Judge orders Microsoft to spill internal docs and scour execs' comms in secondhand licensing case The legal spat between secondhand software reseller ValueLicensing and Microsoft took another turn this week: a consent order was published with demands for documents from past and present Microsoft head honchos, and a planned case management conference was canceled. Several requests in the order revolved around a historic, …
Not sure any of that suffers from the disability of even being remotely true.
At this point with being messed about by Microsoft — not a happy judge and a vexed judge is likely to be rather generous in spreading the misery in the direction of the irritation.
"No blanket or default designation of such documents as 'Restricted' or 'Confidential' shall be applied." ✓
So my company should just shut then? We're only financially viable because we can sell massive amounts of compute to people. No way we could afford to buy that many boxes and configure them and keep them running around the world. We're not an infrastructure company.
Why are posters on here so psychopathically opposed to cloud computing? What industry are you working in where businesses can afford to run all the compute they need and have the expertise to keep it running? Don't you want small businesses to be able to compete globally? Do you think every business with employees who drive cars should have a motor mechanic on the books? Do I need to employ a plumber if I have running water in the office?
Not everyone has or wants the knowledge to run a server farm that's globally available. Buying that resource from a third party enables thousands of businesses that wouldn't exist without the cloud.
Why are posters on here so psychopathically opposed to cloud computing?
I don't think they are, I think they are opposed to the blatant abuse of $[everyone] by large dominant providers. Take the current culprit under discussion, they've been found guilty on court multiple times of illegal practices to kill competition - and now they are being roasted (I hope) for blatant activities designed to shift people into it's walled garden and not to sell on their perpetual licences.
Adobe got to be the de-facto standard with creatives by making quite good software. Then they abused that dominance by going to subscription only. I have an old laptop with CS4 installed should I need it (I rarely do these days), subscribing and paying Adobe every month would be crazy for my level of usage. But I don't have the option of buying a newer version, and I suspect that if $[carp] happens, I'd not be able to re-install my perpetually licensed version on a different machine any more (I wonder if they still have their activation servers running ?)
It's that sort of thing that people are so against. OK, I suspect there are a few who would be against any sort of cloud computing on principle - but most will recognise that for many tasks it makes sense. But this "everything cloud whether the user want sit or not or even if it makes sense" thing really isn't right.
Yes, your harmful company should be shut down.
When it comes to clown computing, outside of the niche case when you're testing software for a few days (rather than buying hardware), it's *always* more expensive to run software on someone else's computer, rather than yours.
>What industry are you working in where businesses can afford to run all the compute they need and have the expertise to keep it running?
99% of businesses actual compute needs, could be met with the ludicrous performance of hardware that you can find sitting discarded in streets.
As for the 1% that needs even more compute, well clearly they can afford it, if they can afford to pay extra renting it from someone else.
>Do you think every business with employees who drive cars should have a motor mechanic on the books?
For a large business that has a lot of cars, it would make the most economic sense to have a motor mechanic on the books, or an employee that has basic mechanics abilities, that can do servicing as needed.
Mechanics charge a lot for even a trivial oil charge - if the company mechanic only services 2 cars a day, that could end up financially much cheaper.
>Do I need to employ a plumber if I have running water in the office?
You would want an employee that at least knows how to do basic plumbing (or at least know how to do some plumbing yourself), if you don't want to be useless and watch water spraying, while waiting for a plumber to not show up.
>Not everyone has or wants the knowledge to run a server farm that's globally available.
Um, the whole idea of the internet is that any host is globally available?
If a business needs a globally distributed server farm (that isn't going to be shut down any time soon), then clearly such company should own and control it, not rent it.
>Buying that resource from a third party enables thousands of businesses that wouldn't exist without the cloud.
I suspect that those are the thousands of businesses that I consider, shouldn't and must not exist.
I take it that you consider that a Doctor surgery, shouldn't and must not exist as they all almost certainly use hosted systems to store patient records, appointment books, various HR systems. Their job is making/keeping people healthy, why should they also have to do IT?
To use the plumber example companies user water but they don't own and operate reservoirs and water treatment plants, they just use water its a utility. Computing is also a utility, do you think it is some special magic that only few should have, or do you think that every company should have its own reservoirs and water treatment plants?
