News From May 4 2002

Technical, Business and Product News from the Modern Computer World... Updated Once Per Month

Seattle Times - US Feds Might Use Microsoft Product for Online ID
By Brier Dudley 206-515-5687 or bdudley@seattletimes.com.
Seattle Times technology reporter
(link from Victor P - Thanx)

Forget about a national ID card. Instead, the federal government might use Microsoft's Passport technology to verify the online identity of America's citizens, federal employees and businesses, according to the White House technology czar.

On Sept. 30, the government plans to begin testing Web sites where businesses can pay taxes and citizens can learn about benefits and social services. It's also exploring how to verify the identity of users so the sites can share private information.

Microsoft's Passport is being considered as a way to authenticate users of the Web sites, said Mark Forman, associate director of information technology at the White House.

"They are involved in that discussion,'' he said, adding that the government has not yet selected which technology it will use.

Forman, who is overseeing the government's purchases of $100 billion worth of technology this year and next, was a featured speaker at the Microsoft Government Leaders Conference in Seattle this week.

Forman is a former Senate staffer who worked for IBM and Unisys before he joined the Bush administration.

Describing himself as the government's chief information officer, he said his priorities are to impose businesslike approaches for technology deployments and to monitor improvements they bring.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, some politicians and business leaders have called for a national identification card, but Forman said that's not in the works. "We don't have any plans for a national ID card," he said.

The White House is instead pursuing an "e-identification" initiative, an effort to develop ways to authenticate people and businesses online who already have government identification numbers such as Social Security, business-registration and employer-identification numbers.

At the government-leaders conference, attended by representatives of 75 countries, Microsoft presented a blueprint for its "e-government" strategy that suggests they use Passport to verify the identity of visitors to their Web sites. It also suggested that its bCentral business Web site could be used to process business tax payments and that citizens could use its MSN Web site to handle address changes and voter registration.

...Yesterday, appearing at the conference, Gates reiterated the goal, saying he expects governments in many countries will find it difficult getting to "critical mass" with authentication systems they develop on their own. He said some governments may opt to use companies such as Microsoft or America Online as "the bank" that registers people for online usage.

...Microsoft says it has 200 million people registered to use Passport, most of whom signed up because Microsoft told them it was needed to use other Microsoft services, such as its free Hotmail e-mail service or Windows XP operating system. According to Gartner, a research company based in Stamford, Conn., only 2 percent signed up because of the service's stated purpose: to avoid having to use multiple identifications and passwords at different Web sites.

News.com - The Microsoft Penalty That Isn't
By Bruce Perens
(link from Victor P - Thanx)

In its antitrust settlement with the Justice Department and nine states, Microsoft promised to publish technology that would allow competing products to interoperate with Windows. But Microsoft has sidestepped the penalty by crafting a technology license that excludes the company's only viable competitor.

Linux, which was described by Windows Division Vice President Brian Valentine as the long-term threat against Microsoft's core business, is banned from interoperating with its common Internet file system, otherwise known as Windows File and Printer Sharing.

The Microsoft license specifically excludes software under the General Public License, commonly known as the GPL. The GPL is the software license used by Linux and by SAMBA, a popular open-source program that allows non-Microsoft systems to share files and printers with Windows.

Microsoft has also banned software under the Lesser General Public License, or LGPL. That license is used by the Mozilla Web browser, the GNOME graphical desktop, and many of the software libraries shipped with Linux. The GPL and LGPL are the most popular licenses used for open-source software, and cover tens of thousands of free programs.

A second Microsoft license on extensions used in Windows 2000 and Windows XP will require royalty payments, excluding all software produced by the open-source developer community. Because Microsoft has patented features of the file-sharing protocol, open-source developers who implement the protocol could be sued for infringement.

Microsoft is likely to use this same license on future "standards," embedding patented features in the standards and excluding free software like Linux from use of the patents. While patented features in file sharing would handicap Linux from being able to exchange files over an office LAN (local area network), similar future efforts could ban open-source tools like OpenOffice and AbiWord from operating with documents created using Microsoft Office, and Web browsers like Mozilla from viewing Web sites produced with Microsoft software.

It's the share-and-share-alike provision of the GPL that Microsoft can't accept--the requirement that modified versions of software under the license be available for anyone to further distribute and modify. But this is the aspect of the license that made Linux a threat to Microsoft while even the mighty IBM could not dent Microsoft's monopoly with its OS/2 operating system.

The GPL, brainchild of MacArthur "genius" grant recipient Richard Stallman and his GNU Project, creates a fair partnership among many thousands of independent software developers that is difficult for Microsoft to swallow. Microsoft previously responded by influencing government and universities to choose weaker OS licenses that lack the share-and-share-alike provision.

