[ Thanks to Gary
Virene for this link. ]
“THE Microsoft trial is at last coming to an end—at least
for the moment. … 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.”
“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.”