MONOPOLY GAME

Microsoft critic dismissed by consultancy firm

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.
A Microsoft spokesman said the software maker had not pressured @Stake to make any decision on Geer's status. However, @Stake did call Microsoft late Tuesday night (after news of the report's contents first broke) to say that Geer's findings did not reflect his employer's opinions, the spokesman said.