MS video II – full transcript, again…

MS on Trial What follows is the judicial command performance of the re-running of the Felten discredited video claims. Because of the editing that previously took place, including the undeclared switching between machines, the video taping was allowed to run non-stop in the presence of DoJ witnesses. Allchin: Today is February 3rd, 1999. I think it's about 1040 in the evening p.m. my name is Jim Allchin. I'm accompanied immediately to my left by a technical assistant, Hadi Partovi, as well as my legal counsel to his left, Steve Holley. I'm going to demonstrate some of the effects of the Department of Justice Felten removal program on Windows 98. What we are going to show today is basically broken into two parts. The first part is we're going to show that a Felten PC--a PC that has been Feltenized, if you will, and we are going to probably refer to it as the government version that web browsing is still present in that system. The second part we are going to show on the government PC is that Windows can be unreliable and that other applications can break. This afternoon or, more appropriately, this evening, we purchased six ThinkPad I series 1400 machines with Windows 98 pre-installed. And we picked these because they had the least amount of software that we could find; meaning other applications. If necessary, we can start with appropriate OEM CD's and start from there, but we thought this was probably appropriate. I opened one of the PC's earlier this evening, and I did many of these tests on that. What I'm going to attempt to do now is walk through in a somewhat structured way, and we'll see how the phone lines and the like work, what I just mentioned between part one and part two. Now, before the video started, we opened the box, and on the table there are two PC's here. We plugged them in. We enabled "my computer," the address bar, and web folder view without single click. The OEM IBM changed those from Windows 98. We also initialised the ISP connection, and we have had quite a few phone problems here, and we will see how it goes for connections. And then we rebooted. Now, if you can see in the desktop here, this is a machine before Dr Felten's program has been run on it. You can see that the Internet explorer icon exists here. You can see that the quick launch bar there's the Internet explorer icon there. There is also some OEM software which we did not install in any way. We could take a look at some of the things that are here. There is something about ThinkPad, regular accessories, America Online, things that I don't fully know what they all are. lotus SmartSuite is on here, since this is an IBM machine, and a series of other applications. So, what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to go ahead and run dr. Felten's program, and this is a CD that we burned, and I will show you the contents of that. So, now I'm going to go and look at this CD, and we have copied this one directory in, and now I'm going to run the IE remove program. Says "you must restart," so now we are going to go ahead and do a reboot. The error message that you just saw happens on every one of the machines. It has nothing to do with Dr. Felten's program in any way. Or maybe it's not an error message. Whatever it is, it's standard with the IBM ThinkPad. I think it's going through BIOS checking. I'm not seeing anything here. Do you guys have a direct feed here? Okay. I get to figure this out. And naturally I don't have my glasses. is it that one or this one? Do you see it there, Steve? Okay. It's still continuing to reboot. I will wait until it's totally done, but if you look on the screen you will no longer see the Internet explorer icon. I'm going to go ahead and cancel. it's very nice music, but not tonight, so I'm going to go ahead and pop the CD out. So we don't have it in there and put it back in the case. And then if you look at the machine, there is no Internet Explorer icon, and there is no activity on the desktop over here. And the quick launch icons that were here are now removed. And if I now bring up the property page, you will notice, which I didn't show before, but there is a web tab here that is -- that exists on a Windows 98 system that hasn't had this program run on it. Another way you can tell, of course, is going to "my computer" and typing a web address, and I'm going to pick Amazon, if I can type. And I received the following error, "unable to open this Internet shortcut. The protocol http does not have a registered program." So, it appears that Dr Felten's program has removed IE browsing, web browsing. So now, I want to move into part one now that we have, if you will, Feltenized and made this into the government's version. This PC still has web browsing on it, and the web-browsing capability hasn't been removed. So, what I first want to do is go to start, settings, control panel, and I want to show--if I resize this thing--that there is the Internet control panel item. And as you can see that--there's the general page, all the security settings, content, connection, programs." Voice: "It mentions Internet explorer." Allchin: "Yes, right. The words `Internet Explorer' advanced. So I'm going to cancel this. Now I'm going to show another aspect. I'm going to go to start, settings, active desktop, and show that there is components that are only associated with the Internet technologies view as a web page. And I'm not going to go there right now. