First of all, sorry for the long silence…bronchitis tends to keep me away from the computer…but now I’m better, so I should be back to normal :)
Ok, it seems like HP is a deepest, darkest and dirtiest cesspool than I ever managed to think it was. There’s tons of posts and articles in the last 3 or 4 days about the scandal (my own previous posts on the matter here, here, here and here) and they all have headers that talk about “deeper” “worse” “more extensive” and so on and so forth. It seems like HP has managed to sink even bellow the lowly expectations of its observers.
On one hand, there’s a shareholder’s suit against HP already, filed in Santa Clara County’s Superior Court of California. Groklaw’s PJ should have both the complaint and HP’s initial answer to it up soon. Until then, she’s got a post talking, among other things, about the relief the demanding party is asking for, in a case in which there has been no economical loss (yet)…yup, believe it or not, HP’s stock hasn’t fallen like a rock over this crap.
And that’s not the only Groklaw post about this mess, there’s three others, well worth the read. The first one, which talks about the fact that Carly Fiorina’s phone records were illegally obtained back in 2005 by HP…so…this isn’t new behavior, it’s been going on for at least a year…and who knows? maybe even longer.
A couple of days ago, PJ posted about the fact that HP tried to plant software in a journalist’s computer that would enable messages to be traced. Most people thought the software in question was a spyware program, but we have learned worst by now (keep reading, it’s down bellow).
In the third one, she tells us about who knew what and when, pointing to an article in the Washington Post, which among other data, tells us that HP went after the records of at least *three hundred* phones…and got them for 240. Oh, and the software they tried to plant in the computer of the reporter at CNET was not just simple spyware, which would piss me off enough, but a keylogger. What is a keylogger? Well…it’s software that records each and every single key you hit while at your computer, which means that they could have had obtained *every single thing* the reporter typed…his credit card numbers and PINs, his passwords, his private IM conversations…every single thing. This post also points to an article at the New York Times about HP trying to plant spies in newsrooms as clerical or cleaning personnel. The post has been updated with newer info, since it was published earlier today, and will probably be updated again…go read it :)
But Groklaw isn’t the only site talking about this mess, ZDNet’s bloggers David Berlind and Dan Farber talk about it too.
Berlind first points at PJ’s second post referenced above, and is one of the people that thought (like me) that the NYT and CNET were talking about spyware.
In his second post, he talks about the fact that some government investigators saying that if it was not a keylogger, then it wouldn’t be illegal….what?? Are they trying to tell me that if I send spyware to everybody in planet earth it wouldn’t be illegal? That’s got to be bullshit…and if it is true that it is legal, then somebody should start working on making it illegal…now!
On the other hand, Farber tries to look into the future and wonders if Mark Hurd, future chairman of the board, will survive un-splattered by all the bullshit being flung around in this deal. In my personal view, nobody who was in the HP board and knew about this should remain un-splattered…each and every one who knew should be kicked out to the street.
Ah! And Dan Gillmor gets into the game too, wondering why investors haven’t run away from HP’s stock; even Schneier gets into the “what the hell?” game too, wondering why there’s no more outcry about the whole thing…if it weren’t a corporation that did all this crap, the individual or individuals involved would have been put in jail already.
The New York Times, of course, has been keeping an eye on the whole mess, and has published very interesting stuff about it, including this article which does a good overview of the entire thing, and then adding some new info (already pointed at above, but almost everybody is pointing at this article :) on how and when and who. If you are only going to read one post or article about this (besides mine :) this NYT article is the one you want to read.
Technorati Tags: hewlett-packard scandal, pretexting, hp pretexting scandal, hp illegal investigation, patricia dunn, patriciagate, hpgate, carly fiorina, mark hurd
Tags: Thoughts
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!!
Comments
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 20th, 2006 at 2:20 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Until the part about messing with non-employees I didn’t get what the big deal was all about.
Spying on a member of the press’ computer is just wrong, but only because they wouldn’t publish everything they found online like the media does to everybody they think is interesting. If the NYT could get a keylogger on Rumsfeld’s computer they’d do it before you could say Linux RoXors!
HP spying on their own employees… it’s wrong and all, but doesn’t get my panties in a bunch, and I don’t get why, if that were all there were, it would be a big deal to the consumer. Why wouldn’t it just be a big deal to the employees?
I feel very much like this is a tempest in a teapot, and I don’t get why you’re so worked up about it… not only do you not work for them so aren’t being spied on by them… you’ve escaped the whole United Spies of America thing by being in another country all together… maybe with Nafta we can send HP your way. *grin*
Honest, tonight I’ll read some of the articles, but the idea that a company abuses its employees and lies to them and spies on them isn’t something that is either shocking or newsbreaking in my opinion… and that is probably the real story, that ‘normal’ people don’t care because we just assume it’s happening all the time.
Make with the book reviews BTW! Is Peter Hamilton worth a read? Will Otherland, the epic series, EVER not put me to sleep (been in the first book since it was released in paperback, and that’s not an exageration, I just can’t read it)
I still don’t get it at all. I get what they’ve been accused of doing, and I get that it’s unethical, what I don’t get is the furor, well, the online furor… evidently most people are like me and just couldn’t care less.
