Swiss missed. Bank Julius Baer, the Swiss institution now infamous for a) shutting down WikiLeaks.org, and b) offering a haven in the Cayman Islands for alleged tax evaders and money launderers, finally broke its silence yesterday.
The bank issued a press release that was a marvel of reality distortion. In four terse paragraphs Baer managed to deny any wrongdoing, assert its rights to victim status, portray itself as a defender of individual rights and freedom of speech, and say nothing about what it actually did do – (partially) take down a site built to protect human rights activists and corporate whistle blowers. WikiLeaks was quick to post its own rebuttal. The matter hits court today, at which time I'm sure we'll have a small tsunami of new headlines to chew on.
Bottom line: People use Cayman Islands banks to hide and/or cleanse their money. Stop the presses! If Julius Baer didn't do it, somebody else would. Frankly, who cares? Stomping all over a Web site that actually tries to do some good in the world, that I care about.
But WikiLeaks is hardly blameless. There's seems to be a lack of adult supervision over there. For example, It could have published those Baer documents with the names redacted. Just because somebody accused you of hiding money doesn't mean you give up your privacy. Issuing veiled threats to your own critics doesn't do much for your street cred either.
The follow up hearing is slated for today. The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have jumped in. The mainstream media is even on the case. This one is far from over, folks.
When it says fibby fibby fibby on the label label label. At first, I thought the whole lawsuit over bogus "Vista capable" labeling didn't have legs. Sure, those labels were, shall we say, 'aspirational'? But anyone who's ever looked at the minimum requirements for Windows over the years knows better than to believe anything Microsoft says. Yet this suit has already produced a treasure trove of Cringe-worthy evidence -– including 150 pages of e-mails detailing how even Microsoft's executives themselves knew what a dog Vista was and were royally PO'd over it.
I'm having a hard time picking my favorite quotes from all the goodies:
"I cannot understand with a product this long in creation why there is such a shortage of drivers. I suppose the vendors did not trust us enough to use the beta for driver testing?" (Jon Shirley)"No [vendors] believed we would ever really ship so they didn't start work until late 2006..." (Steven Sinofsky)
"We are caving to Intel.... We are allowing Intel to drive our customer experience." (Mike Ybarra)
"In the end, we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with the 915 graphics embedded." (John Kalkman)
"I personally got burned by the Intel 915 issue on a laptop that I PERSONALLY (eg with my own $$$)....I now have a $2100 email machine." (Mike Nash)
"We really botched this.... you guys have to do a better job with our customers than what was shown here." (Jim Allchin)
It reads like a Greek tragedy. Lack of drivers, hardware incompatibilites, false requirements, and bending over forwards to please Intel – yep, that's Microsoft in a nutshell. Will somebody please shoot this company and put us all out of our misery?
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Posted by Robert X. Cringely on February 29, 2008 06:34 AM
