“A Kirkland man arrested last week on allegations that he stole proprietary technology from the AltaVista search engine two years ago is a Microsoft Corp. employee who has been working on the Redmond company’s MSN Search initiative,” Todd Bishop reports for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
“Federal authorities allege that Laurent Chavet, a former AltaVista employee, illegally accessed the California company’s computer system in March 2002 and June 2002, after he left AltaVista and well before he went to work for Microsoft. Chavet, then living in California, copied to his home computer source code that was used by AltaVista ‘to perform the function of scouring the World Wide Web,’ according to an FBI affidavit,” Bishop reports.
Bishop reports, “…people with knowledge of Chavet’s Microsoft employment confirmed that he has been working on the MSN Search effort. A brief biography attached to a paper Chavet co-wrote on text analytics described him as an expert ‘in all aspects of search technology.'”
Full article here.
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Mac users should not buy Microsoft software – May 16, 2003