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my life in my hands and connect on, hopefully, out on the Internet. And it is in the middle of connecting. And I should point out that even if this does fail, it's not related to Dr Felten's program. It really is Washington, DC phone connections. It's verifying the password. Yes. Okay. We are just going to--I'm going to try this one more time, and then we may decide to stop the video, and everyone can watch while we just try this over and over until we finally get a phone connection. It's attempting to connect. All right. We have connected. I'm going to check what speed it is. It's 21,600. I don't want to see this box again. It's just a "you are connected to MSN," so I'm going to close that. Now that we're connected, I'm going to go ahead and close that, and I'm going to go over to look at Windows update and show that while it appears to operate, it actually does not operate. While it's waiting to come up, you will notice up here in the title bar it says "Windows 98," which is something that Dr Felten's program puts into the registry. And the connection is very slow, and we will just wait for it. If, in fact, it takes too long, it turns out you get errors on the screen because of the delays. The performance problem you're seeing here, in general, has nothing to do with Dr Felten's program. You can see we lost the connection. You connection was dropped. So, I'm going to try to reconnect here. It's attempting to connect again. Okay, we're back, and--all right. We're looking fast now, 4800--I mean 48,000. Sorry. check that again. 48,000. So, let's go up to Windows update again. and it's coming up. It's downloading the page. you could see it very brightly down here where the mouse is. And it appears it's up, but if you select on any of these sites, it does not work. If we go up to help and do "about Internet explorer," it shows that Internet explorer 4.0 is there. Now, what I think I'm going to do is go ahead and show that the core functionality of Windows update doesn't work, and I'm going to do that by selecting the Windows update product updates catalogue. And it's in the middle of downloading some information, and I will get four dialogue boxes talking about the acceptance of this particular software in my machine. you might notice that up above here all of the standard browsing functionality that you would expect is present. So, there's the security warning. I'm going to agree to that. I'm going to agree to this one. I'm going to agree to this one. I'm going to agree to this one. And this is the page that you receive, then, once it completes that, cannot display page. Note that this is different than what you may have seen on a prior videotape because this display here handles an error condition that's being returned to it in a more appropriate way. however, in that standard Windows 98 system you would see a nice display of a product catalogue here that you could choose to download software. So now I'm going to leave Windows update, and I'm going to go to show that it's fairly easy to prove that web browsing still exists on this machine. I'm going to do it with the help facility, which is reliant upon the Internet technologies. I'm going to move this screen down. I'm going to hide this, and I'm just--for convenience--and open this up. and I'm going to say "jump to a URL," and I'm going to go to--I think I'm going to go to Amazon first. And it's in the middle of downloading the pages--the page, excuse me. And if you're really into the testament--I have no idea what it's about--you could select it and download that information. We could choose to go to Lycos and look at Lycos, which is a search site on the Internet. And since I'm probably in more trouble than many, will look at Valentine information, and then we'll go to show that I can also, through here, go and see my local disk, which is very interesting. And I can also move back or forward, just like this simple unified navigation, which we think is good for users, and I just hit the back key, and notice that we went back to Lycos. If I go forward, I go back to the desktop. From here I can browse to any page on the Internet. So, I want to leave Windows help now, and I want to go to "my computer," and from "my computer" I want to--if at all possible, for everyone to notice what the toolbar looks like. Maybe I should drill down a little bit into some areas. Let's go look at Lotus information. And from here I can go backwards, I can go forwards, moving back and forth from what I looked at. There is ability to go up the directory tree, cut, copy, paste, undo, delete, properties, and views. Now what I'm going to show is this area is--is also the same functionality that you would expect if you were browsing other sites, other information sources. Still have the back and forward, but now you have things that you might typically have seen on an Internet site such as the x, the refresh, home, search, favourites, history, channels, full screen, mail and printing. And this