ianbetteridge

ssfe11 said:

The EC once again shows how clueless grandstanding politicians can cause havoc. The EC taking lefts and rights from Apple, Meta and now Microsoft. The only way to beat these ignorant folks is to band together and that’s what looks like is exactly happening. Nice!

To understand what’s going on, you need to go back to the 1990s, when Microsoft was unconstrained by any thoughts of antitrust or monopoly law, and spent quite a lot of time and effort decimating the third party software industry. It had a massive advantage over the likes of Novell, Lotus, WordPerfect and the rest because it could create and use APIs that were private, while making second-rate APIs public.

It could also deliberately break third party software with Windows updates. While “DOS isn’t done till Lotus won’t run” was a myth, the truth was that if an update broke a competitor’s app, that was good news for Microsoft. And they definitely weren't going to go the extra mile to fix something that affected 1-2-3 if it didn't affect Excel.

Eventually this got the attention of regulators including the DoJ and EC (European Commission). It’s EXACTLY the kind of behaviour that you are absolutely not allowed to do under antitrust law. When you have a dominant position – and no one doubted, or doubts, MS has this in operating systems – you just can’t get away with it.

In 2004, the EC case was pretty-much over. Microsoft agreed it had been bad, and offered to publish its APIs, and apply a level playing field – which meant its own applications weren’t allowed to use special “Microsoft-only” APIs. Anything Microsoft’s apps could do HAD to be available to others.

Did Microsoft stick to this agreement like a good little boy? Of course it didn’t.

So in 2006, a group of software companies complained it to the EC, through a coalition called the European Committee for Interoperable Standards (ECIS). Despite the name, ECIS was largely US companies, including IBM, Adobe, Oracle, and McAfee. By 2007, the EC had investigated and found that yes, Microsoft had failed to live up to its agreements. It got fined, and the EC asked Microsoft to propose new, specific remedies to make sure it didn’t happen again.

In 2009, those agreements were signed. And in them, there is a specific part – section C (42) – which deals with security software. Now you might get the impression from what Microsoft is saying now, something that’s being repeated by people who can’t be bothered to look up agreements AKA “pundits”, that this mandates kernel level access for third parties.

Reader, it does nothing of the sort. It simply states that Microsoft has to make available – and document – whatever APIs its own software uses. The company could do what Apple has done and move access for EDR (endpoint detection and response) software out of the kernel. It has chosen not to do this.

So no, Microsoft hasn’t been “ordered” by the big bad EU to do anything other than stop its old tricks of giving its own applications advantages that no third party could ever have. It hasn’t moved EDR out of the kernel because, at least back in 2009, the Windows kernel was a mess and developing equivalent APIs was going to be expensive.

Do I blame Microsoft? Not really: Windows is what it is, and keeping it secure is hard. I don’t believe its the platform vendors fault if, using legitimate methods, a third party messes up a patch. That’s entirely down to Crowdstrike.

But is it the EC’s fault? Absolutely not. Stopping companies like Microsoft from destroying competition not by better products but by leveraging ownership of a platform is exactly the thing antitrust bodies are set up to do. It’s what the DoJ did to IBM in 1956, and without that judgement we would all be still using mainframes from Big Blue.

M68000 said:

This seems to be totally a QA testing issue.  Was any testing done? 

blastdoor said:

ianbetteridge said:

blastdoor said:

This is basically a golden age of competition in computing platforms and the EC is trying to wreck it.

It's a golden age of competition in computing because the DoJ and EU both took action to rein in Microsoft in the late 90s and early 2000s. Maybe you're not old enough to remember when Microsoft could get away with anything he wanted, but trust me, it wasn't fun. Ask Novell. Or WordPerfect. Or Lotus. All of whom had better products which got steamrollered because Microsoft controlled Windows.

I am old enough, which is why I made the point -- I remember it very well. 

It's possible that past anti-trust action -- or the threat of such action -- contributed to the current landscape. I can see an argument that the fear of anti-trust action led MS to continue to support Office on the Mac in the late 90s to early 2000s. If MS had withdrawn Office support, it might have ended the Mac. So that's a potential point in favor of DOJ. 

But so what? The fact that some anti-trust actions taken by the government are smart and well implemented doesn't mean all actions are smart and well implemented. I think the EC has gone off the rails and is diving into a level of centrally planned micromanaging that is counterproductive. In the US, there are zealots on the left who are inclined to do the same thing, although in general it's anti-government zealots on the right that are the bigger problem in the US. 

gatorguy said:

AppleInsider said:

Following years of pressure from Google for Apple to adopt the presently flawed RCS system within iMessage, Apple has committed to doing so during 2024.

Android does not have a true equivalent alternative to Apple's iMessage...

Ummm, yes they do. The equally secure and private Google Messages. Unfortunately, the initial implementation of RCS on the iPhone will not be end-to-end encrypted. Still showing a bit of stubbornness I suppose.

Keeping the blue bubble/green bubble distinction would be an advantage for Android users using the E2EE Google Messages (Apple users too if they understand what it means) since it will designate the conversation as potentially insecure. But I've been seeing claims the bubbles are going away. I don't know how true that is, as I thought blue and green indicated the level of encryption. 

blastdoor said:

This is basically a golden age of competition in computing platforms and the EC is trying to wreck it.

mikethemartian said:

Does Crowdstrike have access to the Linux kernel? If so, has it resulted in any major issues?

bloggerblog said:

This blunder will push companies to choose Linux over Windows for their infrastructure 

Draco said:

Many of the iPhone's sub-systems like the displays and cameras are highly complex devices that would be very difficult for a third party to duplicate while preserving the quality Apple's customers expect. Some may also contain calibration data that resides in the phone memory and hence that's why you can't swap modules from phone to phone and expect them to work properly. 

Knock-off batteries and power adapters can also pose a safety hazard to users and I would highly recommend only purchasing the Apple versions of these even if they cost a few bucks more.