Just a footnote from the Economist:
THE Microsoft trial is at last coming to an end?at least
for the moment. As court deadlines come and go, the
world?s biggest software firm and America?s Justice
Department are still talking about a settlement. Judge
Thomas Penfield Jackson, who has presided over the
case, now says that he will give his ruling, which is
expected to be hard on Microsoft, next week or
possibly later.
At such a time you might expect Microsoft to be on its
best behaviour. Not so, say computer-security experts.
They complain that the company is as reluctant as ever
to abandon its much-criticised business tactic to
?embrace, extend?and extinguish?. This bodes ill, they
argue, if Microsoft is offered a lenient settlement or has
only modest remedies imposed on it by the courts.
The argument is over an encryption technology called
Kerberos, after the three-headed dog that guards the
gates of Hades. The program scrambles passwords
travelling on computer networks, so that they cannot be
stolen by eavesdroppers. It is the standard for
identifying users on servers running Unix operating
systems.
Kerberos gained pre-eminence because it is clever, and
because its developers, computer scientists at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, released the
source code, which let security experts around the
world debug and refine the program line by line. It has
so far proved uncrackable?a good thing, because
password-sniffing programs are freely available on the
web.
Up to now, Microsoft has ?embraced? the technology,
meaning that computers running Windows could
connect to Unix servers. But with its new operating
system, Windows 2000, the company has ?extended?
Kerberos, making a slight change so that Microsoft?s
version is not fully interoperable with the standard
version found at hundreds of universities, financial
institutions and other firms across the world.
This, critics say, is an attempt to ?extinguish? a public
standard, to help Windows become the dominant
operating system on servers as well. Given Microsoft?s
version of Kerberos, they argue, IT managers have an
incentive to opt for an all-Windows network. That is
because users will find it easier to log on and gain
access to all the features of the new operating system if
both PCs and servers run Windows 2000.
There are ways around this problem. Network
administrators can write patches that get the two
systems to work together. CyberSafe, a commercial
Kerberos vendor, now sells ActiveTRUST, which
purports to help. But such solutions are complicated and
expensive. And since Microsoft?s source code is secret,
outside software developers cannot debug it.
Microsoft says it has done nothing wrong. It asserts that
it has only made use of a feature in a new version of the
Kerberos standard that is currently being drafted, and is
not trying to undercut the existing standard. The
company also says it will soon make public the details
behind its flavour of Kerberos.
However, the Kerberos story fits nicely with the future
that Bill Gates described when he resigned in
mid-January as Microsoft?s chief executive to become
its chief software architect. He wants to turn Windows
into an operating system for the Internet, creating a
?walled garden? in which devices running on Windows
work best with servers powered by Windows?and
thereby to keep all the firm?s competitors out.
To achieve this grand vision, called ?New Generations
Windows Services?, Microsoft will have to ?extend? the
existing standards of the Internet, just as it has with
Kerberos. It would not be the first time that Microsoft
has tried to gain ownership of standards. In the
mid-1990s it modified Java, a popular programming
language originally developed by Sun Microsystems, a
technology firm, so that programs written in Java would
run best on Windows PCs.
No wonder that, in the current antitrust case, the
Department of Justice is nervous about a settlement or a
remedy that falls short of a break-up (an option that
seems increasingly unlikely). After government lawyers
last negotiated a settlement with Microsoft, in 1995, the
firm still felt free to bundle its Internet browsing software
with Windows?a central issue in the current case. The
DOJ does not want to be outmanoeuvred again.
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