Posted on 05/18/2020 10:46:01 AM PDT by dayglored
Tell-all with president Brad Smith reveals Obama warned tech giants that a privacy reckoning was coming
Microsoft president Brad Smith (pictured) has admitted that the Windows giant was "on the wrong side of history" when it came to open source.
While nowadays the born-again company seems unable to resist the embrace (if that's the right word) of the open-source world, it was not always so.
Former CEO Steve Ballmer memorably declared that "Linux is a cancer" back in the day. Goodness, how times have changed in Redmond.
"Microsoft," said Smith during a chat hosted by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), "was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century and I can say that about me personally."
He added: "The good news is that, if life is long enough, you can learn... that you need to change."
Indeed. Although judging by our response to our recent Name-a-Microsoft piece, the company still has a way to go before the sins of the past have been fully expunged.
Smith himself has penned a succession of hand-wringing articles over the years, from cheering progress on facial-recognition regulation to standing up for the Microsoft employees that are recipients of the US's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme. Heck, he even talked AI and ethics with the Pope (although we'd wager His Holiness was more interested in finding out how Windows 10 1809 managed to do that to his computer).
As a reminder, Microsoft has cheerfully flogged technology to America's controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, as has its newly acquired tentacle GitHub. Smith did not address this as he talked up the source shack: "We see our responsibility as its steward to make it a secure, productive home for [developers]."
The MIT CSAIL "Hot Topics in Computing" fireside chat also heard the resounding clang of a name dropping to the ground as Smith described a meeting with former US president Barack Obama.
Donald Trump's predecessor warned that a reckoning over surveillance and the data held on private individuals was headed the tech giants' way over the coming years: "There will be a moment when the demands that you're placing on the government will be placed on you as well."
"I thought that was a very insightful comment at the time and I wrote it down. I looked around and was struck that no one else was writing it down," said a modest Smith.
If only he'd thought to pass his carefully written notes on to the Microsoft team responsible for slurping data from customer's computers. That whole European nastiness could so easily have been avoided.
Lessons from the past aside, Smith did have sensible advice for those hoping that apps will be the panacea for the pandemic today. "It's a belt-and-suspenders approach," he said. "We still will need public health officers to interview individuals who test positive, even if they've been using an app on their smartphone."
"We can't base our planning on the assumption that everyone will have this app," he added, before highlighting the importance of data in the making of decisions related to public health during the coronavirus outbreak. This is something that lawmakers would do well to consider. ®
Dear Bill Gates and evil ones out there.
Please allow me to run my Windows XP again. Please provide a blanket code to bypass the activation crap. I have been locked out now on TWO machines for close to a year.
Eh, sort of, but not quite. Actually, there are three concepts in play here:
Note that it is perfectly acceptable within the definition of "Free of charge software" to charge for related things such as Support and Service.
ShadowAce -- please correct or expand if I've got the above wrong. :-)
Despite its FUNtastic beginnings Open Source has quickly devolved into a Marxist SJW fustercluck.
Have you witnessed the nonsense goings on at Stack Overflow lately? It's criminal.
Indeed!
Prior to the mid-70's a "computer" was the hardware. The system software came with it, not as an after-thought, but absolutely married to the hardware, and not an independent product. Whatever application software was then written for it was either held within the company that developed it, or like your BASIC apps, considered a public document.
It took the genius (*cough*) of one Bill Gates to envision "Software As A Product", and start charging for his proprietary "Microsoft BASIC" as a product independent of the hardware it would run on.
As a hobbyist from 1970 onward (if you're interested you can see my history here (Computer-tech Full Disclosure Section of my FR profile), I have always felt that one of the great values of software was that it could serve purposes beyond its original creation, and thus should be available for modification. Of course, at the option of the author -- if they want to keep it to themselves, that's fine, but it will be forever up to them to support and maintain it, and it will never do as much as it could if others' ideas are not added to it.
Heck, I,’m just the retired geek version 2009. I’m not paid anymore to stay current, so all I hear is hearsay. :)
OOPS. I type "Linux" probably 100 times a day, and my finger muscle overrode my brain muscle.
LOL Well put and totally understood. Working on that same status myself, just a few more years to go....
Microsoft won't do that for you, partly because they don't support XP, but mainly because they don't want XP boxes on the internet (they're wildly vulnerable).
That said, you're hardly the only person with that desire. So if you're willing to experiment, with some googling, you might find a way to tweak something in the Registry to accomplish the desired goal. And there are some generic activation key codes floating around the internet, but their usefulness and applicability are dependent on what variant of XP you've got. If it's an OEM-specific pre-installed one, that might be a lot tougher than if it's a generic consumer one that you installed yourself. For that reason, I would caution you to avoid paying anything for a "guaranteed XP activation key code" unless you are willing to discover it doesn't necessarily work on your system.
NOTE: The above actions are outside the conditions of the Windows EULA, so I'm not encouraging you to do anything that might get you in trouble. :-) Just sayin', those actions are among those a person could take if for some reason they wanted to.
https://www.google.com/search?q=windows+xp+license+key+generator
I have no idea whether any of the search results are any good, or legal, or anything else, of course.
I was a highly productive SQL Server guru for 20 years, and this pain is familiar. No more working with Windows-centric IT any more. No more running Windows shops or architecting Windows-centric solutions. Maybe I might write SQL queries or architect a data model or debug data engineering, that's it.
As a side effect of being a consultant and a researcher I had to juggle a lot of distinct configurations. I used HYPER-V for my personal workstation for a while, but they played favorites with vendors and made it untenable without 100x my desired spend. So I just gave up and went KVM without the special sauce vendor software. I give customers my outside mail and API surfaces and decline to integrate in their Office/365 groupware solutions.
Windows 10 updates and use leave you wondering if your files will still be there afterward and if so what information about you was and is being sold.
:)
Windows has been on most desktops since before Steve Ballmer was in charge.
In fact, if you consider Microsoft overall, the time line goes even further back to the mid 80s and MS-DOS.
Windows really took majority status after Windows 95 was released. By 1997, it was the # one home computer operating system (I won’t say PC, as these numbers also included Macs).
Ballmer became MSFT President in 1998, and later CEO in 2000. I watched it happen real time. Blech.
I’d like to see General Flynn’s and James Rosen’s responses to this.
Microsoft has been poisoning Win7 for the last 3 years with updates that break functionality. Your next “update” should be Linux Mint.
I don’t like to hate anybody, it’s bad for the soul. I prefer ridicule, when possible.
His famous 1985 Windows 1.0 commercial, laughable as it was (and is), was nevertheless a frightening harbinger of the horror that was to come later. The Monkey boy, “Developers”, etc. allowed us to overlook the psychotic rage and the unethical business practices that cost competing businesses their existence, and cost their employees their careers and in some cases their lives.
I’m sorry that you had to experience that up close. I was always at least one handshake removed from Redmond (I worked with some Microsoft folks in the early-mid 90’s, but at a distance.)
That man was way over the top out of control for 30 years. The damage he did is legendary, and that is his legacy.
how is Nadella to work for?
Just remember ... as Ed Asner said, playing the retiring engineer at 3 mile Island ...
“You can’t put too much water in the reactor.” The rest is history. :)
Better late than never for them to figure this one out...
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