Update: Please see this article as it appears this may have been an unintentional consequence of a faulty implementation of the on-click event in Firefox

In what appears to be another attempt to dissuade users from using non IE browsers, Microsoft has blocked the right clicking of links on the MSN web site when using the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Clicking on such a link in Internet Explorer pops up the normal right click menu. Right clicking on a link in Firefox or Mozilla results in the same effect as left clicking a link. This may be an attempt to cause problems for people using the tabbing features of Firefox which is usually done by right clicking on a link and selecting “open in new tab” from the menu.

I can’t see how Microsoft can claim this was accidental because there is no valid reason I can think of to remap a browsers right click and also it only affects Firefox browser (IE’s biggest competitor) I’ve tested in both Netscape 8.x and Opera 8.x and neither are affected. Try it for yourself, go to http://msn.com In Firefox and try to right click on a link. Then try the exact same thing in Netscape or Opera (or Internet Explorer obviously). They apparently do this using a JavaScript file specifically targeted to the Mozilla browser. You can find it here: http://hp.msn.com/scr/home/msnmoz1021.js

If this is yet another case of Microsoft trying to block out products that successfully compete with them, then they should expect to find themselves in front of another judge for yet more anti-competitive charges. They’ve been found guilty twice already, (US and EU) what’s another guilty conviction? I’m really starting to reach the point where I may pop-up a DHTML warning message informing users of Internet Explorer of all the reasons why IE is a lousy browser, you know, the usual stuff. Lack of standards, lack of security, lack of modern user features, invites Spyware and Virus infection, promoted by a company guilty of monopoly practises who abandoned it’s development until it faced stiff competition from a competitor after which it suddenly became their flavour of the month again, that sort of thing.

In the mean time, If you really must browse MSN, you can either block that script using the Firefox AdBlock extension, or just hold down the control key while clicking links to open them in new tabs. Blocking the script with AdBlock doesn’t seem to cause any other problems and it does return control of your right mouse button to you.

Update: It has since been revealed by the gentleman apparently responsible for the MSN script causing the problem that it is an unintended effect and could possibly be a bug in Firefox 1.0.4. I should note that I did not state it WAS an intentional effort to block alternative browsers, I simply implied it might be. I believe that that is a reasonable theory in light of the fact that such things have happened at MSN before.

AMD has filed a 48 page complaint [PDF] in federal district court (Delaware) accusing Intel of all manner of anti-competitive behaviour. Among the charges are that Intel pays huge sums of money to companies to limit their purchases of AMD processors and that it withholds rebates and marketing subsidies from customers who break the rules.

As anyone that reads the articles here regularly may have noticed, I’ve never had a high opinion of Intel, they always appear to be lead around by the nose by their marketing department and they took a step sideways (at best) when they swapped from PIII to P4 mostly because they figured being able to clock ever higher MHZ would help marketing. Clock cycle to clock cycle the old PIII is still a close competitor of the P4 despite being out of development for years. The P4 was just an exercise in marketing as AMD proved by outperforming it in power usage, heat generation and general performance and doing so at significantly lower clock speeds. And most of us fell for the Intel “MHZ is everything” spiel hook line and sinker.
Innovation and pricing should be the two factors determining market share, and if that was the case, AMD would have a handy lead on Intel. As we all know, this isn’t the case and even though Intel have been playing catch up in the technical stakes for some time now, they have lost hardly any of their market share. We may be about to find out why in a public and probably messy court battle.

AMD have created a page specifically for the purpose of detailing the relevant information and link to the relevant documents and you can find it here.

The net is alive with the sound of P2P proponents gnashing their teeth, and of record and movie companies rubbing their hands together in glee. The Supreme court has just ruled unanimously that peer to peer companies can now be held accountable for the actions of their users. In my previous article, I showed my disdain for companies that blame their bad performance on any external factor they can find. In this case that blame has been levelled at P2P networks like Grokster, and now these huge companies can use the legal system to put any of these companies out of business. In other words, we now have a Mafia style protection racket in the entertainment industry. Do it our way or we’ll make sure you don’t do it at all, or put another way, “make us money or we’ll make sure you lose all of yours”. The real effect of this ruling is that the previous Sony Betamax ruling of 1984 has just essentially been overturned, at least in part. This may result in opening the doors to widespread litigation of any company that offers a product that could possibly be used infringing copyright. That means the manufacturer of your MP3 player or even your mobile phone could be sued, and that means they will up the prices on such devices to cover the risk of litigation. To anyone but the record and movie companies, this is not good news.

The Judges stated that the P2P companies had invoked or otherwise advertised the use of their networks for the purposes of infringing copyright and therefore should be held accountable for such uses. Many think that this may protect MP3 player manufacturers and the like because they’d have to advertise “infringing use” to be liable, but consider that explaining in the instructions for the MP3 player how to rip a CD and copy the music to your player could be construed as an advertisement to infringe, so nobody that offers such devices is safe from the repercussions of this ruling.

