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The H Year: 2012's Wins, Fails and MehsThe H Year: 2012's Wins, Fails and MehsPosted Dec 31, 2012 22:20 UTC (Mon) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359)Parent article: The H Year: 2012's Wins, Fails and Mehs
Restricted boot is *no* win!
Consider:
① this works on amd64 only, not ARM
② even there: devices are not required to carry the “hardware drivers” key, which is what Microsoft® uses to sign shim with: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/21189.html
In my opinion, we should keep a strict stance *against* Restricted Boot in all its forms, *even though* this is a way in… into a handfull of devices… at first… until they take that away…
Article of the day: http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20121231-00
(Log in to post comments)
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 1, 2013 1:41 UTC (Tue) by brianomahoney (subscriber, #6206) [Link]
This is another M$ special and, as the Americans were dumb enough to give Obummer '4 more years' don't expect anything until these guys are gone!
Then the cure is an anti-trust suite.
Finally my legal advice, though I am a Swiss Roman Law Lawyer (TINLA CYOL), this isn't a circumvention device in the DMCA sense, so open hackathon.
While I respect Garrett for his work so far, the SHIM is a big distro solution, me, just turn all this crap off in the BIOS and if the mo-bo dosn't work or I don't see a fixer in Zuerich next day they can have 80'000 systems back and a 5 year procurement ban!
More important guys, we have WON, all mobile i-X and Android is Unixish, BYOD destroys corporate IT control, a huge step forward and finally BYOD diversity means that OpenSync (idea, not project) is mandatory.
You tell the CEO, or corporate council (me) he has to use Outlook and have a locked down Exchange server and they will laugh, just before they fire you!
Die besten Wünsche für ein glückliches und erfolgreiches neues Jahr aus der Schweiz, Brian
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 1, 2013 3:10 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
You think the Republicans would bring an antitrust suit? Really?
The previous antitrust suit against Microsoft (against anyone, I think) was in the Clinton administration. Republicans said the government is picking on an American success story.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 1, 2013 3:20 UTC (Tue) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link]
Uh guys, please, I’m not the slightest interested in USA politics.
Please take that part elsewhere.
It also wouldn’t solve the problem for The Rest Of The World™, anyway.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 1, 2013 11:31 UTC (Tue) by efraim (subscriber, #65977) [Link]
But the government WAS picking at Microsoft.
There are plenty of legitimate reason for demonizing Microsoft's behavior, but including the media player and Internet Explorer as a bundle with OS itself? Come on! Everybody does that nowadays. So, turns out, it's not an anti-competitive behavior but rather an innovation, an example to follow (and do Linux distributions follow it!)
I don't believe for a moment that Microsoft won the browser wars because of some monopoly. It won browser wars because IE4 (and then IE5, IE5.5) was lightyears ahead of Netscape 4 in stability and features and when Netscape 6 FINALLY came out it could not really stand any comparison with IE6.
So yes, I don't think Netscape's whining about monopoly was in any way justified. If they could only build a competitive web browser in time...
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 1, 2013 12:41 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] There are plenty of legitimate reason for demonizing Microsoft's behavior, but including the media player and Internet Explorer as a bundle with OS itself? Come on! The problem was never a bundled browser. The problem were with incentives to have it as the only browser on preinstalled system. You may not like plethora of crapware on newly sold systems but it's important way to give Joe Average a chance to test your product. Microsoft specifically forbidden OEMs to do that (it only promised some marketing $$ if guys will not install Netscape... and OEMs naturally have chosen $$ promised by Microsoft and not smaller amount promised by Netscape). Everybody does that nowadays. So, turns out, it's not an anti-competitive behavior but rather an innovation, an example to follow (and do Linux distributions follow it!) That's quite a statement. Yes, everyone does this but even Android often comes these days with two (or sometimes more) browsers. I don't believe for a moment that Microsoft won the browser wars because of some monopoly. Abuse of monopoly was most certainly a factor if it was deciding factor or not... we'll never know. So yes, I don't think Netscape's whining about monopoly was in any way justified. If they could only build a competitive web browser in time... It's kinda hard to do without money and Microsoft made sure Netscape will not have these money. Of course Netscape mostly did that to themselves (Complete rewrite of million lines long program? Who's crazy idea is that?) but Microsoft used a lot of illegal tricks too. You are basically saying that it's Ok to jab someone couple of times with knife in the back if said someone is on a bridge with a stone tied to the neck. No, it's not Ok to do that even in this case.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 1, 2013 13:23 UTC (Tue) by efraim (subscriber, #65977) [Link]
>> The problem were with incentives to have it as the only browser on preinstalled system.
