Microsoft has launched an attack campaign against Google by launching Scroogled.com. Not to be mistaken with Scroogle which was a search engine that anonymised Google searches by acting as a proxy.

For once Microsoft has a point. As often in such cases they are saying the right thing for the wrong reasons. In this case Microsoft is using using the fact that they haven't taken things as far as Google to attack them. However I did learn that all Google Shopping results are paid for (I don't use Google Shopping).

I can't really blame any of these companies for exploiting user's private data without also blaming the users. Nobody is willing to pay a dime for an email account (unless it's "pro", and even then). This has formatted the industry to function this way. People used to think that email was such an intangible gadget that the thought of paying for it was surreal, this was at a time in which service providers were still searching for ways to be profitable.

Now that everyone is hooked to email, it is still rare for people to pay money for the service of email (or go through the effort of self-hosting), no matter how vital it has become for many of us.

What is left to say except the usual read the terms and conditions, and only if you agree should you click "agree". It's all in the terms, and Microsoft's terms are not any better. Microsoft has provisions to allow themselves to do the same exact thing Google is doing. It's just that they're not doing it, yet.

In an ideal world users would host their own services, in a less ideal world people would pay for the service and hold their providers accountable for maintaining privacy and protecting their data as much as legally and technically possible.

Other reading: John Gilmore on Google's Gmail terms-of-service (from 2004).

Last week this post on Reddit showed that Microsoft Reputation Service considers donate.fsf.org as a gambling site. This may look like a human error, maybe even someone outside of Microsoft, who knows, indeed, anyone can provide feedback to Microsoft and help them categorise the Interweb.

This means that you too can visit that page and help Microsoft's filtering system understand the difference between a gambling site and an FSF donation page.

Note, this is a Microsoft website it may behave strangely. Indeed I was not able to submit the form at first using Iceweasel or Chromium on Debian/Wheezy, of course I enabled JS. I had issues like the captcha not showing up, unwritable captcha field or the submit button not reacting. I left the page open for a while and when I got back I was finally able to submit the form (still, their captcha is harder to read than their EULA).

I tested the page using Tor Browser which gave me this user agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:10.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0 and the page worked perfectly fine. I retested a couple of times and can confirm the same behavior. I can't say that Microsoft is intentionally being a dick with GNU/Linux users, but I can say if it's not intentional then their website sucks.

This year FOSDEM is supported by CodePlex (among other sponsors). CodePlex is Microsoft's vision/version of an "Open Source" project hub.

I don't know what strikes me more, that FOSDEM would accept dirty money or the realisation that Microsoft has completely (or so it seems) changed their minds about open source.

It was only in 2008, before Bill Gates retired from Microsoft that he said such things like:

"there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with."

[Open source creates a license] "so that nobody can ever improve the software,"

It still seems difficult for MS to integrate the term "open source" completely, it's all over the CodePlex website, but on the FOSDEM page there is a link to www.microsoft.com/opensource which redirects to www.microsoft.com/en-us/openness/default.aspx. It's as if it's too much too soon to have the term "opensource" in a microsoft url. : ]

In the end I guess one could say that Microsoft is a better place without Bill Gates. Maybe Apple will soon follow .. HAHAHAHHAHA!!

Not even one month after Microsoft killed bought Skype bugs and such have started to pour all over their status site. People can't log in, problems with software that wont install/uninstall properly, can't call numbers in certain countries (depending on the weather), issues when trying to reset a password, etc etc...

You can check Skype's status on the site heartbeat.skype.com. I checked for each month over the last year, most of the issues they have had are related to payments and such, especially around December for some reason an issue with MasterCard... strange..

The past 2 months are really bad..

• June 2011
• May 2011

Microsoft has purchased Skype. Now I'm wondering what is going to happen to this software. I know its never been Free Software, however in it's early days it was directly available for GNU/Linux at a time where most other software vendors would not consider platforms other than windows and macos. Another thing is that I have to admit that it does work and it works well.

So what will happen next ? I predict they will first drop the GNU/Linux version. Then they will of course drop the p2p system and prefer a centralised method that will make it less efficient... Good side is that maybe more work, technical and promotional, might go into XMPP + Jingle (Jabber) and that would be cool. In the meantime, brb need to delete an account.

I have been receiving some spam from authenticated hotmail users lately, so I thought it could be useful to report it to them. Remembering some of the Microsoft logic I decided to use the Bing search engine to find out what kind of process they may have set up for the common people to use. Of course I did this because they do not respond to the recommended "abuse@domain.tld" addresses, they are above that sort of thing anyway.

I finally found this very informative page on how to report spam to hotmail and I think "what if I click the link titled How to report abusive e-mail with full headers to MSN?". So I do just that, and guess what, it's a link to a a page titled Dealing with Pornography Online, and the page does not even contain any information on how to deal with porn online... . It's the same for the link to the page that is supposed to explain how to identify if the mail has been sent using their systems. It's hopeless.

It seems I spoke to soon, they have taken note of my email, however their auto replies have been blocked because the ACK emails are sent from misconfigured SMTP servers:

I of course set up some stuff to at least be able to see where this goes.. .. I will update this article when they send the actual response.