Wired: Call it Slash-and-Burn.org

[ Thanks to Jeremy
Allison for this link. ]

“Thursday just wasn’t a good day for geek-culture destination
Slashdot. First came the news that Microsoft ordered Slashdot to
delete discussions of one of the company’s security products. Just
as angry Linux users were furiously lashing out at the nastygram
from Redmond’s legal department, a distributed denial of service
attack hit Slashdot, taking it intermittently offline for a few
hours. “

“The letter is particularly galling to Slashdotters since it
includes a generous helping of everything they love to hate:
Microsoft, lawyers, and the DMCA, which the motion picture industry
has already used in one prominent lawsuit to try to stamp out a
DVD-descrambling utility.”

“Microsoft is concerned about a Slashdot thread from May 2 that
talks about the company’s proprietary extensions to the Kerberos
security protocol, which was originally designed at MIT in the
1980s and has been adopted by the Internet Engineering Task Force
as an open standard. Microsoft Kerberos as used in Windows 2000 is
partially incompatible with the rest of the computing world.”

“As if that weren’t offensive enough, to read Microsoft’s own
Kerberos specification, developers had to run an .exe file with a
confidential license agreement included. That kind of
hiding-technical-information approach didn’t sit well with members
of the Slashdot community, which quickly posted ways to download
the specification and bypass the restrictive license
agreement.”

Complete
Story