Notice that Netscape was NOT preinstalled with earlier Microsoft OSes either. Customers had to go and explicitly get it from Netscape (download, or snail mail)
The fact that with Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 4 they did not bother tells much more about Netscape 4 then it tells about evil Microsoft's plan.
>> You are basically saying that it's Ok to jab someone couple of times with knife in the back if said someone is on a bridge with a stone tied to the neck. No, it's not Ok to do that even in this case.
I am not saying any of that at all. I just do not thing that what Microsoft did was somehow jabbing a knife into Netscape's back. Yes, they wanted to control what their OEMs put on pre-installed systems. In fact, Apple wanted to do it so hard that they eliminated the OEMs altogether. Nobody is crying anti-competitive behavior on them over the fact (or did I miss it?)
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 1, 2013 16:36 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Notice that Netscape was NOT preinstalled with earlier Microsoft OSes either. Customers had to go and explicitly get it from Netscape (download, or snail mail) This is where you are wrong. Sure, not all systems had it preinstalled, but enough of them did in 1996-1997. By the 1998 Microsoft managed to squeeze most OEMs and "convinced" then to drop Netscape. Textbook case of monopoly power abuse. In fact, Apple wanted to do it so hard that they eliminated the OEMs altogether. Nobody is crying anti-competitive behavior on them over the fact (or did I miss it?) You are 100% correct, of course. Microsoft is pale imitation of Apple when abuse of power is concerned. But the thing is: Apple was not never big enough PC vendor to warrant antitrust investigations. On the phone side (where it is big enough in certain markets, but not in all of them), oh yeah... Apple gets a lot of attention from different groups. In court and outside of court.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 1, 2013 13:08 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
You seem to be thinking that, if an action is good, or OK if done by /any/ party, then it must also be allowed/OK for a monopolist. However, that's not the way it works.
Monopolists are barred from certain actions NOT because of anything specific to the actions, but because they ARE a monopolist. Monopolists have to have their grip prised from the market, and this requires barring them from taking actions that would be perfectly acceptable, even desirable, from other actors. This is needed to create room for other actors to expand in the market.
Your comment shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the theory behind anti-monopoly law and regulation.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 1, 2013 13:16 UTC (Tue) by efraim (subscriber, #65977) [Link]
Yes, I really do not understand why should customers of said monopolist (BTW, are you ready to claim the same status for Android once it dominates some 90% market of smartphones which is very likely) suffer just because.
If it is OK for Joe Random to give his customers an OS with an integrated web browser, so should it be OK for a world dominating monopoly. Why should I, as a customer, have to go and install such a basic component as a browser, and a media player separately? Just so that Opera Software can be happy?
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 2, 2013 4:06 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
> Yes, I really do not understand why should customers of said monopolist (BTW, are you ready to claim the same status for Android once it dominates some 90% market of smartphones which is very likely) suffer just because.
If Android does achieve this sort of market dominance, it will be a Monopoly, and If Google _abuses_ this monopoly to extend their reach into other areas, there will need to be actions taken against them.
However, it may very well be that the fact that Google allows the vendors to customize Android so drastically before shipping it may be enough to avoid this.
This is why Google has to be very careful about the requirements it puts on the vendors to call their product Android.
