Microsoft leadership professes its love for the NSA

Summary: Bill Gates acknowledges that he likes the NSA, Windows can now be hijacked through a JPEG flaw, XP stops receiving security patches, and Snowden leaks confirm NSA plan to hijack millions of "Microsoft Windows" PCs

Microsoft is a unique company that grew out of and sustained itself using crime. It then took over crime enforcement, reducing the potential/likelihood that it will be held accountable and people among its ranks be sent to prison (or resent in Bill Gates' case). Microsoft is not an ordinary company; it's a political animal which has a lot of power over the media and tries to make criminal activities look not only acceptable but commendable.

Out disappointment with the Linux Foundation for hiring into management (of OpenDaylight) a former Microsoft manager is not to be misunderstood by those who know Microsoft's history. Right now, for example, as more proprietary and NSA-friendly companies join OpenDaylight, the former Microsoft manager, Neela Jacques (also from VMware, which is linked to EMC/RSA and hence NSA), serves the Microsoft-esque agenda by promoting a mix with proprietary, where proprietary, especially in virtualisation, means the embodiment of back doors into Free software (the host can take over the guest). Jacques says: "Customers of the IT industry have long said that being locked into proprietary platforms has real drawbacks – you are stuck with one vendor’s vision, one product roadmap, and the costs of switching can be high. Not a situation most customers enjoy. More, we have a huge systems integration industry in p​art because of the challenges of getting components from different companies to work with each other. Finally, a lot of technologies that customers love get left to fade away or are made obsolete when a vendor’s priority changes."

It is clear, based on speakers from OpenDaylight itself [1,2,3], that software freedom is essential in virtualisation. Memset explained this very recently [4,5,6], alluding especially to costs. Why would anyone even tolerate Hyper-V, which we already know (since it runs under Windows) to be a back door for the NSA? And why does Microsoft try to shift privacy critics (focus of attention) to Google? How dare Microsoft do this and then promote the people behind this ugly privacy spin? Watch this new satire [7] (cited by [8]).

Well, you see? Here's the thing...

Microsoft loves the NSA, and Microsoft folks actively defend what the NSA is doing. Microsoft is the NSA's most special software partner. It goes beyond software. Kinect and Xbox, for instance, are surveillance devices at the centre of people's homes (Microsoft now "Seeks Patent for New Spy Cam"). Microsoft receives protection from the government (as well as bribes and subsidies) despite its crimes because it's cooperating with this government's crimes.

Microsoft now enables hijacking of Windows PCs through a JPEG flaw [9]. Yes, that's right. JPEG! The scary thing is, many banks-connected machines still use this Swiss cheese OS [10], even though it will no longer receive any security patches next month. What is the world coming to? The latest leak from Snowden reveals that "NSA used ‘Microsoft Windows’ to infect millions of computers" [11]. Will the world wake up and smell the coffee? This is very serious stuff [12] and anyone who still uses Windows should drop it. We already know the NSA's espionage leanings. Suffice to say, Bill Gates does not like Edward Snowden (he says so now [13-16]) whereas he likes the NSA. It's all about crushing dissent. It's class war. No wonder Microsoft extended olive branches to the NSA. This policy goes all the way to the top, sheltering criminal enterprises. ⬆

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Why your virtualization should be open-source

   
   
   Open-source products are highly customizable, and aren’t locked in to specific providers. Developers can freely make additions, modifications and alterations to the structure or the code in an open-source setup. The merging of these two technologies has given birth to the open-source virtualization phenomenon, which has key benefits over branded, locked-in solutions. According to a recent study, consumers have saved in the region of $60 billion per year by going open source.

2. Open Networking Summit Chair Guru Parulkar Defines SDN

   
   
   The Open Networking Summit (ONS) gets underway today as a conference discussing the Software Defined Networking (SDN) movement. But what is SDN anyway, and does it have a uniform definition?





3. What Comes After Traditional Server Virtualization?

   Pop quiz: What technologies will potentially succeed operating system virtualization? Most pundits will tell you cloud computing or perhaps software defined data center or software-defined networking (SDN). But another potential answer involves so-called container technology like Docker. Here's why.





4. Open source enables government to slash IT bills: Memset

5. Memset demonstrate the cost savings of open source G-Cloud

6. Memset Urges Public Sector To Ditch VMware For Open Source





7. Microsoft to cut on software development, focus on ads

   Under the leadership of Satya Nadella, Microsoft has done a major reshuffle at the company. Nadella will be tightening the focus that the sharp and most celebrated CEO of the world, Steve Ballmer, gave to the company with attack campaigns against Google. Nadella is appointing Mark Penn as C-level executive promoting him to the role of chief strategy officer.





8. M$: We Can’t Beat ‘Em, So We’re Going To Snow





9. It's 2014 and Microsoft Windows PCs can still be owned by a JPEG

   Microsoft has fixed security bugs in Internet Explorer and Windows that allow hackers to remotely execute code on victims' vulnerable machines – one bug a result of poor JPEG handling.





10. Banks pay Microsoft big for securing Windows XP ATMs





11. NSA used ‘Microsoft Windows’ to infect millions of computers

    The documents leaked by Edward Snowden have yielded what may be their most shocking revelation yet: plans to infect millions of computers with malware to prevent them from working properly. This was devised by the NSA in consultation with a shady billionaire, unofficially named as ‘Bill Gates’, who had close links to many different arms of the US government.
    
    Because Microsoft Windows causes intermittent crashing and losing people’s work, it is claimed in the documents, terrorists will be unable to make videos of their impending martyrdom. By refusing to print reliably, they will not even be able to print out flyers calling on people to ‘rise up against the Western oppressors’.
    
    ‘This project has already been successfully used to bring the Iranian nuclear enrichment programme to its knees, along with most Western businesses,’ said a government source, who asked not to be named. ‘There is literally no corner of the world that has not been infected. We believe it is the most successful computer malware of all time.’





12. Malware “Industrialises Spying”: The NSA has “Automated its Spying Operations”

    The report from Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher, based on the Edward Snowden leaks reveals that the NSA – surprise, surprise – has automated its spying operations, so that malware once used to target the odd terror suspect can now be used routinely. The programme is called “Owning the net”. (Israel also gets a special shout-out in the report for its work with the NSA in developing malware.)So it’s no longer – and, of course, never was – only about tracking metadata from our phone calls and Google searches. This is industrialised spying, including on domestic populations, using our interactions with the net (which means most of our activities) to know what is going on in our minds.





13. Snowden is no hero, says Bill Gates





14. Bill Gates Rejects Snowden While Pulitzer Board Debates His Actions





15. Bill Gates Thinks Snowden is no Hero for Leaking NSA Documents

16. Bill Gates makes his conservative biases clear in a Rolling Stone interview on the ongoing NSA controversy

    As the dangers of NSA spying slowly come to light, with issues ranging from potential CIA spying on US political leaders and stealing documents from the US Senate to a precipitous drop in worldwide confidence in U.S.-based technology platforms, Bill Gates, founder of the core operating system in over 90% of the world’s computers, deftly made the case for NSA spying in a recent Rolling Stone interview. Notable in the interview is not so much what Gates said, but what he didn’t say.