More info on the troubling new ruling can be found at: news.com, Wired and TheRegister.

If the recent news that a couple of big record companies in Australia have gone after two sysadmins for not stopping a customers BitTorrent site are any indication, record companies may soon go after Tim Berners-Lee, the guy that invented the World Wide Web, because it’s illegal use has resulted in most of the record company execs living below the poverty line. Or Perhaps they’ll go after Robert Kahn who is one of the guys who created TCP/IP, better known as the protocol on which the whole Internet relies. Surely he is massively responsible for creating the technology that steals all their hard won money.

The main problem appears to be that these guys need something or someone to blame for the slump in sales they all seem to be having of late. It would of course just be wrong for them to blame their own outmoded thinking and their desperate holding on to past business practises. I actually find it surprising that they’ve all managed to swap to CD’s without trying to find ways to make them illegal, (Though they have proposed a tax on blank media because they claim much of it is used by nasty pirates.)

They claim that piracy is ripping off the artists, but what they really mean to say is: “We as record companies, should be the only ones ripping off the artists”. Just take a look at contracts of any of the Australian Idol winners to get an idea of who’s making the “real” money here. The fact that their blank media “tax” against piracy has thus far failed to impress anybody in a position to help them, is perhaps why they are now going after anyone they think they can extort money from. Don’t get me wrong, I feel bad for the struggling new artists when their songs are passed around the net with no revenue for them, but the record companies really need to look at who is really to blame here. I don’t pirate music or video myself, but by the same token I don’t buy CD’s anymore either, mostly because I’m sick to death of the record companies blaming everyone else but themselves for their lacklustre performance. Due to their inability to guide the online industry, you can’t buy a song and play it on any music hardware, or even most hardware for that matter. They have allowed the online music industry to fragment into a dozen non compatible propriety formats and that alone is one of the big reasons why online music sales haven’t taken off they way they could have. The other reason is excessive money grabbing. They are pricing online music at the same price (or more) as buying the actual CD, even though there is no packaging or distribution costs involved. What most people don’t seem to have considered, is that online music probably doubles the record companies profit margins by massively cutting costs. They’d prefer you didn’t consider that while listening to their stories about how the poor artists are starving.

The question remains, is a creator to be blamed for users that infringe using their creations? Are admins the world over responsible for every little thing their users do? If so, where will that stop? Because using that theory, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Kahn are guilty has “heck”. The Sony betamax case was lost because it was found that there were legal uses for such technology, but the record companies are now desperately trying to re-try that case in a modern arena, apparently because the need to blame people for their own poor performance has risen to new highs. Consider this though, record companies have sued children, and dead people, with that sort of indiscriminate unscrupulous litigation, can it be long before they go after Tim and Robert? Who knows, once they realise that most piracy happens on Windows computers, perhaps they will have found a target (Microsoft) with deep enough pockets to fund their ‘avoid taking the blame’ campaign for a couple more years. Truth be told, I think the real reason they are all worried, is because the Internet will eventually be capable of removing most of the reasons one would need a record company in the first place. The idea that they will one day have to work for a living must have them waking up in cold sweats.

In a further example of idiocy, the supreme court has just ruled that P2P networks can be held liable for the infringments of their users. The fact that such technical innovation will now probably disapear apparently doesn’t worry the judges.

Just stumbled onto this when visiting a local planning application website. The site plans were all in Tiff format which of course cannot be easily viewed in a browser.

The site directed you to an Alternative tiff viewer at Alternative tiff viewer

Its easy to install for both Internet explorer and other browers including Mozilla Firefox, and its free. You do however have to register.

I found it very useful, particularly as otherwise when clicking on the image to be viewed the brower went to Paint Shop pro my image program and was slower and much more difficult to view!

Take a look.

Hazel

Several times in the past I’ve felt the need to address Microsoft’s questionable tactics with regards to Linux. Those tactics come under the banner of their “Get the Facts” campaign. In it they pay researchers to do studies that show Windows is cheaper then Linux, or is more secure then Linux, or that Windows is the better performer of the two. The main problem is that that you must take any such reports with great gobs of salt and should probably disregard them altogether. Why? Well for one thing, because we only hear about the studies that favour Windows and the ones that don’t were likely shredded immediately. Secondly because much of the paid “research” is based on criteria that is set in such a way as to favour Windows. One such example is the IDC report that claimed Windows had a cheaper TCO then Linux, but IDC (or at least one of the reports authors) later admitted that scenarios were chosen that would inevitably be more expensive to Linux.