It may also be that the fact that Google allows companies like Amazon and B&N to take the android source, modify it and ship it without branding (as on the Kindle and Nook Tablets) may be enough to prevent the "Android" branded version which Google controls from hitting a high enough percentage to become a Monopoly
The key thing isn't to make Opera Software happy, it's to prevent a Monopoly in one field (OS) from leveraging this Monopoly to harm competition in other fields (Browser software, Office Software, etc)
A monopoly also indicates a strong barrier to entry for new competitors. This is why calling Google's dominance of Search a "Monopoly" is highly suspect. there's nothing preventing other search engines from starting up, and if they server the users better than Google, it will be very easy for users to switch and forget Google exists (assuming google doesn't improve their version to compete)
A Monopoly is not just the dominance of a field, and there's nothing wrong with being a Monopoly. It's just that if you _are_ a Monopoly, then you are not allowed to "abuse" your Monopoly status to take over other fields.
It's perfectly legitimate for you to use your income from your Monopoly to fund good products in other fields, you just can't do things like selling them at a loss once you are past the R&D stage and into production.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 3, 2013 20:28 UTC (Thu) by efraim (subscriber, #65977) [Link]
>> A Monopoly is not just the dominance of a field, and there's nothing wrong with being a Monopoly. It's just that if you _are_ a Monopoly, then you are not allowed to "abuse" your Monopoly status to take over other fields.
>> It's perfectly legitimate for you to use your income from your Monopoly to fund good products in other fields, you just can't do things like selling them at a loss once you are past the R&D stage and into production.
I understand your position, however I do not agree with it because I feel like many of the terms here are too ill defined to be a matter of law (for instance, what's R&D phase? Is Android in R&D phase? Is GMail? When quality control and brand control become abuse?)
I am not commenting on LWN often and this thread is pretty far from core LWN software topic, so if you feel I am veering off-topic into politics too far please say so.
Action against abuse of monopoly Posted Jan 2, 2013 16:18 UTC (Wed) by jpnp (subscriber, #63341) [Link]
Except the US didn't actually stop MS from shipping IE. And look at the actual remedy imposed by the EU: customers are presented with a browser selection dialog at first boot which allows them to choose from a list of top browsers. If they select a non-IE option then they're sent to download that, but it doesn't remove all IE components from the system, merely selects a default.
Yes this is an extra imposition if you're happy to use MS's default browser, but it's hardly a particularly onerous one. In return the consumer benefits as one company fails to snuff out all competition in the browser market. Look at the performance benefits to us all when healthy competition returned to the browser market; MS had to start investing in browser development again -- something they entirely stopped doing during the period they had a practical browser monopoly.
Action against abuse of monopoly Posted Jan 3, 2013 20:17 UTC (Thu) by efraim (subscriber, #65977) [Link]
I actually don't believe for a moment that the resurgence in IE development we've witnessed has anything to do with EU's efforts.
I think it's unfair to the hard work of Mozilla and later Google Chrome development teams to claim that their achievement is actually a result of some cheap political posturing by EU. What actually made Microsoft develop IE again is the fact that Mozilla has succeeded in delivering a more stable and feature-rich (and easy to use!) web browser for several years. In fact I am afraid that this trend might be reversed now that Mozilla started chasing Chrome in version treadmill. (I have only anecdotal evidence but it seems that plugin compatibility and stability suffered as a result)
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 3, 2013 9:38 UTC (Thu) by farnz (guest, #17727) [Link] Because it was OK for Microsoft to give their customers and end-users an OS with an integrated web browser, right up to the point where Microsoft attempted to tell their customers that they couldn't install another browser as the system default browser if they intended to sell the machine to an end-user. Android doesn't currently have this problem - if HTC choose to make the system default browser Firefox Mobile, Google aren't going to stop them using Android. If you go back to the mid-90s, when all this went down, other browser developers were in the business of paying OEMs to preinstall their product as the system default browser; Microsoft used its leverage as provider of the OS to insist that OEMs that did this had to pay much more for the OS (more than the other browser vendors were prepared to pay, so an OEM that shipped Windows and IE only paid less than an OEM that shipped Windows and IE and Netscape, even with Netscape paying the OEM to ship Netscape). Had Microsoft simply bundled IE as a freebie with Windows, and not tried to use that as leverage to block OEMs deals with Netscape, they'd not have got into trouble. It was the attempt to use their ownership of a monopoly operating system to influence the browser market that caused them pain, and a lot of observers noted at the time that IE4 was a better product than the equivalent Netscape browsers. Indeed, it's plausible that if Microsoft had behaved better, they'd probably have still crushed the competition in the web browser market as thoroughly as they did, and would not have faced the anti-trust issues that their monopoly abuse caused.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 7, 2013 19:46 UTC (Mon) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
Don't forget, it was PROVEN in court that Microsoft put a load of code into Windows ?98 whose sole purpose was to cause Netscape to crash.