error that I typed here was just an HTML set of information. And actually, I believe we saw it come up earlier in the video. Now what I want to do is open the history bar, and you can see that the history bar still exists, and I'm going to go down and open up Windows update. And we can see that. It should open in the right pane. I will wait until it comes up. still waiting for the rest of the screen to come up. There it is. So, you can do that. But if I try to go to Amazon, I receive the error, "unable to open this Internet shortcut. The protocol HTTP does not have a registered program." So, the integrated explorer is visible, but it's disabled." Voice: "Mr Allchin, we are going to run out of tape, and so we need to change it and need to take a brief break." Allchin: "Okay. I won't touch the computer." Now it's live? Okay. I uncross my hands. I'm going to, now that the Windows update site is on the screen, I'm going to try--I don't think I tried this yet. I will try Lycos, and again I see the error. So I'm going to close out of Windows update. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to show that integrated browsing can be enabled very simply through the registry database that is on a Windows 98 machine, and I'm going to turn this on by starting a regedit. I should be clear that what I'm going to do is just enable and in at least one case that I'm aware of how to make http work, I going to find a register key called "Site handler," which Dr Felten's program installs. And I'm going to add a new key to this; new value, actually. And there you can see the new value number one that has become so famous. And I'm going to flip the light switch or circuit breaker, or whatever analogy you might like, to turn http on in this particular scenario. And I'm just going to minimise this because I want to not have to switch so many machines. And I'm going to minimise that for right now, and show that that simple change let's you do quite a number of new things. So, if you remember before, we got an error when I typed Amazon here from the "my computer" item. And as you can see, we now have http browsing easily available to us, and we can go look at this particular page. But just so there is no confusion about whether that might have been cached or something, you could also watch the lights down at the bottom right. But I'm going to pick something else today in music. And as you can see, I can browse there easily. I could also back up using the back arrow to the local file system, which is the unification that we think is very good. Now what I'm going to do, because I have shown that, is I'm going to go back in and disable or remove what I just did. If you notice, I'm going down here to delete this key. it says, "are you sure you want to delete this value?" I keep saying "key." I mean value. And I have removed it. And there were there were four entries when I started, and now there are four entries. I could take a brand new machine and come back, but for speed reasons, I'm not going to do that. I can say that on another machine it would act the same if I had not done that sequence. Now--so, that basically shows that you can get the web browsing on this system, and the reason why is the technology is still in Windows 98, and it's only been hidden and not totally completely. Now I want to move to the second section which is about showing that Windows has been impaired, showing that it has some reliability issues and that some features are broken and some third-party apps fail. This is after Dr Felten's program has been run. So, just to make sure that I didn't do anything in error, I want to type in web address here again. And since I changed the registry back exactly the way it was, when I type www.amazon.com and I hit the return key, we should see the error from Dr Felten's program, which is unable to open this Internet shortcut. the protocol http does not have a registered program. So I'm going to say okay. Now what I'm going to do is go on to some other areas that have problems, but I want to remind you that Windows update already--I've already shown that Windows update has problems in the web--the Windows update web site, so now what I want to do is show another problem, which earlier I showed going to settings, active desktop. And I showed that this material--these options existed. I'm going to turn on the web page, view as a web page, and you could see the screen went into a very unique mode in which all the icons are gone, and you can't really do anything in this window. You could scroll around in it. I should point out that I have seen this on multiple machines from different manufacturers do different things, but they're all equally broken. So, you might not know how to get out of this. It actually takes a little looking. It took us a little while to find out how to do this without rebooting. We did learn how to do it, and I right-mouse, and I just say "refresh," and I can bring the system back without having to reboot. Now that's the third--second issue that I wanted to show. I want to show a third issue now, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring up a facility that is shipped in Windows 98 called "notepad." I could use any other word processor, but I happen to