Because Microsoft can make proprietary and patented enhancements to software under the weaker licenses, it can apply its embrace-and-enhance strategy: Microsoft introduces incompatibility into the Microsoft version of the software, and forces the public version of the software out of the market because it won't interoperate with the Windows version. Only a vendor that dominates the market could use such a strategy to maintain its monopoly. The GPL-licensed Linux system is the only one that has been able to make a dent in that monopoly.

Microsoft executives justify their position with the mantra, "We are for strong intellectual-property protection." But only when it's to Microsoft's advantage; otherwise, Microsoft wouldn't be pressuring others to weaken their open-source licensing. Even during the penalty phase of their antitrust prosecution, the company still can't settle for a piece of the software industry pie. Although Microsoft's compromise with the U.S. Department of Justice is crafted to make it seem that a competitor could enter, it still leaves Microsoft owning the whole pie.

This situation also illustrates the dichotomy of software patents versus copyright. Copyright laws protect your rights to the software that you've created. Even the OS advocates use copyright law to enforce their share-and-share-alike provisions.

In contrast, software patents create a legal monopoly that allows the holder to prevent someone else from creating and distributing their own software. If software patents were awarded justly, they might not be quite so bad. But according to patent expert Greg Aharonian, 95 percent of software patent claims are not inventions at all, and should never have been awarded. Blame the U.S. patent office, which rewards its examiners for awarding patents, not denying them, and gives them only a few hours to examine each application.

When an open-source developer is prosecuted under an invalid patent claim, can he prove that the patent is invalid or does not apply? The legal fees for a patent defense often exceed a million dollars. The little open-source developer will be forced to settle with the big corporation, regardless of the merits of the case. To foster open-source development, we need to provide developers with a safe harbor from software patent prosecution.

What should you do if you aren't happy about Microsoft escaping an antitrust penalty? Don't be passive about it. Since Microsoft hates the GPL so much, give them more of it to contend with: Deploy systems like GNU/Linux as Web servers and other infrastructure, and consider Mozilla, OpenOffice and Evolution for the desktop. Look around for software projects that you can place under the GPL: internal tools, research work, products that you built and then didn't sell--and get your employer to release them.

But most importantly, let the U.S. Department of Justice and the nine U.S. states that want to settle with Microsoft know that you won't tolerate a sham. The remedies in the antitrust case must not exclude Microsoft's only real competitor.

CNet -Adobe wins Macromedia Patent Suit
David Becker CNET News.com

Software maker Adobe Systems won its lawsuit Thursday claiming that rival Macromedia infringed on the company's patents.

Adobe filed the suit in August 2000, alleging that the user interface of Macromedia's Flash Web animation tool infringed on Adobe's patent for "tabbed palettes," a feature that allows users of design software to rearrange the work space on the PC screen.

A jury in the U.S. District Court of Delaware agreed with Adobe and awarded the company $2.8 million in damages. Adobe said in a statement that it also expects a judicial injunction preventing Macromedia from selling the infringing software.

A trial is scheduled to begin in the same court Monday regarding Macromedia's first countersuit, charging that Adobe's Photoshop image-editing software and its GoLive Web design software infringe on two patents that Macromedia holds for editing tools. A second Macromedia countersuit, filed last year in U.S. District Court for Northern California, is not yet scheduled for trial.

"While we would have preferred to settle this issue out of court, we are satisfied that the validity of this key innovation has been upheld," said Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president of Adobe's graphics business unit...

PALO ALTO, Calif. (AP) - After one of the harshest and closest proxy fights in American business history, Hewlett-Packard Co. officially closed its $19 billion acquisition of Compaq Computer Corp. on Friday.

On Monday, Compaq investors will receive 0.6325 shares of Hewlett-Packard for every Compaq share they own, and Compaq stock will cease being traded...

...HP announced its plans to buy Compaq on Sept. 3 in a deal then worth $25 billion. The company overcame fierce opposition from the families of its late founders and won a shareholder vote on the Compaq deal 51.4 percent to 48.6 percent...

VANCOUVER, British Columbia--Security researchers presented data on Friday indicating that Code Red version 2, a 9-month-old worm, continues to spread slowly across the Internet, compromising computers and leaving them easily accessible to malicious attackers.

...Code Red version 2--a variant of the original Code Red worm that fixed a bug in the program's infection routines--has infected more than 18,000 computers as of April, up from around 14,000 computers in December, Song said...

...Today, Arbor's monitoring system still receives nearly 30 probes by infected Code Red servers every minute, Song said. Nimda, a worm that struck a month after Code Red and borrowed several of its tricks, has also stuck around but appears to be slowly disappearing. The original Code Red, and the third variant known confusingly as Code Red II, have both seemingly died off...

...Thirty four percent of all peer-to-peer users said they spent more money on music than before they used such services, the report said, while 15 percent said they spent less. One-half said the amount of money they spent remained the same...