Is Phar Lap Thai for lightning or Microsoft for mea culpa?
In 1999, Robert Smith, then the president of Brookline, Mass., developer Phar Lap Software Inc., discovered that Microsoft’s Windows 98 and Office 1997 were digitally “fingerprinting” files with the user’s Ethernet card address (also called the MAC address). Windows 98 was also transmitting the MAC address to Microsoft as part of the registration process, without the user’s permission or knowledge. “This fingerprinting scheme could be used (or misused) to trace the origin of document files,” said Smith in 1999. “If a whistle blower leaked a Word document to the press about a company or government agency, the Ethernet address might be used to track the document back to the author.” Microsoft first tried to downplay the issue as a registration bug. In a 1999 story by John Markoff of The New York Times, a Microsoft group product manager, Robert Bennett, said, “The software was not supposed to send this information unless the computer user checked a specific option.
