Summary: AT and T to continue tradition of spying by diverting customer traffic to Microsoft datacentres
A FEW months ago, Microsoft sued TiVo with patents in order to support its buddy, AT&T. It is worth adding that AT&T is a lobbyist for more patents, an illegal spy, and unauthorised censor for the United States government [1, 2]. Here is a reminder of this from the news:
Here in the US, AT&T eagerly helped the administration in spying on users with no warrant and no official process (even allowing private info to be passed on with just a post-it note request).
More importantly, however, AT&T made a deal involving Windows Mobile a few weeks ago. AT&T has a close relationship with the patent bully [1, 2, 3, 4] (yes, that would be Apple attacking Linux phones) too.
To Microsoft, Yahoo! is a form of brand-washing. People use what they believe to be Yahoo!, but in fact they just use an alternative front end to Microsoft Bong [sic] (supporting an abusive monopolist and receiving 'cooked' results without realising it). Microsoft will harvest data and advertise based on its own biased preferences, but users will be presented with deceiving logos after the hijack. We recently found out just how friendly Microsoft is to warrantless spying. ⬆
Because digital connections in third parties aren't assets; they endow another party with tremendous power over people (e.g. MElon getting to decide who can and cannot reach people or what messages to "dim down")
Narrowing down to desktops and laptops, and judging by Web requests that go through Clownflare, many people there use GNU/Linux or Google's 'bastardised' version of it (with spyware preloaded)
From what we can gather, the tram ticketing system does not use Windows; we never saw it crashing or rebooting (or showing some Windows logo) in decades, so we assume it runs some kind of Linux
