Microsoft Bastards

[Tim Schmidt]

<rant>

It appears that Microsoft is blocking access to the MSN site (kinda the hub 
of all of MS's on-line services) from bowsers like Mozilla and Opera.  It 
has been established that this blocking is being done based on the browser 
identification string alone.

Here's the funny part - Microsoft claims that all of MSN.com is W3C 
compliant, and that it's blocking access to browsers that do not fully 
support standards.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Mozilla the most 
standards compliant browser in the world?  And isn't IE about the least?

It gets better...  MSN is not viewable from Mozilla, but it is viewable from 
Netscape 6.0 and 6.1!  There is no functional difference between Netscape 
6.1 and Mozilla 0.9.2.1 and yet they deem Netscape suficiantly standards 
compliant to view their content and Mozilla not.  *sigh*

Now, before you ask me what the hell I'm wanting to look at MSN from a linux 
box for...  It's always a good idea to keep an eye on the competition.  For 
that reason alone we should want to be able to view MSN.

Oh well - I'm pretty pissed off at these kind of blatant lock-out tactics, 
but I suppose I can take solice in the fact that we must really be pissing 
off Microsoft by writing some damn fine software that they can't even think 
about embracing and extending.  Thank you Richard Stallman, thank you GPL.

</rant>


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