have notepad, so I'm going to just do a small html program here that says "hello," and I'm going to save this to the local desktop, and I'm going to give it a name called "hello.htm." So, the reason why I'm creating that is that I want to show that there are some unique characteristics of this program that would never happen on Windows 98. Now, what I'm going to do is I have, if you see it on the screen here, I have "hello.htm," and what I'm going to do is double-click on this. and since Dr Felten has removed the association for htm, the operating system doesn't know what program to run, so I'm going to select explorer, and it will open and show you that through explorer there is the html text rendered through mshtml. So now what I'm going to do--so far so good, you might think--now what I'm going to do is type in "Amazon.com "again and hit return, and you notice the system goes into a unique weird flashing state. And, in fact, you can't really move the thing around. It's just sort of very confused. It's definitely not well right now. so, you could try to click start, but that won't work either. You can't--it won't stay up, no matter what you do. So, the system is in a unique state here because of other problems that Dr Felten's programs introduced into Windows 98. And I tried to kill that, and it's left the system in a little bit of a funny state. So I'm going to try something here I haven't tried before, refresh, to go away. So now those are some basic features, and I'm certainly not trying to be comprehensive. I wanted to start showing some issues that I have seen with applications. And again, it's not extensive, but I'm going to start by showing the deluxe CD application. And I have a plus box that I'm going to--and unfortunately, we didn't up this one beforehand, and see if I cannot kill myself with--oops, well, see, almost. I wish we had opened it all. So, it's the plus CD, and I'm going to put the plus CD in the CD-ROM. And if you don't mind, since my eyes are not so great, once this autostarts--I'm going to try to kill the music, and it's going to install Plus. Now, what I'm going to do, to save time, I'm going to accept the license agreement, and I'm going to type the key in, and if you could read me the key, it would be great." Voice: "4681112162." Allchin: "And then I'm going to select next. And I'm not going to scan for a virus since this is a brand new machine, doesn't have viruses. And besides, it takes a long time. And I'm going to do custom install not complete--doesn't make any difference, but again for time, and it will ask me what are the features that I want. I just want the custom CD. I don't want any of the themes or games or--look at all this stuff. So, I just wanted the deluxe CD, and so I say "next," and it's now going to copy the files onto the machine. Now, you notice that Jim and demo showed up in the box for the owner--I don't know what the exact words were. Those were typed in when these machines were initially put to their state that I described initially. So, it says we're finished. congratulations. It's been successful. I don't know if I have to reboot or not. Do you know? Voice: I don't know. Allchin: I don't know either. It didn't tell me to reboot, but I thought you were supposed to reboot. Well, I don't mind a little risk. I do have a CD. I've never heard of this person before in my life, and I'm going to put it in, and we still have the Internet connection here. It's still live. And I'm going to--should I reboot so that everyone is a hundred percent sure? Voice: Sure. Allchin: Okay. I'm going to reboot, even though it didn't tell me that I had to. I'm going to reboot. I don't want anybody to think there is some magic about us not having rebooted the thing. It's just unfortunate it's going to have to take some time. Voice: You have to do something to get the screen to come back. Allchin: Oh, I'm sorry. It's on over there? Voice: Yes. Allchin: Okay. Now, unfortunately, I'm going to go through the pain of getting reconnected again. So, now I'm going to--going to go and try to re-establish a connection again. And I think I used this one, and it's dialling. You notice that we put several connectoids in here, different phone numbers, because we didn't know which one we would be able--we would need to use to be able to connect. And because it's 11:28 at night now, things are getting better on the connections, because we couldn't get through virtually at all before. So now we are connected. Voice: I should say something. I should point out the IBM Global Network connectoid was there installed by the OEM by default. That one we didn't add. Allchin: I want to see how faster we got here. Okay. We are not quite as fast. Does everyone see that? 21,600? And I'm just going to put in a CD now. This is a music CD, to be clear. And it says that it wants to download. The driver is being scanned, and it can't. I see that I wanted to try to connect to the Internet. And as can you see, it is playing--try to find the volume here to turn it down--but it did get an error. It should have automatically gone out on the Internet and connected and got the volume information. And I really verify and willing to stay through the night to show that this CD on Windows 95 system--I'm