rp321@uiucuxa.CSO.UIUC.EDU (11/07/85)
[ Gulp! Tasty bug food! ]
Hmmmmm. Microsoft is on the net... why haven't we heard from them?
There has been a number of messages on the net about Microsoft's threatening
messages embedded in their software, but MS has been strangely silent
about it. Do they have something to hide?
Russell J. Price
University of Illinois
{ ihnp4, pur-ee, convex }!uiucdcs!uiucuxa!rp321
rp321@uiucuxa.CSO.UIUC.EDUslerner@sesame.UUCP (Simcha-Yitzchak Lerner) (11/13/85)
For whatever it's worth, I have an old copy of chart, and the
same message is embedded in the file used to protect the program.
I suspect that it is there just to scare, but I am not certain.
(I don't own any other Microsoft protected products, so I can't
say if any others contain the same message. I suspect that they
have had it there all along in all of their protected products,
but it is only now that there is a flak, and therefore publicity,
about its presence.)
--
Opinions expressed are public domain, and do not belong to Lotus
Development Corp.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Simcha-Yitzchak Lerner
{genrad|ihnp4|ima}!wjh12!talcott!sesame!slerner
{cbosgd|harvard}!talcott!sesame!slerner
talcott!sesame!slerner@harvard.ARPA johnl@ima.UUCP (11/14/85)
Old copies of MS Word and MS Project also have the threatening copy protection message in them. I suspect that if some copy protected program of Microsoft's did indeed munch a disk, it was a mistake rather than deliberate, but the whole thing does seem extremely dumb. But remember, in a sense copy protection is the whole reason Microsoft exists at all. Bill Gates wrote the original Altair Basic which was widely pirated before it was even done, because he gave away some tapes (paper tapes, that is) of premilinary versions to people who had no compunctions about copying software. Apparently there were so many copies that Gates never could make any money selling it, and he swore that would never happen again. Thus was Microsoft born. John Levine, ima!johnl The opinions above are solely those of a 12 year old hacker who has broken into my account, and not those of my employer or any other organization.