Microsoft Conspiracies

reply to post by rapturas

About MS, is it true that MS DOS was purchased off a third party for peanuts?

The original MS DOS was purchased from Seattle Computer Products for (if I remember correctly) $250K, and Microsoft also hired the original programmer of it. SCP retained the right to ship their own version for free as long as it included a hardware component. Later, SCP began selling a version of MS-DOS with just a ROM chip (few pennies of "hardware").

IMO, if anything protected by law was stolen from Steve Jobs or Apple, there would have been a lawsuit and Microsoft would have lost. Steve Jobs is a master of marketing and I think no slouch when it comes to legal pursuits.

IMO, I think that their marketting gimmicks are rip-offs to a point where the general public is so ignorant of what really goes on, that they don't know what to buy, so they buy what Microsoft tells them. Confusing, right? Let me give you an example. There is about thirty seven different versions of Winodws Vista. (Sarcasm, there are only like 5). The cheapest being Home Basic, and the most expensive being Vista Ultimate. There is about 300$ price difference between I think. The actual difference? Nothing, except a little more eye-candy with windows vista areo (very nice, mind you.) Now, they show this off, making it seem like you'll die if you don't buy the highest-priced OS just because it comes with more (tiny) features (Like windows defender, a useless program that claims to stop malware but really doesn't), so they public buys it. As a computer nerd, I saved tons of money fixing errors (hardware and software wise) myself, other than sending it to a shop. Antivirus is just companies trying to get your money, esspecially with the new pay per year subscription for antivirus definition updates through Norten. I also think Vista's new User Account Control not only is extremely annyoying, but also registers everything that you do, and that gets done to your computer, to a server, but thats just my guess. But hey, I have nothing to hide, so what do I care. I think the market for expensive software is a rip and just takes advantage of the growing population of computer users that rely on user-friendly interfaces. Thats why I have come to appreciate good ol' . Nothing better than p2p networking...

I think MS Windows Vista is nothing special yet it's being sold as if it's the best ever OS out there, my new laptop has Vista on it and my Internet Explorer and Yahoo Messenger crash with vigor...

I since switched to Firefox AND I am planning the switch to the Ubuntu OS.

If anything, the real conspiracy is crappy software being forced down our throats.

Is there not 9 editions of Vista including the 64-bit versions? which for the life of me I cannot find a PC supplier to sell me a pc with 64-bit ultimate pre installed.

I thought Vista was just a stop gap anyways with something altogether spankier coming out next year or so

apologies for the off topic post



[edit on 27-10-2007 by maintainright]

Originally posted by rapturas
About MS, is it true that MS DOS was purchased off a third party for peanuts?
and is it true that the GUI was stolen by Bill from Steve Jobs?

According to this 1999 flick - yes, they bought DOS for 50k and it seems the GUI wasn't exactly stolen - but deception was present.
I just noticed it is now even on Google - "Pirates of Silicon Valley" 1 hr 36 min.
Pirates of Silicon Valley

Enjoy

Ubuntu is pretty good, just test the waters with it though to make sure your hardware will work properly. Another problem you will come across is getting a windows emulator for the windows programs you want to run since ubuntu is linux.

on other news. Here is where Vista sends some info. not exactly a news source, but interesting non-the-less.

www.abandonia.com...

The jist of it, is a network dude got Vista, saw increased latency on his network when Vista machine was on, ran a packet sniffer, and it came back that alot of data was being sent to several sources. Thought I'd pass it along. I've several chats about this, but I personally don't have vista, nor will I ever, so can't test it.

Regards,

Camain

I love the Easter eggs that the Microsoft programmers put in, they can be fun. However, I hate the Microsoft company as a whole.

A conspiracy? No... I don't think so. Just a greedy company.

try this in MS notepad:

open a new document, type in, bush hid the truth
and then save the document and close it. then reopen it
and see what happens to the text lol very annoying.
It works with any character as long as it follows a 4 3 3 5
character set another eg: mmmm mmm mmm mmmmm

its a glitch i guess but why on earth has it not been fixed?
one thing that really annoys me about MS is that they release
something with bugs in it then you have to download patches
and what not to resolve the issues. i recently brought a qtek2020i
with windows mobile 2003 se on it and its the #test OS i have
encountered on a mobile device. IE always always hangs,
the device always freezes up if i run windows media player.
it always seems to be an MS programs that screws up over anyother
program :anger:

Originally posted by pepsi78
I tryed naming a txt file con, this is very strange, it told me that a filename with the specific name already exists, then I tried with con.doc and con.html, same result.