The current situation where "doctor surgeries" are submitting every last sensitive medical record to malicious parties, should not be happening.
If they choose to electronically store patient records, book appointments and use "HR systems", they should be reasonable for maintaining control of such sensitive information and ensuring that malicious 3rd parties don't have control.
The solution to that problem has already been implemented - it's called GNU Health - which the "doctor surgery" can easily host themselves (sure they'll have to retain an "IT staff" (someone who has basic ability to use a computer), or schedule for "IT contractors" to do maintenance - which will happen to end up significantly cheaper than clown disservices), on pretty much any computer (although preferably on hardware that isn't backdoored to hell, with proprietary malware/spyware).
You're using a bad analogy - water is water and it's easy to check if it's poisoned - as a result, it does not matter where you get water from (if a company wants its own reservoirs and/or water treatment plant, that's fine - some do).
There are also practical limitations of physical space - most companies don't have the space for a reservoir.
Computing is completely different - it's not fungible like water - different computing systems are completely different and it's also quite hard to work out whether a system is poisoned with malware, backdoors and/or spyware (but many systems have been found to).
In the case of a remote server, that does a businesses computing, that someone else controls, even if the hardware is free of backdoors, the host receives the equivalent of a universal remote backdoor, as they can physically do whatever they want with the server that is under their physical control.
The practical limitation of physical space, isn't a problem now that computers have been incredibly miniaturized - you'd be very hard pressed to find a company that doesn't have the physical space for all the computers they need (if you go into many "doctors surgeries", you'll notice that most already have a server rack and a computer, or multiple, on a desk - it's just a matter of utilizing what they already have).
Interesting disclosure; I suspect MS knew years back the problems of paper EULAs and licences and so deliberately moved to online only licences. Enabling MS to remove details when they stopped selling that type of licence - which is naturally before the channel stops selling those licences.
I note it seems there is nowhere on the MS site that gives any real overview into all the different licences you can purchase and run MS software under.
Hence I am running several versions of MS products under licences which I know about but for which there is no information available on the web.
A couple of examples:
1. WS2019 running under MS Open licence (a discontinued discounted licence aimed at not-for-profits but also permitted personal usage - I only discovered this licence as I was working at a not-for-profit and so saw the relevant MS announcements).
2. Office 2019 & 2024 running under under a small business volume licence (the adverts indicate this type of licence when they say the licence is for 3 PC’s, as 3 is the minimum number needed to qualify).
I suspect that a lot of the reason why they did it was to try to shaft customers who wanted to use Amazon and Google. From what I remember, the old Windows licenses could be taken to the Cloud on dedicated host in other cloud providers. By moving everyone to subscription licenses they took away the ability and then offered a "discount" on Azure or you had to pay through the nose on other Clouds. I suspect True Value then got swept up in it all.
Not really. If you are a volume license customer and have software assurance, you absolutely can use those licenses on VMs in the cloud no matter where they are. If you don't have SA then don't renew them and ren the licenses form AWS. (If you don't have SA you legally cannot use those licenses on a BM on prem either!)
Where the license thing came into play wasn't so much OS licenses as application, Exchange, SharePoint, SQL server etc.
We don't buy SQL licenses from Microsoft any longer, we rent them from AWS. If we need to turn up a new SQL server or turn one down, we don't have to buy new ones or have paid for license sitting around!
I still don't know how this whole resale works. The majority of licenses out there are VLA, with VLA you don't have physical media, a paper license, everything is managed at the VLA site, what do these people do grant the reseller a login to the VLA site?
Seriously? You think this sis some "evil genius" plot? Microsoft didn't give s shit about cloud subscriptions until they saw AWS & google eating into their profits.
Email was as easy win for them; they already had a huge lock on enterprise email. SharePoint as well, hosting an on-prem SharePoint infrastructure is a real pain in the ass!
Cloud compute is where they struggle, Azure is way inferior to AWS. They just lock in customers because of AS integration. Stupid people think they need Microsoft cloud to integrate AD. You don't!
No, this was not Microsoft's evil plan, it was other people's success they road on.
If you cannot produce it, you need to show your retention policy that states your data retention policy. Let's say MS has a 5-year data retention policy they can produce, now they can legally state they do not have the document.
