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The News – 05/16/01
Microsoft’s Not Guilty; My Face is Red
Well, not guilty of what I charged them with yesterday, anyway.
Alert SNS reader Andrew Hargreave pointed out that the Yahoo story that
sparked the Entrepreneur.com story that sparked my rant about Microsoft’s
alleged password backdoor was in error. In fact, it was in error a year ago
when Yahoo first published it. According to Russ Cooper of the NTBUGTRAQ
mailing list, nothing fishy is going on with the dvwssr.dll file:
The story, from a year ago, pertains to the
discovery of a string in dvwssr.dll and its alleged ability to backdoor NT.
My message from 4/14/2000 about the issue is attached below. There is no
new backdoor discovery, Microsoft hasn't recently confirmed anything of the
sort, Yahoo deserves to be shot for not putting a date on the article and not
realizing it was wrong when it was first run. Looks like they're a bit hard
up for ad revenue.
I apologize for believing what I read. I deeply regret having
maligned Microsoft.
It’s sometimes difficult to know when you read an item from a
single source whether it’s a scoop or an error. With news coming a mile a
minute, journalists and would-be pundits like myself risk being wrong and
appearing foolish.
I stand by what I said, however, about Microsoft’s dismal
record on security, and their tendency to abuse their monopoly. There are
alternatives to IIS in the marketplace, and I recommend business owners
seriously consider them.
NTBugtraq
Microsoft Plays Hardball with Corporate Users
In the spirit of balanced commentary, I feel compelled to
report that Microsoft has given what amounts to an ultimatum to corporate
licensees: Get current, or pay full price the next time you upgrade. If
corporate sites don’t upgrade to Windows 2000 and Office XP by October 1, they’ll
lose the privilege of preferred pricing for incremental upgrades. According
to ZDNet (who could be wrong, after all), “Under the new Software Assurance
program, companies that are ‘current’ can sign up for maintenance
agreements and get future upgrades as part of the deal, but will pay 25 to
29 percent of the purchase price every year for this perpetual
license--whether they want the new software or not.”
How’d you like that kind of arrangement for your business? Pay
us whether you use us or not. I’m thinking of trying to work that into my
contracts, but somehow I don’t think it will work. Why? Well,
unfortunately, I don’t have a monopoly. Darn.
ZDNet
Can’t Get Enough of ME?
In the unlikely event
that you want more of my opinions, I’ve started a Weblog. It’s the
fashionable thing for pundits to do, and I’m doing it too. A Weblog is a
datestamped collection of somewhat random thoughts and ideas assembled on a
Web page. If you’d like to subject the world to your thoughts, as I do, you
can create your own Weblog. You need to have a Web site that allows you FTP
access, and the free software from www.blogger.com.
This allows you to right click on a Web page and append your pithy thoughts
to your Weblog.
I’ve dubbed my Weblog
entries “Stratlets”, and they are available at www.stratvantage.com/stratlets/.
Let me know what you think. Also check out the TrendSpot for ranking of
the latest emerging trends.
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