Dan Geer Dismissed for Dissing Microsoft

This is just plain stupid. I'm sure more gossip will come out about this in the next few days, but, to quote Richard Forno's comments on the ISN mailing list today: "and we wonder why IT security will never really improve". For those unfamiliar with Geer, he's a LONG time computer security heavyweight who's largly responsible for the merger of Boston hacker staple L0pht Heavy Industries and @stake a few years back which, as far as I'm concerned "made" @stake and was a major milepost on the slow and steady decline of the computer underground.

A computer security expert who contributed to a paper deeply critical of Microsoft has been dismissed by his employer, a consulting company that works closely with the software giant.

Dan Geer, a longtime computer security researcher, and several colleagues released a controversial study on Wednesday that called the ubiquity of Microsoft software a hazard to the economy and to national security. Although independently financed and researched, the study was distributed by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), a Washington-based trade association largely made up of Microsoft's rivals.