Summary: With its shoddy 'cloud' (Fog Computing) services Microsoft will gather people's phonecalls, potentially inform overseas governments, and also increase the risk of unintentional privacy-infringing disclosures

MICROSOFT'S Office 360 (Office 365 minus all the downtime) is expected to have more outages, admits Microsoft. "BPOS gained a pretty bad rep due to a series of outages," argues the reporter, "the most recent coming just last week, and users were praying that the new cloud iteration launched on 28 June would banish those negative experiences to the past."

Why would anyone want to give his/her documents to Microsoft in this age of the Patriot Act? And speaking of which, having taken Skype from a European company (privacy erosion) Microsoft now "admits Patriot Act can access EU-based cloud data":

At the Office 365 launch, Gordon Frazer, managing director of Microsoft UK, gave the first admission that cloud data — regardless of where it is in the world — is not protected against the USA PATRIOT Act.

It was honestly music to my ears. After a year of researching the Patriot Act’s breadth and ability to access data held within protected EU boundaries, Microsoft finally and openly admitted it.

Will the Commissioner in charge of privacy intervene to impede this? What if the datacentres which run Windows involuntarily leak out all the data? There is this new report about an "'indestructible' botnet":

The botnet, known as TDL, targets Windows PCs and is difficult to detect and shut down.

Code that hijacks a PC hides in places security software rarely looks and the botnet is controlled using custom-made encryption.

BBC names Windows for a change and this whole story shows the sort of dangers people will have if services are based on Windows. Skype has not been based on Windows and recently it suffered many disruptions (just after Microsoft had bought it). ⬆