Chief Instigator
The "instigator" of a report that criticized Microsoft's operating-system dominance has left his day job at a computer security firm that does work for MS. From press reports, it's not clear whether @Stake's chief technology officer Dan Geer was fired or resigned.
The document Geer was involved in writing holds that reliance on a single operating system increases security risks (which makes a certain amount of intuitive sense). "It doesn't matter how hard Microsoft works on security. So long as they continue to be human beings, there will continue to be flaws—and you don't want every machine on Earth to have the same flaw revealed at the same time," one of the co-authors, Perry Metzger, told InfoWorld. "It's as though every person in the U.S. had the exact same genes."
The authors want to weaken Microsoft's market advantage via government action. For any number of reasons, that's a bad idea. For some background on why, check out Reason's excellent November 2001 story, "Antitrust's Greatest Hits: The Foolish Precedents Behind the Microsoft Case."
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