Here is the gotcha, that policy Must be enforced! If through discovery, it is revealed that some parts of the company (persons) are circumventing that policy them EVERYTHING becomes discoverable. Your word won't be good enough! That includes every PC, every server, every storage device.
If you cannot show your policy and cannot (or refuse) to produce the documents, you can be charged with contempt of court, or even more serious charges. If it can be proven the data was destroyed after the order, now you are in big trouble.
It's not something a LLM could do, as m$ has ensured that none of their important windows source code has been available for LLM "training" (they didn't go train co-pilot on windows did they?).
After all, a LLM can't make a degenerated copy, if it hasn't been provided the text to copy.
If there was a LLM that was provided the relevant text, m$ would likely work out how to sue over such degenerate copies, in such a way that benefits them, but nobody else.
Publishing any source code library is useless, unless the software is under a free license that allows it to be modified and/or redistributed.
Regardless, anyone who has looked at m$'s leaked source code, realizes that the software is of such terrible quality that the only correct course of action is to delete it.
It would be only be useful if a judge was to order m$ to produce and publish *complete* documentation of all their file formats (enforced with fines directly to the CEO and other business heads until it is coughed up), as that would allow free software to implement complete support for such undocumented formats (note the produce part - as it's not like m$ actually follows their own documentation).
Although, that wouldn't help with all the non-microsoft proprietary software grafted on to the windows cancer (such a ruling wouldn't make the source code available for that software) - but just put it down.
I don't want this post to be taken into the context of this article - it's related, but intended to be a general observation, not an implication of any wrong-doing in this instance.
As a technologist, someone who understands how easy it is to make an alteration to a file or document in the digital realm - and how easy it is for that change to not leave any kind of paper trail [save, in limited circumstances, it might contain some kind of "edit date" timestamp, I am a bit concerned about the disconnect between the reliance that a Court of Law places on digital evidence and the vulnerability of digital evidence to over-enthusiastic pruning.
I've worked for a multi-national - no names, no "pack drill" - that was simultaneously one of the largest users of storage capacity outside of the public sector... and at the same time continued to tell a relatively small workforce that due to "the cost of disk space", we would all be limited to 500Mb of email storage and our emails would be purged after e.g. 90 days. We were also told, around that time, that because of the importance of "complying with court orders and being able to say with honesty that diligent searches had been performed", the extraction or local retention of emails would be an instant-dismissal offence,..
You don't need to be a genius to read between the lines of that sort of "HQ Position" and realize that some digital evidence turned up in an on-going legal dispute that didn't bode well for the company concerned.
But how are Courts supposed to handle this... Software companies like Microsoft provide a lot of "management tools" and features in their email products, so - notwithstanding the gradual drift towards hosted mail services and outsourcing of mail hosting - we could easily end up in a position where, the day a dispute with a commercial partner turns ugly - but before the preservation order lands - a company might elect to pre-emptively "reduce disk storage" demands by, I don't know, purging emails...
And that's before we get to the "One Cool Trick" we've seen performed by e.g. the current Administration, where, thinking back to the hilarious inclusion of Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist from the Atlantic who was included in the Signal chat group set up prior to the strikes... That's clear evidence that Cabinet Secretaries are using unofficial and prohibited communications - like Signal - to discuss knowingly sensitive information, basically to keep it out of reach of the Presidential Records Act, the Watergate-era law enacted by Congress to stop future administrations from purging evidence of malpractice.
The UK saw the exact same thing during the Covid crisis, when Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel, Michael Gove, Grant Shapps and Robert Jenrik and others were all found to be using the "auto-vanishing" WhatsApp message feature...
At what point do a few isolated instances of "bad practice" become "business as usual" that "The Law" - meaning more directly, "Courts" need to take a different approach? Do they bring in all potentially interested parties and have them all testify under Oath? Do the Courts go back to Congress/Parliament/etc. and say, "Look, we can't apply the law when companies are using technology to create and exploit loopholes in it - we need you to enact the following..." [and, more the point, would any legislative body - Congress or Parliament - voluntarily put laws on to the statute that could so readily be used to put their own members behind bars?
Ultimately, the answer to all these questions - as is often the case with legal issues - is "What is the harm?"
What's the harm that a company could engage in malpractice and cover it up?
What;s the harm that an organization's officers or leadership could break the law and cover it up?
What's the harm that a government could break the law and hide the truth from their electorate?