"con" is a reserved device name as part of the Windows operating system. Look at the file wecerr.txt on your computer.

If you have Windows XP, try this easter egg

Go to your start menu and click 'run'
A little box should pop up.
Type in telnet
A command prompt box should come up
Type the letter o and press enter
( to ) should come up
type in towel.blinkenlights.nl

and watch!


[edit on 27-10-2007 by zstaples5]

There was the Wingdings "conspirocy" where if you typed in a certain string of letters while in the font, you'd get something that looked like 9-11.

If you want to get into real Microsoft conspiracy, look around for information on the NSA backdoors. I've never performed the analysis myself but the claim is that windows included facilities that allow the NSA (or anyone else with the know-how/codes) to access the computer without the users knowledge.

This kind of thing is very likely, and i believe is one of the reasons the Chinese demanded access to the windows source code. The NSA has allegedly made many attempts to put backdoors in software/cryptographic algorithms in the past, or deliberately weaken technology so that they still have access. For example it is claimed that during the 60s/70s NSA (or equivalent departments at the time) had the technology to break codes that academia would not have the technology to break for 20-30 years.

If you want a proven precedent of a tech company covering things up for the NSA try reading about differential cryptanalysis. Discovered most likely sometime in the 60s/70s by IBM, they covered it up so that only NSA had access to this technique, it was only 'rediscovered' by academia in the late 80's, and in the mid 90's IBM admitted they had known about it for a long time, but that the NSA had 'encouraged' them to keep it quiet.

wow, thank you to everyone that contributed to this thread! truly appreciated folks. Once again confirming to me that ATS is a great site....Peace

[edit on 29-10-2007 by cynical572]

reply to post by bobafett


Very good.
And the reason (among many others) I will not install Vi$ta.
Being a security---mmmm---not "expert", but how about freaky geek, I am very disturbed at some of Vi$ta's activities.
The secret transfer of info without consent, the indexing and checking of all media, and the unexplained activity that doesn't even show up on a extensive search of processes.
Most people don't have a clue how tcpip works, or even what it is. And I would make a plausable guess that less than 1 in 1000 even know there are other protocols besides tcp, udp,etc.
I have yet to find, or even prove, that there in another network protocol in operation in Vi$ta O.S. But just by inference, the people who built the protocols that make the internet operational have had decades to design others, and Vi$ta seems to have something fishy going on in the transfer of information.
We know for a fact that the internet backbones and nodes have had filters capable of noticing keywords, and tracing them from source to destination at a speed of many gigabytes per second installed.
I confirmed this several months ago by visiting a site known to be viewed by suspected terrorists, typing a comment ( matter of fact, the comment was just one character, an "!" for the purpose of tracerouting )
and logging the hops. Having been informed previously of which ip addies to watch for, I did lookups on them. They all seemed innocous, except that, only visiting the watched site for about 2 minutes, I got an hour or so of pings from the suspected spies I was actually "reverse monitoring" after disconnecting from the site. Most tried to access known trojan ports and messenging ports, among many others, and fortunately, my firewall blocked and logged them. They were smart in that the port scans were at a speed that didn't trigger the port scan block function (blocks an IP address for a certain amount of time if a large amount of ports are pinged in a configured time frame), nor did they trigger Syn flood or DOS attack prevention schemes.

