*OT* - Speaking of Microsoft, here is another article that outlines discussions Microsoft programmers had a couple years back to actually place encrypted software into Microsoft code that would cause the machine to lock up if a *competitors* OS was detected (DR Dos in this case)!!!
August 27, 1998
Old E-Mail Dogs Microsoft
In Fighting Antitrust Suits
By JOHN R. WILKE
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
SALT LAKE CITY -- In 1991, when a competitor threatened to break
Microsoft Corp.'s lock on desktop software, Microsoft engineers
discussed an unusual counterattack: a software bug to be hidden inside an
early version of Microsoft Windows.
In a Sept. 30, 1991, message about the plan that referred to members of
his team in the shorthand of electronic mail, David Cole, head of Windows
development, told another executive that "aaronr had some pretty wild
ideas after three or so beers -- earleh has some too." If the bug detected a
rival's program, he further wrote, it would "put competitors on a treadmill"
and "should surely crash at some point shortly later."
Mr. Cole also warned that the existence of the
bug had to be kept secret. "We need to make
sure this doesn't distract the team for a couple
of reasons," he wrote. "One, the pure
distraction factor, and two, the less people
know about exactly what gets done, the
better."
Mr. Cole's e-mail came in response to a
challenge from what Microsoft saw as a clone
of its DOS operating-system software. Now it
is a key piece of evidence in a private antitrust
suit brought two years ago in federal court
here by tiny Caldera Inc., of Orem, Utah, with
the backing of Ray Noorda, the 72-year-old
former chairman of Novell Inc., of Provo,
Utah. The suit charges that Microsoft intended
"to destroy competition in the software
industry."
The e-mail is among previously secret internal
documents subpoenaed by the U.S.
government in a 1995 antitrust suit against
Microsoft that was settled; these documents are at the center of the
Caldera suit and could become part of the government's current antitrust
suit against Microsoft, which is scheduled to go to trial next month. (In
pursuing its suit against Microsoft, the U.S. government has subpoenaed
documents from Intel Corp.)
'It's Where Ideas Are Explored'
Microsoft concedes the authenticity of Mr. Cole's e-mail, but its lawyers
deny Caldera's antitrust allegation and have asked that the lawsuit be
dismissed. Thomas Burt, a senior Microsoft attorney, said in an interview
that something mentioned in an e-mail between managers doesn't make it
company policy. "An e-mail message in a company like Microsoft is a
conversation -- it's where ideas are explored, and sometimes shot down,"
he said. "Because it is both informal and not conclusive, you can't really
look at any single e-mail or excerpt out of context."
Mr. Burt says that the Salt Lake City lawsuit is unrelated to the current
U.S. case and, in any event, is a fight over products long since obsolete.
But a federal judge in Utah disagreed earlier this year and instead
broadened Caldera's case by expanding Microsoft's potential financial
liability to include the potential damages caused by Windows 95. A trial is
scheduled before a Salt Lake City jury next June.
The hundreds of e-mail messages and documents collected by the
government in the 1995 case, but never released to the public, could have
a strong emotional impact on a jury. Some also could be introduced as
evidence in the current federal case, which goes to trial next month in
Washington, as investigators try to show a longstanding pattern of
predatory actions by Microsoft against potential rivals.
Microsoft executives say they weren't concerned about DR-DOS, the rival
program then owned by Novell, which had less than 5% of the market.
But the subpoenaed Justice Department documents suggest that top
Microsoft executives were in fact worried and devised a campaign to win
long-term, exclusive contracts with personal-computer makers "to freeze
DR-DOS out," and "derail the train before it starts," according to an Aug.
7, 1991, memo by senior Microsoft marketing executive Brad Chase.
Among the memo's prescriptions: Build "unique synergies" between
MS-DOS and Windows, and "lock in PC makers to long-term contracts."
The memo shows concern that DR-DOS could take off, especially if
International Business Machines Corp. adopts the program. A Microsoft
spokesman said that restrictions on its contract lengths weren't imposed by
the government until the settlement of the 1995 case.
DR-DOS was one of the few products presenting an alternative operating
system to Microsoft. That posed a threat to Microsoft's most basic
strategy: controlling the software plumbing of desktop computing, and
leveraging that control to sell more PC software.
Microsoft dismissed DR-DOS as a knockoff, but the lineage of the two
programs is more complex. The original code for Microsoft's DOS was
itself a technical cousin of C/PM, an early operating system on which
DR-DOS was also based. DR-DOS was a product of Digital Research
Inc., a software company famous in high-tech lore for missing an early a
chance to supply IBM with the operating system for its first personal
computers. That was the very contract that vaulted Microsoft to
prominence. Novell later bought Digital Research and then sold it to
Caldera.