Maybe it's just me, but these all seem pretty fundamental to ensuring that society continues to have trust in the rule of law and that society continues to function.
But now we get to the interesting bit... How do we configure technology to help prove that a company isn't manipulating digital evidence behind the scenes? The obvious answer is to lift the basic principles of the blockchain - or similar - and apply them more broadly. Delete an email, or slightly alter it's wording? The hash won't line up - and the presence of doctored audit material becomes instantly visible.
Who would one of the most important providers of this sort of technology be?
Microsoft.
Umm...
In other news, there's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_Hole_in_My_Bucket
These days, the police could stage an evidence raid on corporate headquarters buildings, and find nothing horribly-damning in the papers, computers, and removable media it siezed.
The good stuff would be somewhere in the cloud, encrypted. Good luck finding it.
I think this is the true appeal of The Cloud to business executives.
And that scenario only works if the legal dispute in question is, "The State vs. Company X".
It has no effect - no possibility of bearing - if the plaintiff is a different company and this is e.g. a contractual dispute, or a civil matter rather than a criminal complaint. Yet the rules of evidence - albeit with the potential to be expressed slightly differently - are potentially powerless here. [ The potential to be expressed slightly differently comes from responses related to e.g. a witness taking the 5th Amendment. In a criminal matter, a jury would be instructed that they cannot take a negative inference from that response. In a civil matter, it can absolutely be inferred to the detriment of the respondent.]
However, if it is a contractual or civil law matter, it would be *exceedingly* difficult to go to Court and ask for the civil equivalent of a "search warrant" - i.e. some kind of legally enforceable preservation order - because of the distinction between the two legal frameworks. In a civil dispute, the plaintiff can basically ask for all they want, but they can't turn to the Court and ask the *Law* to help enforce it. As you quite rightly point out, in a *criminal* case, the Court can absolutely do that - the State can apply to the Court for a warrant that would allow them to "search and seize" evidence indicative of the alleged crime.
Let's look at this from a slightly different direction... A publicly limited company has to have it's financial declarations - it's annual report, it's 10-Q, in fact all it's internal financial data - independently audited to ensure that the truth aligns with the published claims. This became a legal requirement when companies abused the "trust" of investors and lied about their financial performance: enough people were harmed that laws were enacted to make such practices criminal.
Over the last 20-30 years, so much of our lives have become digital that we take it for granted... The thought of going to a library, or begging parents to invest in a copy of Encyclopedia Britannica - just so you can find information on something... well, that's basically a joke to us today. Yet even though we seem to have adopted "digital contracts" in some areas of business [usually where the party likely to be disadvantaged is Joe Public], yet there are very few pieces of legislation that require similar controls on corporate practices. It's a bit of a stretch, but one example I can think of is French VAT law, through which businesses must "guarantee the integrity, legibility and authenticity" of an invoice - so when the invoice is submitted electronically, the issuer has to use technological means (such as digital signatures, though that is not the only accepted solution) to evidence the integrity of said invoice.
But the bottom line seems to be:
"If a court is likely to place any standing on any piece of digital evidence in a legal dispute, then it should follow that appropriate laws must be enacted to require any evidence that may later be relied upon in Court to be verifiably protected such that it's authenticity, integrity and legibility are retained".
Or to go back to our general example... Say you and I represent different companies in a legal dispute. You represent the plaintiff and in the dispute, you go to a Court and say, "Your honor, on information and belief, we allege that the scurrilous defendant over there has emails that contain proof of their contractual breaches. We would like to ask for limited discovery, of their email archives, to surface that evidence..."
If the Court agreed that your claim was valid, I would then be asked to not simply produce all relevant emails... but, critically, provide evidence that shows that the search was complete, thorough, covered all agreed search terms of the entire email history for all identified employees, contractors and agents and, critically, can prove that authenticity with appropriate digital signatures accompanying the evidence.
And that takes us to the "fun bit", which is that if I *can't* produce that evidence, then the relevant civil law would allow the plaintiff - that's you - and the Court to take the most negative possible inference. In other words, it would allow the Court to conclude that because I couldn't prove my email responses were "complete", the Court would be entitled to conclude nefarious malpractice on my part.