So the OP's claim that "Netscape couldn't write a decent browser" is wrong - if the underlying OS has been deliberately booby-trapped it's rather difficult to cope! And there's a long trail of MS repeatedly doing that ... "DOS ain't done til Lotus won't run", and the story coming out now about WordPerfect, etc etc.
To the OP - the best definition of "monopoly power" is "the ability to set a price above the marginal cost of production". MS can pretty much name their own price, so they have monopoly power. Google may be very dominant in search, but they can't set their own price. There are other search engines out there, and if Google raise their prices both sorts of customers (the advertisers and the searchers) can easily go elsewhere. Market dynamics currently push them to Google as the best value for money, but if Google changes that dynamic it's easy for them to flee. Thing with Microsoft is it is (and MS deliberately makes it so) very difficult for customers to flee. The harder MS makes it for customers to leave, the more MS can charge before customers consider leaving.
Cheers,
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 7, 2013 19:58 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
> Don't forget, it was PROVEN in court that Microsoft put a load of code into Windows ?98 whose sole purpose was to cause Netscape to crash.
That's a serious accusation. Can you prove it?
As far as I remember, it was proven that MS has put special hooks to make their applications work faster.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 7, 2013 20:57 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
In a different case, it was proven that Microsoft put in hooks to make windows not work when running on DR-DOS
These weren't 'hooks to make it work better on pure microsoft systems' they were tests to detect DR-DOS and fail.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 8, 2013 18:19 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
No, they were (insanely specific) tests to detect {MS|IBM}-DOS and fail if not found. It just so happens that there was only one DOS-compatible competitor to the {MS|IBM}-DOS hegemony... how convenient.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 7, 2013 20:45 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
> the best definition of "monopoly power" is "the ability to set a price above the marginal cost of production".
I think it should be clear that this is a quite radical re-interpretation of what monopoly means and is not the definition that is commonly understood or that is used in the law.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 7, 2013 22:17 UTC (Mon) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] To the OP - the best definition of "monopoly power" is "the ability to set a price above the marginal cost of production". This does unuseful things like saying that the Morgan Motor Company has a monopoly, which it doesn't in any meaningful sense.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 7, 2013 22:24 UTC (Mon) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]
>This does unuseful things like saying that the Morgan Motor Company has a monopoly, which it doesn't in any meaningful sense.
Can you elaborate? I've never heard of the Morgan Motor Company, and I thought the definition quite usefully cut through the irrelevant connotations that "monopoly" has.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 8, 2013 0:10 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]
IIRC, the Morgan motor company is a very small outfit that makes fancy cars. They can charge way more than »the marginal cost of production« because the people who buy Morgan cars, even though they would be perfectly able to get something like a Yugo at a cheaper price that would also let them drive from A to B, for whatever reason still prefer a Morgan car, and are happy to pay more than they otherwise would have to if their only interest was to obtain a car (any car).
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 1, 2013 7:56 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
Thanks for the respect, but I'm afraid the feeling's not mutual.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 7, 2013 4:25 UTC (Mon) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
You apparently haven't been following American politics at all.
George W. Bush ran partly on a platform of dropping the antitrust suit against Microsoft. See http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-pe...
When he came into power in 2001, the Department of Justice suddenly stopped asking for the breakup of Microsoft, and started suggesting other remedies. There is actually a pretty good chance that Microsoft would have been broken up into a "Windows company" and an "Office company" if Gore instead of Bush had been elected.
Bush was also instrumental in winding down enforcement of the already toothless settlement in 2008. See http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&re...
You might also notice that the antitrust case against Google in 2011 also began under a Democrat. (Personally, I think the case against Google was a mistake, but that's another topic...) At the end of the day, the facts are that the Republicans haven't been very interested in antitrust lately.
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