In its suit, Caldera alleges that Microsoft tied Windows to its version of
DOS and then forced PC makers to take both programs, shutting out
DR-DOS.
This was accomplished through a tactic known as per-processor licensing,
in which a computer maker must pay a set fee for every PC it makes,
regardless of what operating system it installs, Caldera alleges.
Illegal Tactic
The tactic was labeled illegal in a 1994 Justice Department complaint
against Microsoft, as were the long-term sales contracts and bundling of
one Microsoft product with another. After Microsoft settled that case in
1995, the e-mail and other documents collected by federal prosecutors
were sealed.
Microsoft is likely to use the same argument in the Utah suit that it
embraced in Washington-that it has an absolute right to determine its
products" design. Governmental interference, the company says, stifles
innovation in an industry vital to the U.S. economy. Microsoft is also likely
to argue that consumers are better served by a single integrated Windows
product; and that selling the products separately would have been
inefficient for consumers.
Caldera, too, will argue it was defending consumers and innovation. The
DRDOS product was compatible, cost less and offered more advanced
features. It goaded a complacent Microsoft, after years without a major
upgrade to its flagship operating system, to add new features that matched
those in DR-DOS. Those features included support of larger disk drives,
improved memory management and other advancements, an edge that
helped DRDOS sales rise in 1990 and 1991-before Microsoft struck
back, Caldera says in its suit.
The lawsuit alleges that part of Microsoft's campaign against DR-DOS
was to hide a bug inside a test version of Windows, which was sent in
1991 to thousands of developers working on software that would run on
Windows and to nearly every PC maker in the world. Many of these
companies were then considering whether to use DR-DOS, and the
bug-triggered whenever it encountered DR-DOS-sowed doubt that it was
compatible, the suit charges.
At the time, the bug was a mystery in the software industry. It was
encrypted -- the only piece of encrypted code in Windows -- so that it
was almost impossible to identify. But the author couldn't resist signing his
work, leaving one string of letters unencrypted, and the bug became
known among puzzled software engineers outside Microsoft as the AARD
code-letters that Windows developer Aaron Reynolds used to tag his
code.
Microsoft said Mr. Reynolds and others involved in the case wouldn't
comment individually.
When a "foreign" operating system was detected, the bug froze the
computer and displayed an ominous error message suggesting that the user
contact Microsoft. When developers questioned the message at the time,
Microsoft denied it was intended to derail DR-DOS. Documents to be
produced at the Caldera trial suggest otherwise. "What the guy is
supposed to do is feel uncomfortable when he has bugs, suspect the
problem is DR-DOS and go out and buy MS-DOS and not take the risk,"
a Feb. 10, 1992, Microsoft memo said.
Enter the Sleuth
The bug was decoded by a self-appointed software sleuth, Andrew
Schulman, who published his suspicions in a technical monthly with a cult
following, Dr. Dobbs Journal, in 1993. He thought the code may have
been placed there deliberately but wasn't sure, and unraveling it took some
work. The code "turned out to be XOR-encrypted, self-modifying and
deliberately obfuscated-all in an apparent attempt to thwart disassembly,"
he wrote.
Mr. Schulman found that the code searches for two tiny differences
between MS-DOS and DR-DOS, and when it discovers the latter, it halts
the machine.
"It appears to be a wholly arbitrary test, a gratuitous gatekeeper seemingly
with no purpose other than to smoke out non-Microsoft versions of DOS,
tagging them with an appropriately vague "error" message," he wrote.
In a response published in a subsequent issue of Dr. Dobbs Journal,
Microsoft said "it has never been the practice of this company to
deliberately create incompatibilities between Microsoft operating system
software and the system software of other operating system publishers."
Microsoft disabled the bug when it released the product to the public.
A Microsoft spokesman yesterday said that "in a beta [test] version of
Windows 3.1 in late 1991, we had code designed to help reduce product
support costs by determining whether 3.1 was running on a version of
DOS for which it had been tested, and in the end, even that limited
function was disabled before it was released to consumers." Caldera insists
in its lawsuit that the damage was already done, because the target
audience-the people who were supposed to "feel uncomfortable"-were
developers and PC makers, not the public.
"Every one of these allegations was investigated years ago by the Federal
Trade Commission and the Justice Department, and they did not bring a
case," the Microsoft spokesman said.
The Caldera suit says that the company's DR-DOS sales doubled from
$15 million in 1990 to $30 million in 1991. Its sales in the first quarter of
1992 soared again, to $15 million, but collapsed to $1.4 million by the
fiscal fourth quarter. Today DR-DOS has found a new life in devices such
as airline seatback entertainment centers and TV-set top boxes.
John |