*That* would put all corporations on notice that they had better be "on their game" with respect to evidence preservation. It would also require companies to get much tighter about e.g. the use of ephemeral messaging solutions [WhatsApp and Signal] on the part of their employees.
Does all this sound a bit over-the-top or far-fetched? Well guess what - regulations have already been introduced to require this of the financial industry. After the LIBOR scandal that took place between 2005-2009, banks were required by regulators to enact all sorts of safeguards to prevent "regulated employees" / "regulated individuals" from using unauthorised technology to communicate.
So it can be done. And it *has* been done, when it has been shown that without regulation malpractice led to widespread harm.
I have to say that in the case of publicly elected or appointed officials, such activities should not just be "immediately impeachable", but such that they render the participant *immediately* liable for criminal charges. Without adequate enforcement - with teeth - the malpractice will continue.
You are wrong, a civil/contractual matter absolutely can result in an Order of Discovery. You just cannot say you don't have the data. You must show a retention policy, and you MUST show you are enforcing it!
Yes, you have to produce evidence you performed the search "to the letter of the order". Deliberate withholding evidence can result in felony charges.
Failure to produce the "requested documents" does not infer guilt! Yes, it may make a judge or jury look upon you with disfavor, but it does not show guilt!
And no (referencing your previous post) having a short retention policy does not infer nefarious activity. Many companies enact these policies because, YES, they got burned! Not because of deliberate misdeeds but because people are stupid! People don't follow policy, say dumb shit in emails, cut corners, break the law, all without the company's official sanction!
Apologies if what I stated came across as wrong.
The distinction I was *trying* to make is that in a criminal investigation of the variety, "The People vs." or "The Crown vs.", then the first that the subject of a "discovery" order could well be when a duly appointed law enforcement officer turns up at your door with a judge-signed warrant, demanding entry that can't legally be refused.
By comparison, in a civil case, you absolutely *can* request discovery - as you point out, it happens all the time. But what you *can't* do in a civil case is ambush the other party. A request for discovery has to go before the court, and both parties are represented at the hearing, and if you are the subject of the discovery request, you get to argue back if you think it's unreasonable, overly broad, or a fishing expedition.
I think we agree that you're right - and the distinction isn't so much whether or not you can get discovery, but whether or not your access to it comes via ambush or formal request. And to be fair to all those criminal prosecutors out there - we have very sound reasons for allowing criminal search warrants - it's to prevent people from committing crimes and then covering them up.
There are two annoying vectors in this.
1 - Cloud storage. It renders a raid a rather less useful exercise because you can make access unavailable on remote while having a coffee in the nearby Starbucks watching the raid
2 - Access to Cloud storage without your permission. The flipside is that especially the Cloud Act sets the stage for raiding your Cloud data without you even knowing it by authorities. In that context I especially don't trust any Microsoft products.
it could potentially go the other way too... prove to us you did EVERYTHING you could to avoid dumping toxic waste on the kids school 8 years ago? oh!!! you delete everything after 7 years as part of your document policy? oh well.. here comes a fine!
I definitely read some cybersecurity training stuff on "deleting data afyer am aged amount of time to avoid potential legal issues"
"deleting data after am aged amount of time to avoid potential legal issues"
The lack of a document management and cleansing policy at Clydesdale bank meant that people were able to claim for missold PPI way back beyond the 6 year 'rule' and cost them in excess of £2.5b
https://www.heraldscotland.com/business_hq/16168550.clydesdales-ppi-bill-swells-2-5-billion/
Ever-so-slightly exaggerated, I think.
The article in the Herald clearly states that Clydesdale had to set aside an "a further £350 Million" - literally in the very first sentence - which contributed to a total bill of £2.5 billion.
So the consequence of the malpractice was £350 Million...
But I don't think that voids the core of your argument - which is that there can and occasionally are Courts that take a dim view of corporations playing fast-and-loose with data retention.
You're right, and the solution is what youve already mentioned. Laws have no power or meaning if there is zero enforcement mechanisms and no consequences for refusing to follow them. Which is the situation we are in. If there's no consequences for a company deleting evidence and then claiming it was because storing said evidence was somehow too expensive for them, then of course companies will take advantage of this loophole. It would be incredibly foolish to think they will do the right thing just because they feel like it. That is not how anything on earth has ever worked. So unfortunately for us all, there is only one solution, and that's new laws to create real punishments with actual enforcement. And we all know that is not happening within the next 50 years, possibly not even this century.