I work for a company that audits my company phone bill every month.
I’m recorded on surveillance that is watched and listened to every minute I’m on company property.
My cell phone has GPS on it and at a meeting the sales-rep said it could be tracked if they wanted to. Nobody in the company will say in writing that it isn’t being used to track us.
They track our movement with punches in and out of stores and use mapquest etc. to determine how long it should take for us between stores.
Our company e-mail account passwords are something they could ask for on the company account… it’s why I don’t use the one they gave me or their network.
Privacy in the work place is a luxury the higher up the chain I go.
As a clerk nobody cared what I did… it gets worse higher up though, and those people were pretty high up.
It would be, in my opinion disingenuous to assume they wouldn’t be spied on by any means necessary, if not by each other then by rivals. They’re playing for high stakes, and as such, like a movie star, the can expect helicopters at their weddings, and people to go through their trash. That’s my perception of the business world today. Not pretty, but the way I think it is in a lot of places, and I think that’s behind the roar of silence that we’re hearing in regards to this episode of “Rich People Behaving Badly” next on Fox.
Well…the thing here is that they weren’t only tracking their company-given cell calls…their *home phones* were tracked too, their calls audited…on their *private and personal phones*. That is what pisses me off. I have no problem with on-the-job tracking and auditing…nor with tracking and auditing of company phones and computers; hell, I set up systems that do that for some of my clients! But private phones and computers? That I don’t like, not one bit.
I don’t mind controlling workers’ work…you pay them to work, and you have the right to make sure they are working in any way you desire. But tracking them at home? in their private time? That’s bullshit. And if that doesn’t piss you off…well, let’s say that you just don’t have the degree of paranoia that I do :)
Oh! And as for the book reviews…I’ll post something when I finish reading what I’m currently reading. And about Peter Hamilton…the name doesn’t ring a bell, never read anything by him that I can remember, so…no opinion, sorry :)
I’ve got the same level of paranoia. But you’re forgetting I live in the country where Privacy happens to other people. Our gubment is insisting that ISPs keep records of everything I do online in case they need to look at it later. They’re claiming it’s to fight kp, but I don’t buy it for a minute. It’s just them all up in my business. and there’s nothing I can do about it while the current czar is running the show. That much information in the hands of a private corporation is begging to be abused, stolen, hacked, and generally spread all over the world without my consent.
We, in the US have I believe, no recourse short of revolution to stop the invasion of our privacy because we haven’t any any longer. Not from businesses, and not from the gubment. Note the lack of interest in what has you worked up. We have, as a society, become inured to the aspect of the story that has you irate.
I mean it when I say the story isn’t that it happened, it’s that so many people don’t care because it’s assumed as a given any more.
Privacy is as dead as it can be. I use tor at home a lot. I use it not because I’m hiding anything but because I’m tired of the default being to reveal everything about myself. Does it work? Who knows. If I were a gubment agency in charge of watching its ppl I’d be working on Tor and axcrypt and pgp and all the other privacy places so I’d know how to open those doors. Open Source or not, I don’t fully trust anything and assume that if it leaves my brain it’s public knowledge because to assume anything is private is a misconception.
The gubment had wires and cameras in my stores to spy on us for a tax case for 5 years. They had a ship off the coast listening to houses. They had flyover airplanes listening to conversations in cars. Our gubment spent more on investigating the case than the accused unpaid taxes were, and much of the spying was on people like me… people not involved. I’m accustomed to it now… I don’t like it. I fight it when I can, but the assumption of privacy as a right in the US is a faulty assumption. It’s not in the constitution and therefor doesn’t matter… hell, parts of the constitution are being used as toilet paper in my opinion.
All I can say to that is…ouch. And I’m glad I’m not a ‘merkan nor living in the US anymore…I *do* appreciate my privacy, and I’d do everything I could to keep it…and I’d raise a racket about any and every thing like this that I see.
Life in the US sucks lately…I hope you guys get rid of the idiots running the show sooner rather than later.
I could be wrong. I’m only one person… but my level of ho-hum is more in tune with the place at large than your level of outrage…
FWIW: I’m not as resigned to loss of privacy as I appear, but I’m savvy enough to know that presumption of privacy is a faulty premise and I do what I can to maintain my privacy.
RE: Life in US sucking… sometimes, as an American when I turn on the tv and watch the news I feel like a parent must feel who helplessly watches an adult child with great giant gobs of potential get hooked on drugs and spiral out of control. You know they’re capable of more, and they give glimpses of it, but they’re still junkies and it hurts to watch.
Now, *that* is exactly how I feel about the US! Damn, it could have been so great! But..it got hookefd on republicans and…it sucks now :(
You ‘merkans need to learn to pick your presidents better…I mean…Bush makes Clinton look like the best thing since JFK! I can understand the whole we-were-attacked-and-need-security, but your president and company are taking it way way beyond what is reasonable.
On the other hand…I’m still pissed off that nobody else is pissed off about HP’s shannigans :)