going to stop this. If he does it on a brand new Windows 98 machine, but it would have automatically connected and gotten that information. Okay. So, that was one application failure. now I want to move on to another application, and I'm going to use Money99. Now, in my testimony, I talked about money99, but in the tape Money98 was done. I was pretty focussed to go ahead and do both Money98 and Money99, but we could not find a copy of Money98 in this town at this time of the night, and so it's an old copy, meaning Money99 is what's being sold, so that's what we went out and purchased. This particular one is the Money99 financial suite. So I'm going to, again, go through installing Money99, which is this CD here. Now, as I mentioned, the two I'm going to take out so it's not confusing. I'm taking out the music CD, and I'm putting in the Money99 CD. I did mention that the different versions of money had different characteristics about how they operated and what, you know, issues--there were more issues in Money99. So autoplay--autostart is happening. It's seeing that it's Money99 installation. I'm just going to answer next. I'm going to say continue, so I'm just doing the regular install. That's the name that was typed in earlier, the product identification code. And now it's going to search for install components, and this machine hasn't had anything done with money installed on it, as you know, so I'm going to say okay. I agree to the license, and it's in the middle of installing, so I'm going to go up here and click continue to install Money99. And it's checking for necessary disk space, and it's in the middle of copying on the files. This particular application has many, many errors in it when run on the government version of Windows 98. It says that we need to restart Windows to complete the installation, and I'm going to go ahead and agree to that and restart Windows. Voice: Allchin, we are once again running out of tape, so while the machine is rebooting we are going to have to change the tape. Allchin: Okay. I won't touch it. Okay. The computer rebooted, and I had to make one change on the keyboard to turn on so that I could see the screen here. I'm going to cancel out of this screen, and I'm going to start Microsoft money. I'm going to go up to programs--oops. I'm going to go to programs down to Microsoft money and select it. And in this particular case I'm not connected on the Internet. It's creating a new file for me to work in. So, I think it's going to try to play me a little tour here. I'm just going to go ahead and let it continue on. And if you don't mind, we are going to kill the tour. Now it says, `what's your name.' We are turning down the volume when were we born? Well, apparently, I was born yesterday, with the way things are going, so I'm going to say done answering everything, and I get an error. It says `Internet explorer cannot open the Internet site money colon slash slash profiler slash results. The protocol specified in this address is not valid. Make sure the address is correct and try again. Okay, well, I don't know what that all meant, so now let's go try something else. Let's just go try to do something like help. And we get the error again, but all of a sudden I'm in a weird state. In fact, I lost total control. Can't do anything on this machine right now. I'm hitting the left-mouse key in all sorts of places, and I can't do anything. So, right now the system is in a very confused state. Needless to say, Money99 works quite a bit different on a Windows 95--Windows 98 system that has not been changed by Dr Felten's program, and we have got an error here. Let's do that again, and let's--it's just weird things start happening. And if I try to go up into some of these areas, I just get all sorts of different errors that are coming out on the screen. Another error here. Another error here. Needless to say, there are a number of mis takes showing up here caused by running this particular application on the government version. Now, what we would like to do now is a little bit complicated because I didn't want there to be any confusion about interactions between these applications. And so I want to change machines, and I want to do on a fresh machine--without anything that's happened here, I want to do Prodigy. There are enough questions that I wanted to explain it very carefully about what's going on. We're going to go to another machine that started in a mode like this one, and I'm going to install the prodigy CD that I have someplace here that came in this package. Voice: So, let's cut the video long enough to change the cable from one PC to the other. And the location. I think we will just move the PC into the camera range. Allchin: One question, fine. Yep, that will be fine. (Pause.) Allchin: Okay. We have switched machines to a machine that started in the same general form. There may have been a different set of things in the dial-up connections. I want to go there so that everybody can see. We didn't put the same list there, but- Voice: We have one less connection. Allchin: One less, but that was simply because we were so worried on this machine to have enough. As you can see, it hasn't been Feltenized, if I can use that term, and starting with