November 13, 1988

THANKS FOR SHARING: It’s worth two years of press releases for a delectable chunk o’ info like an anonymous tipster sent in last week’s mail, about the goings-on between Digital Equipment Corp., MIPS Computer Systems, Texas Instruments, Sun Microsystems, Motorola, AMD and other RISC players yet to be determined. The first was a juicy tidbit about DEC trying to get TI as a MIPS partner before TI signed its deal with Sun for SPARC. “Deep Envelope” continued:

“MIPS is soon to close a deal with a major, world-class semi house. They’re on the verge of signing with a Japanese house, but the agreements with the other MIPS Semiconductor partners preclude a Japanese partner until summer ‘89.

“So who will MIPS choose for the 5th slot. A German firm?… Super-secret talks are going on with a major American company which covets future MIPS chip business… but that company has to figure out how to jump on the MIPS bandwagon without losing its hard-fought design wins.

“A successful conclusion to these talks will effectively make MIPS the single winner in the RISC chip wars. SPARC is slow — and who wants to compete against Sun with the same slow CPU? The 88000 is popular, but it’s nine months away from volume production and has bugs (easy to fix) and design problems (harder to fix) and no software. AMD 29000? They’ve retreated to the world of embedded controllers.

“Now, watch for the new Intel chip, and watch IBM. The real war is about to begin.” (Signed) “– Also “Inside Silicon Valley’.”

Whew. A spokeswoman for MIPS had no comment on Japanese, Germans or Americans involved in negotiations, but said discussions were ongoing with “a number of companies.” Stay tuned.

VIRUS FEVER: I fervently hope that the Arpanet/SendMail virus planted by Cornell U. hacker Robert Morris doesn’t have repercussions for me/us.

Programmers and computer scientists in the Dept. o’ Defense and elsewhere have always known about their systems’ back doors, or whatever euphemism you want to use for “open invitation.” (According to the New York Times, SendMail’s author purposely built the not-unusual back door that Morris’ virus snuck through.)

They also know about the desire inside every nerd’s brainpan to mess with something that he/she isn’t supposed to mess with. Now, wouldn’t you think this would be impetus enough for these great and vastly important agencies to build in hacker detectors, some kind of tough security, some protection devices to keep this information untouchable?

I would not be the least bit surprised to see overeager legislators propose laws saying that only certain “authorized” people in this country can own modems, or that all electronic communication can be monitored at any time by the FBI or CIA.

This is very spooky (pun intended) and is another one of our many fading civil liberties we’d better be damned vigilant about, especially as the logistics of our lives become increasingly reliant on both private and public data networks.

The responsibility for system security should lie squarely on the corporation or institution. I think it would be a very interesting legal tactic if Morris pulled “turnabout is fair play” and sued Arpanet and/or the SendMail author for reckless endangerment of all the institutions that rely on Arpanet. Someone should have known better.

SPEAKING OF WHICH: All this hoopla has been serendipitous for Metme Corp. of Deerfield, Ill. President Charles Adamovic, whose company makes encryption devices for telephones, faxes and computers, agrees with (my) assessment that a determined cracker could bring this country to its knees by attacking the worldwide electronic banking network.

Adamovic wouldn’t tell who, but said that a “very very large chain of banks” wire-transferred $5 million to another bank via the Federal Reserve Bank. The feds OK’ed the transfer and shipped it on, but in transit, the phone wire was invaded, the receiving bank’s identifying number changed, and a deposit made somewhere to a very clever someone’s account.

“No one knows where it went,” says Adamovic.

CALL JUDGE WAPNER: Looks like someone may be worried about how it’ll fare in the Apple vs. Microsoft/Hewlett-Packard user interface lawsuit. MacWEEK magazine will report in its Tuesday, Nov. 15, issue that 60 shoppers at a Sunnyvale mall were shanghai-ed recently for a little “People’s Court” action. After being “carefully” selected for untainted opinions, they were paid $50 each, sent to a San Jose Holiday Inn, and asked to review Apple’s licensing agreement with Xerox PARC, among other things.

It wasn’t revealed who sponsored the “court,” but the lawsuit was outlined in detail for the group, which was asked who they would find for if they were the jury in the case. The verdict, surmised by MacWEEK’s informant via group response, was that Apple would probably win, but the case was “a waste of court time” and no damages would be awarded.