PeopleSoft
Recently things have taken an even more bizarre
twist as Oracle Corporation has made a very public
attempt to engage in an hostile takeover of one of
their competitors - PeopleSoft - and the
management - led by a former protege of Larry
Ellison - not only aggressively resisted the takeover
attempt, but publically referred to Larry Ellison as
sociopathic - a definition that I would now
tenatively agree with.
(During the trial I understand that PeopleSoft's CEO
was asked if he had actually referred to Larry
Ellison as a sociopath, and he denied it. Well,
of course; he didn't call him a sociopath, that
would be defamation. He was quoted as calling
Larry Ellison sociopathic. A different word,
altogether. One wonders if this indicates that the
material presented in this website made it into the
court records. Certainly, a copy was sent to the CEO,
when it was first published, in early 2004.)
Several dozen states' attorneys general have taken an
interest in this case, expressing concerns about the
motives of Larry Ellison.
Some citizens have been heard calling for Larry Ellison
to do the perp walk.
However, I would not go so far as to say that the entire
population of PeopleSoft is arrayed in opposition to the
takeover by Oracle Corporation - given the population
dynamics of the Bay Area software industry in general and
Oracle Corporation's business ethics in particular, it's
almost certain that several of PeopleSoft's employees are
reporting to Oracle Corporation, too - but it seems likely
that the virulent opposition by PeopleSoft's Board of
Directors is in no small part fuelled by private and
intimate, in many cases first- or second-hand, acquaintance
with Oracle Corporation's management's lack of business and
personal ethics, and the company's contempts for the rule
of law.
WorldCom
I'm tempted to draw parallels between the management at Oracle
Corporation, and the management at, say, WorldCom, or
Enron, or half a dozen major accounting firms - there are
some obvious similarities, and they may not be simple coincidences.
The FBI
This is more interesting when one learns, separately, that one of
UUNET's earliest contracts (some say the sole reason for UUNET's
existence) was providing the United States Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) with a USENET feed ... incidentally,
resulting in UUNET's positioning themselves in the market so that
virtually all of the USENET traffic flowed through their machines.
I am not entirely unacquainted with the history of UUNET, as I have been
paying attention to the company since around 1987 ... when I was the sole
systems administrator of 200+ Sun workstations, a dozen Sun servers, and a
VAX 11/750, at Network Equipment Technologies (NET).
It was a convention to give organizational UUCP gateway servers names which
reflected their role, as well as their organization [much as www does
today, when followed by a domain name] ... and this was done by prefixing the
hostname with a u. Hence, the UUCP gateway for NET was named
unet, and it was registered in the UUCP registry as unet.uucp.
This name was of interest to UUNET, because they wanted to call themselves
UNET - but NET did not want to relinquish the name. The rest, as they say,
was history; and the collapse of USENET into a centrally manageable entity,
began.
The World's Wiretap
When I take into account Barry Shein's historic obsession with
controlling the content of USENET, in connection with his proximity
to the operation of the world's largest legitimate wire tap,
I, personally, cannot help but be concerned.
In particular, given that the data was originally being delivered to
the FBI on reel-to-reel tapes, the question can be asked: was the
FBI getting an accurate daily snapshot of USENET traffic ...
or only what certain employees of UUNET wanted the FBI to see?
That is, what sorts of auditing mechanisms were in place at that
time to insure that the USENET postings being archived by the
FBI, for future use, contained credible data? To the best of
my knowledge, none.
It's not impossible that many aspects of this situation persist, to this day.
UUNET remains well positioned to intercept a significant portion of
the Internet's traffic - there are reports that
60 to 70% of the world's Internet traffic goes over UUNet's
networks.
Carnivore (DCS1000)
My personal intuition is that Software Tool &
Die probably provided the FBI with the idea for
Carnivore,
as well as developing and testing the product - turning software that had
already been in use, inhouse, for years, into a product, made available to
law enforcement agencies - and giving the company that developed such a
product, a certain invulnerability, as a result of the continuing need for
technical support from a customer base solidly inside the law enforcement
community's upper echelons.
Interestingly enough, one of the articles I have read, over the years, on
this and related topics, suggested that Barry Shein had been involved in a
lawsuit over control of the domain world.com. Someone else owned it
and it suddenly came to Barry's attention, it seems, that it was an asset
of some value. Somehow the fact that he had a computer known as world
got shoe-horned into a lawsuit claiming the domain world.com, and,
voila, Barry won in court, and the domain was his.
Was it a coincidence that WorldCom, shortly thereafter, expressed an
interest in buying the domain world.com from - you guessed it - Barry
Shein? I, personally, do not know. But I cannot help but observe that the
entire sequence of events, as described, seemed suggestive of some sort of
prior inside knowledge.
Concerns About Integrity
It's not clear what percentage of the world's telephone traffic passes
through WorldCom's switches ... but every concern that applies to
UUNET, as a corporate entity, applies to WorldCom, as well. That is,
UUNET is a wholly owned subsidiary of WorldCom.
Students of economics may know that WorldCom executives have been
indicted on fraud, perjury and conspiracy charges - including the
top executive, Bernie Ebbers.
Students of intelligence may with good reason wonder if the contents of the
FBI's archives are filled with forged messages from perfectly
credible people whom made the mistake of offending someone, somewhere
with a casual comment about Israel (or any other controversial topic),
and whom now find themselves, inexplicably, unable to board airplanes
(for instance).
Tangentially, the fraud that occurred at WorldCom is about what one
would expect if a bunch of spooks got funding to start up a
business, that just happened to grow explosively - they'd do
what they'd been trained to do, which is to lie, shuffle funds
around amongst multiple accounts, and forge documents to cover up
their abuses of corporate assets. Sound familiar?
The Father Of Spam
While we are discussing electronic mail, and forgery ... it is intensely
amusing to me, personally, to read that Barry Shein has positioned himself
as the spokesperson for those opposed to spam.
That's right - one of the fathers of spam has somehow forgotten his
roots - which were inciting others to electronically mail bomb those
whose freedom of speech they wished to interfere with - and is now
collecting fees for telling everyone how terrible spammers are.
Now that I am older and wiser in the ways of manipulating perceptions, I
wonder if it would be inappropriate of me to loudly wonder why Barry
Shein is trying to distance himself from spammers, and if this really
means that Barry is also running a spam ring?
After all, all you need is a cooperative ISP ... a database ... a mail
server ... and a gaping hole in one's head, where one's ethics fell out.
It seems to me that Barry is fully equipped - and if I
apply Occam's Razor, again, I cannot help but conclude
that it is easier to believe that Barry is manufacturing
credibility against future need, than it is to conclude
that Barry has any insights on the problem that he cares
to share with the public - the latter explanation simply
is not credible, in my eyes.