the Internet Explorer icon in the desktop and in the quick launch bar. And I think now I will Feltenize it. So, I'm taking the same CD that I had before, going through the same process. and I want to explain again why I'm doing this, because since there are a number of errors, I didn't want anyone to think that there was cause because the other programs had errors. So, I'm going to open the folder again, just like I did previously, and run this program again. And it says you must restart just like you did before, and I'm going to say yes. And again, you see the same message that you saw on the other computer. These are, by the way, exactly the same model. We bought them at the same store. As I said, we bought six of them exactly the same. And we are waiting for it to boot. Are you seeing something? Okay. This is the same messages that we saw in the last computer after running the program, and we are waiting for it to boot. And if you notice after it comes up the rest of the way, and all the icons in the tray are present. I want to kill the tour, and the CD is still in the CD case. I'm going to remove the CD, put it back in its case. Now I wanted to point out that the Internet explorer icon is missing from the desktop, and the other icons are missing in the quick launch area, and I open up "my computer," and I'll just try a web site that I was trying before. Of course, we don't have a connection, but, of course, that doesn't matter because we get the error unable to open this Internet shortcut that this protocol http does not have a registered program. So, indeed, if you look that there is no active support here as it existed before. So now we have a system that has web browsing hidden just like the other machine, and I'm going to take the prodigy CD and install that on this machine, just like an end user would. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I should show something which I didn't, and it's pretty important, so I'm going to cancel this since I just noticed I didn't do it. I want to show, just so that everybody agrees, Windows update and what it says on the task bar--I mean, the title bar. It says `Windows 98' in the title bar. I don't want to do this auto connection. I just to want get out of there. And now I'm going to do the CD again, go ahead and hit autoplay. And the Windows 98 title change was the one that Dr Felten's program inserted. It says `install prodigy Internet.' I'm going to go ahead and say okay. And here we are again. I'm just going to do easy installation. And, of course, I want to improve the quality of my connection. I will say yes. And this is a bunch of information, and away it's going to go to install Prodigy. It says to press this button to finish, so I do. And it gives me an error, unable to open this Internet shortcut. The protocol bunch of unique characters does not have a registered program. I say okay. It says the registration has been cancelled. And so what I want to do right now is I want to--the install has failed, to be very clear here, Prodigy failure. And this CD does work fine on the Windows 98 machine. So, if I -- although we're not going to show all that tonight. I forgot what I'm going to show. I'm going to show Windows update because there was some confusion about the title bar. and if you notice now that prodigy has been run, the title bar for Windows update has been changed, and this message is because it's trying to connect again, so I'm just going to cancel all of this. I will say stay offline and just exit. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go and uninstall Prodigy. I'm not thinking here. Control panel, add/remove, Prodigy Internet 4.0. I'm going to remove it. It says remove all connections. I will say yes. So it is removed, Prodigy. And because there was some confusion over that, I wanted to go ahead and show that in Windows update the title bar stays the same as a Windows 98 system. This is what you saw on one of the demo tapes earlier, or--period, so... And because I don't have a connection here, I'm just going to exit. So, I think I'm going to stop there. What I tried to show is that you can, in fact, do web browsing on the Internet on a machine that has had Dr Felten's program run on it. The second thing I wanted to show was that there are a number of issues that arise because of the interaction of that program in the system, and I haven't been able to take the time to show all the issues that I've personally seen or that have been tested, and it would be incredibly difficult for me to immediately show the performance issues. That has to be in a controlled lab environment, and I do not have that here, and but I think that we've shown what I've set out to do. Now, one of the things I didn't do is have Navigator on this machine, and--nor have I shown you what the situation would be like if we're on a regular Windows 98 system. And, at least on this tape I'm not going to show that. I think people want to go home, so I'm going to stop there. One other minor thing I just noticed, I noticed that the date didn't get typed in here right, so that was another difference between these machines. Other than that, they're as close as we could possibly make them, and I'm done. ® Complete Register trial coverage