Salon: Embrace, extend, censor

“Yet another skirmish has broken out in the ongoing war
between free-software hackers and proprietary-minded corporations
— and this one promises to be a doozy. On Wednesday, lawyers
representing Microsoft requested the removal of a series of posts
on the bulletin boards at Slashdot, the popular “news for nerds”
Web site.”

“Citing the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
Microsoft asserted that the Slashdot posts, which reveal
information about Microsoft’s proprietary version of a popular
security technology called Kerberos, include “unauthorized
reproductions of Microsoft’s copyrighted work” — as well as
information on how to get around access restrictions protecting
Microsoft’s “data specification.”

“The Microsoft action is just the latest move in a
long-simmering dispute between the free-software/open-source
software community and Microsoft. The technology in question,
Kerberos, is a security system that authenticates the identity of
users logging into networks running the Unix operating system. It
is an open standard, developed in part by Theodore Ts’o, a software
developer who now works for VA Linux, a company that specializes in
computers preinstalled with Linux.”

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