FC: Microsoft wants to be Big Brother... and wants you to pay

[William Knowles <wk () C4I ORG>]

********
Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2001 16:03:11 -0800
To: farber () cis upenn edu (Dave Farber), Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>,
         freematt () coil com (Matthew Gaylor)
From: Jim Warren <jwarren () well com>
Subject: MS Big Brother wants you to help ... and wants you to pay, to
  boot!
Cc: mtarsala () marketwatch com

According to CBS MarketWatch, below, Microsoft now wants to be the
holder of *much* of our most sensitive medical, financial and other
personal information.  Before reading about MS' latest "service,"
consider --

* Only a few months ago, Microsoft's own network was cracked and it's
believed that massive amounts of internal information may have been
downloaded from it before the network was killed.

* At great expense, an increasing number of federal agencies and
foreign government agencies are abandoning Microsoft server and other
software, stating that it's simply too insecure for them to risk using
it any longer.

* Holes in Microsoft's Internet Explorer and/or Outlook Express has
been estimated to be responsible for covertly circulating to millions
of entries in naive users' address books, a huge number of viruses,
Trojan horses, and DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks,
including several that cost their targets hundreds of thousands of
dollars in down-time, lost business and consumptive recovery efforts.

* Microsoft is also the company that said they absolutely did not
collect information about user machines when users did online software
registration -- until it was proven that they WERE doing exactly that
(covertly picking off each machine's globally-unique Ethernet-card
serial number).

* Microsoft's Word includes "features" that are estimated to have
facilitated about 1/4-1/3 of *all* of the world's computer viruses in
the last 4-5 years.


Geee ... thanks very much ... but I think I'll keep my most sensitive
personal information in my OWN files -- and copy'n'paste it if/when
needed!

--jim, Jim Warren; jwarren () well com, technology & public policy
columnist Also GovAccess founder/list-owner/editor, and DataCast
founder/owner 345 Swett Rd, Woodside CA 94062; voice/650-851-7075;
fax/off due to spam-glut

[self-inflating puff: Playboy Foundation's Hugh Hefner First-Amendment
Award; Soc.of Prof.Journalists-Nor.Calif.'s James Madison
Freedom-of-Information Award; founded InfoWorld; Dr. Dobb's Journal;
Computers, Freedom & Privacy Conferences; Electronic Frontier
Foundation's Pioneer Award (in its first year), blah blah]

===

http://cbs.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?print=1&guid={BAF153AC-EAF5-4449-8DC8-C837376B5912}&siteid=mktw

Microsoft unveils awaited software
By Mike Tarsala, CBS.MarketWatch.com
Last Update: 5:07 PM ET Mar 19, 2001


REDMOND, Wash. (CBS.MW) - Bill Gates is trying to convince anyone
who's ever filled out a form on the Internet to trust him with their
lives - and pay his company for it.

Gates unveiled Internet-based software Monday that lets people store
and manage their personal records [making] the world's largest
software company a central repository for storing credit card numbers,
birth records and other types of personal information. The company
will charge a to-be-determined monthly fee for the service.

Code-named Hailstorm ...

... The software keeps people from having to root through file
cabinets any time they want to make a big-ticket purchase, file a
medical claim or apply for a loan.

<snip>




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