We're vehemently agreeing here, but I think the actual situation is *worse* than merely "unenforceable" or "unenforced" legislation.
I think we're much, much closer to "selective prosecutions".
You only need to look at the news out of the UK's parliament this week about enforcement actions against social media companies that were failing to abide by the UK's Online Safety Act... Ofcome - surprise, surprise! admitted that they hadn't even completed the roll-out of enforcement measures and that the work was expected to slip to 2027.
Part of the issue here is that Ofcom appears to have been targeting smaller UK providers and not the biggest abusers - who are all typically multinational companies able to "shield their revenue" from the UK and thus avoid paying any penalties whatsoever.
Yet another case of the UK government writing an ineffective law, failing to enforce it and then just throwing their arms up in resignation and surprise at their own failure.
I mean, you would have thought that as the OSA went through committee, someone would have asked, "How are we going to ensure that this is enforceable? Maybe we should bring in someone from Ofcom and interview them on how they anticipate they are going to ensure this law is followed..."
But, apparently, the UK Omnishambles Government is too stupid to think of that.
You'd be surprised - some companies and a specific client of mine, with well-publicised legal issues, have specifically not deleted any data from the last 9 years due to being under a self-imposed legal hold. A legal issue that in itself was self-reported to various regulators, but it doesn't make good click-bait headlines to explain that bit. In total is around 300 TB of data that has been kept, 15,000 mailboxes... the list goes on.
I wish this were not the case, but I have a horrible feeling that your client might be "the exception that proves the rule" rather than an indicator of widespread morality breaking out in corporate-land.
Cynical, I know.
But there's no shortage of evidence to back up that cynicism...
There absolutely ARE penalties for that! Starting with fines and up to imprisonment! Like all things in the law, it's relevant to the case.
In the US there are not blanket legal requirements to retain data.
If you do not have an official retention policy, you legally can say we do not have the data because it was deleted. What you cannot do is delete the data and lie about when it was deleted. The court can pull your backups and if it is shown the files exist in the backups 'after' the requested discovery period, you are in contempt!
If you have a retention policy, you only need to produce data within that policy, BUT you must be careful, in the course of discovery data is found that predates your retention policy then everything becomes discoverable. This is where companies get in trouble, they have a policy, but people circumvent it! Storing email on their PC, copying files to removable storage.
The same condition applies to your example. "We deleted everything older than 3 years because we could not store it" is a legal response. Again, there is a big but! If the court want 4 years of data, you HAVE to provably show you did a search for everything in question going back 5 years. If anything over 3 years old is found, now you are in trouble. Opposing council cam make every storage device in your company discoverable.
I work in a very litigious industry, and I've been through many discovery exercises. I've work with our lawyers on these; I've been intimately involved in writing the policies for data retention and all the "gotchas" involved.
Just want to come back to the point I made above and extend it slightly.
We know that a seeming majority of the big AI Companies have now admitted that their models have been breaking the law by committing cyber crimes.
We know that, because they are automated machines, AI models are capable of absorbing, assimilating, analyzing and even generating vast amounts of data in fractions of a second.
We have not yet considered the consequences of those things in the context of this thread - the use of digital evidence in a legal dispute.
Just out of interest - think about a scenario in which Company A intends to sue Company B for e.g. contract infringement. Company A are not *sure* that Company B infringed, but they have a pretty good hunch they did. But Company A wants to make sure that there is evidence of this "beyond all doubt".
So they take their AI model[s] and instruct the models to:-
1. Fabricate entire email trails between executives of Company B, in which the emails admit to legal wrongs.
2. Include emails sent externally to Company A employees or useful third parties, where they can evidence alignment with external evidence...
3. Hack in to Company B's mail servers and file-and-print servers or collaboration platforms and then *plant the incriminating evidence*.
4. Go to their lawyers, file suit, then give their legal team the parameters of a discovery request they want to file with the court - a request that they *know* will surface incriminating evidence - because they just planted the false, incriminating evidence within the infrastructure of the target company!.
Company B, meanwhile, aren't going to have things easy.