One of the study’s authors accuses Microsoft of stacking the deck. IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky says the company selected scenarios that would inevitably be more costly using Linux.

The other side of the coin is the money that changes hands. Either the studies are paid for and defined up front, or the study authors are paid when the study is included in the Get the Facts campaign. Since authors know that Microsoft will pay them for any studies included in GtF, and they know that Microsoft will jump at the chance to include any study that “looks reputable” and shows results that favour Windows, we get the end result that we can’t even trust research that isn’t paid for up front by Microsoft any more if it ends up in GtF.

Lastly is the studies that show that it is more expensive to convert from Windows to Linux then it is to stay with Windows. What those reports fail to mention is that more often then not, the reason there can even be a comparison, is because Microsoft have done everything in their power to make sure it is as expensive as possible for people to migrate away from their software. Proprietary formats, proprietary protocols and exclusionary tactics are the reasons that they can even make those sorts of claims with a straight face. Fortunately courts both legal and of public opinion are forcing Microsoft to reduce their exclusionary tactics or face the legal and PR results. That doesn’t stop them from trying as in the case of the EU anti-trust ruling and also their SenderID anti SPAM framework, or in fact their upcoming Open document formats, which aren’t really open. As I said, it doesn’t stop them from trying, it just means that people are more likely to be aware that their often touted claims of embracing interoperability are not worth their weight in bull s**t.

Remember, Microsoft are not running “Get the Facts” to improve Windows, presumably they are doing it to try to stop or limit Linux growth from hurting Windows sales. In other words, it’s an advertising campaign, pure and simple. Do you always believe every Ad you see on TV or in the newspapers? Interestingly even the standards bodies in advertising have had cause to dislike the “Get the Facts” campaign because of it’s obvious misrepresentation of the issues and as a result Microsoft have had to pull at least one of their Ads when a closer look at the comparison they made showed that they were comparing Windows on a cheap dual CPU server to Linux running on two very expensive IBM mainframes. Had they wanted an honest comparison, they’d have compared both Linux and Windows on a dual CPU x86 server. The fact that they didn’t probably indicates that the results were not in their favour when they tried it in private. Which leads back to my first point, that we never see those findings, we only see those that favour Windows.

So in short, “Get the facts”, should read “Get half the facts with an extreme bias favouring Microsoft products.” but then even the IT dense CIOs that “Get the Facts” targets would see that as only advertising, so “Get the Facts” works nicely for Microsoft and the CIOs reading it get to think, and tell board members and shareholders that by reading them they were “researching the issues”. The fact that most of them either aren’t true, aren’t entirely true, or are so narrow in scope as to be useless and are not indicative of anything relevant doesn’t seem to be an issue for them at all.

The inspiration for this latest “Get the Facts” tirade was this excellent article from Joe Barr on Newsforge. Well worth the read, particularly if you were considering basing a business decision on a “study” paid for by Microsoft.

The BSA (Business Software Alliance), which counts companies like Microsoft, Dell, Apple and HP as members, has been claiming that 33 billion dollars in revenue was lost due to software piracy ni 2004.

That some revenue is lost to piracy is without a doubt true, but many are somewhat doubtful about method by which the BSA reached this figure. In short, according to the Economist (subscription required) the BSA worked out it’s piracy figure by using surveys to determine how many programs the average user has in each area, they then compared that total to the amount of software actually sold in that area and used the difference to reach the $33 billion figure. There are so many problems with that reasoning, that you start to wonder if perhaps the BSA is just a collection of marketers, lobbyists and lawyers working furiously together to further the goals of their member companies. For starters, take me for example, I have OpenOffice.org, Firefox, NVU and Thunderbird on all of my machines. All of those are free Open Source programs, and yet they would count as “piracy” using the above calculation. When you consider that over 65 million people have downloaded Firefox alone, that, it makes you wonder how the BSA could tout such a figure and do so with a serious face. They also apparently jump to the conclusion that the people really guilty of pirating software would rush out and buy it were they unable to use their illegally gotten software. I find that assumption dubious to say the least. So I guess the moral of this is that we can all help the BSA tout bigger software losses if we all adopt and encourage Open Source software.

The second chapter in this woeful story relates to the current software patent issue dividing the EU. The BSA released figures that once again have been twisted to serve the interests of it’s members, nearly all of whom are huge companies. Their claim was that software patents benefit small and medium sized companies (SMEs) as much as large enterprise. Rather then go into all of the detail here, I will instead direct you to Ingrid Marson’s article at ZDnet where the saga has been explained more clearly and in more detail then I could hope to achieve myself. One comment I would make is that the BSA is behind much of the current lobbying in the EU in favour of software patents and their figures have been quoted by at least one MEP over there as reasons why software patents should be legally approved. That the figures are hopelessly inflated in the BSA’s favour is apparently not worth considering.