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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.

On the face of it, AT&T 'pulls a Canonical' [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] by diverting its many US customers to Microsoft (via Yahoo!). And let's not forget the Verizon deal [1, 2], either.

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. ⬆