Sadly, these known filtering addies have been moved and no longer exist, and rarely now, can you even catch an ip probing from someone other than a hacker, or a p2p network.
I seriously doubt that they have discontinued monitoring, and am of the opinion that, since Vi$ta is becoming pervasive, a new network protocol is in use that may never show up unless some 3rd party software designer provides a program to notice it.

reply to post by gotrox


You know, I saw something quite interesting not so long ago, I was doing traceroutes to people I know, to see how many hops it took, and displayed results in a map. Most of them seemed normal, 5-15 hops, fairly similar routes. But when I traced the route to someone in Iran, it took a weird route, about 40 hops, via a part of London the other routes didn't, and also through Langley in the USA. I'm in England, so for a route out to the middle east, to go via America was very odd. Other traces to eastern Europe didn't go through the US, so I would have expected it to take a similar route on the way to the middle east.

OK - I've been debating adding this here, since it's really just a rumor (but then, most conspiracies are, no?). Anyway, I posted something similar in another thread here somewhere, can't find it now. So, here it is - take it for what it's worth:

I've worked in a field called "GIS" (Geographic Information Systems) for some twenty years. Basically digital mapping, combined with many layers, sometimes hundreds of layers, of other data sets (aerial photos, weather, census data, infrastructure, satellite imagery, remote sensing, etc.). Military used to be the big users, then public works/engineering and other agencies, now even the public though they call it something else (e.g., Google Earth, etc.).

So, a few years ago, Microsoft was planning their own online GIS, and was feverishly accumulating data sets to make it "live" First came Terraserver, then Virtual Earth (and NASA's WorldWind), but Google's money, moxie, and free-thinking prevailed as the consumer viewer of choice.

Some colleagues at University I worked with 5-10 years ago suddenly left their careers and dropped out of sight. I thought this strange, since they had lucrative, well-paying tenures in some of the finest, most desirable campuses in this part of the country (UC Santa Barbara, Stanford, etc.). Well I made a few inquiries to see what happened to them, but gave up after a year or two.

One day I get a call from an old PhD buddy that vanished. He said he had heard I was looking for him and wanted to just say he's fine, etc. After prodding him a bit, he finally, reluctantly, told me the following - I have no reason to doubt him:

He said that he was recruited away by Microsoft for an "astronomical" contract to work in their 'skunk works' (I didn't realize they had such a thing). He said the sprawling Redmond campus has many buildings, some of which have enormous, deep, climate-controlled basements containing long rows of giant server farms. He said his job was to help acquire, store, and organize all of the spatial data he could get his hands on (topos, streetmaps, city plans, etc).

That's not all. Although he was in charge of the GIS data, he said that though it was many tera- and peta-bytes worth, it was nothing compared to everything else Microsoft was hoarding. Puzzled, I asked what he meant by that - I mean how much 'stuff' could you possibly put on a map?

He said it is way bigger than that. He said that Bill Gates was on a "mission". A personal quest or hobby - and money was no object. Apparently, Gates was continually adding to the server farm storage capacity and filling it with everything imaginable. Forget maps - I mean every kind of dossier on everyone. Digital copies of all manuscripts, films, photos, phone books, manifests and financial records of all kinds. Artworks, ancient texts, engineering drawings, patents, you name it. Seems impossible, doesn't it?

I mean, seriously, c'mon: Redundant server farms and a copy of everything - all intellectual and artistic output of the human race?!? Sounds like a science fiction story - and I told him so. What possible interest would Gates have in a photo of some nobody in a tiny hamlet of some third-world country anyway?

The answer was that Gates was the richest man in the world and that mass storage devices are incredibly cheap and getting cheaper. He had the money, the brainpower, the capacity.

It was suggested I do a little math -and the conversation was over.

I wasn't sure what to make of this, but I can tell you that every once in a while when I download photos from my camera or cell phone, or shoot off a blistering e-mail to a buddy about a boss, or just look into the videocam on my laptop - I often shudder to think where all those bits and bytes are ending up...

It may be nothing, it may be only partially true, or it may be...

One thing I'm reasonably sure of - you won't find anything about this by searching Google. Like the enigmatic UFO's - I'm sure there's a small army of folks whose only job is to 'sanitize' everything for public consumption.

Who knows? Take care...

[edit on 11/1/2007 by Outrageo]

guess no one remembers this?

www.heise.de...

and the other side of the argument

www.pcworld.com...

i tend to think the NSA naming probably is just a naming convention - if it was actually meant to be used by the NSA you'd think they would hide it...or would they? =)