Company A will submit a carefully-crafted discovery request that they know will return emails in chains they planted. They get Company B to hand over innocuous parts of mail threads. Then they go back to the Court and say, "We analyzed the data provided in response to Discovery Request #1 and now would like to refine that with Discovery Request #2... " And Company B are sunk. They just provided the start and end of a [fake] mail thread that sets the stage to show they have content on a subject, so when the second request lands, they have been painted in to a damned-if-they-do and damned-if-they-don't position. Their choices would be to trim out the super-incriminating evidence and risk being caught at it, or hand over the 2nd tranche of materials - including the falsified evidence - and lose bigly. Lose-Lose.
And all of this is possible because we are coming to rely so heavily on digital evidence that simply is not tamper-proof.
Yup....twenty six years ago we got this from a M$ sock puppet:
Title: "Evangelism Is War"
Quote: "Our mission is to establish Microsoft's platforms as the de facto standards throughout the computer industry."
That was written twenty six years ago, in January 2000.
[Q] Why is anyone surprised that present day sock puppets from M$ still turn up in court with futile arguments about preventing customers from selling on the customer's own property.
[A] Same answer as in January 2000......$$$$ for M$
Read it all at this link: https://zgp.org/~dmarti/linuxmanship/Comes-3096.pdf
Microsoft wanted more money and ended losing money.
You get most of your money from spyware, ads and online services, you need more people to use Windows that you need people paying you for using Windows.
At this point the basic version of Windows should be free with ads with a Winrar like option of upgrading to a paid ad free version.
But nope Microsoft has to do a Microsoft.
But nope Microsoft has to do a Microsoft.
Personally I think what Microsoft has been trying to do for the last ~10+ years is trying to emulate "...doing a Google".
But the problem is, MS has nowhere near the kinds of ubiquitous data-sucking-and-monetizing revenue streams sitting at the pinnacle of the online advertising industry in particular that Google has, in order to fully realize the "User as Product" business-model.
So instead they resort to the usual un-creative and half-baked aping of the competition that they usually do.
One thing is clear: the deprecation of static perpetual SW licenses and replacement with continuous eternal rental revenue has been an absolute goldmine for the SW industry. And they clearly want to extract as much as they possibly can from it now.
before trial. When they know they are going to lose, and the judge is not on their side, big corp's write a check. Sometimes a very large one. The damage done by exposing those doc's to the world is probably more costly than even an 8 digit check, maybe even a 9 digit one.
I suspect you are right - and unfortunately writing the check is like buying an approval slip to let you carry on doing what you're doing.
Because when you're a multi-trillion-dollar company, unless the Court fines you a trillion dollars, payable over 20 years, you're not going to be discouraged from continuing to break the law.
Yeah I was really surprised muskrat did not settle the florida civil case. He lost bigley(Trump words for a trumper) and it set a precedent that you can expose his auto-pilot as a hack. Historically he'd settle, just not sure why he did not this time with the of course mandatory gag NDA like all the other cases. Keeps it out of the public view with those NDA's. I think the biggest travesty in the US system is those NDA's. NDA's should have one purpose, protecting the VICTIM, not the perp.
A standard corporate data destruction policy for internal communications like email is typically 1-3 years, unless it has been flagged for legal hold.
So they make the ask in 2021. It is entirely reasonable for Microsoft to say "Sorry, we have nothing older than 2018."
Don't get me wrong, I have no love for M$FT. But seriously, this is a Bravo-Sierra expectation. When they fail to produce any evidence one way or the other, it makes them look guilty.
Unfortunately in 2026, how a company "looks" matters more than whether they actually did the crime. Yeah, there will be a 'go away' settlement with no admission of fault.
My previous employer's email retention policy was 90 days. They're a major real-estate company. Try doing the smallest real estate deal in less than 90 days! I always wondered what they were trying to hide evidence of. I kept permanent copies of CYA emails, and still have them, just in case, but I suspect most employees don't know how to do that.
I suggest that permanently deleting an email (completely gone off the server, not just out of the user's trashcan) in less than 5 years should be either illegal in itself or used as evidence of covering up malfeasance in any court case against them, civil or criminal.
A lot of emails are spam and it being illegal to permanently delete spam emails is a terrible idea.
5 years is an excessively long time store all emails, especially when most emails are not relevant a week later (although, some a relevant for a year or 5).
Still, 90 day retention policies for all emails is a clear case where malfeasance is being covered up.
