"Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes."

--Henry David Thoreau

Summary: Refuting the "new Microsoft" propaganda and some ludicrous concept that Microsoft is now "playing nice"

THE company which kick-started PRISM and works most closely with the NSA pretends to have become "open". How ridiculous a notion! SoylentNews covered our story [1] and many comments there show that the large majority agrees that Microsoft is just trying to harm openness from the inside. That's just not what corruptible journalists would have us believe.

"The company which kick-started PRISM and works most closely with the NSA pretends to have become “open”."Dan Kedmey reminded us the other day that "Microsoft’s New App Will Help You Stalk Your Friends", right after he had covered this bit of news about Microsoft's "embrace and extend" at work (recall what Microsoft is doing to infiltrate Android). As Kedmey put it in his own words:

It's acquiring apps and quickly rebranding them as Microsoft products

[...]

Acompli is the best example of Microsoft’s new playbook: In a matter of weeks, Microsoft took Acompli’s popular email app and rebranded it as Outlook for iOS and Android, to rave reviews from the tech press. Before the Acompli move, Microsoft’s iOS and Android Outlook offering was nothing more than a clunky web portal disguised as an app. It’s a safe bet that Sunrise and similar acquisitions will reappear as Microsoft-branded offerings just as quickly.

For those who deem it "good news" for Android, bear in mind that Microsoft is a surveillance company much worse than Google in many ways, as we have demonstrated over the years. Simon Sharwood said a couple of days ago that "Microsoft [is] to store deleted Exchange Online mails FOREVER". Is anyone surprised by that? Outlook has already been banned for use by European politicians (the "app" at least is verboten for security reasons), which really says a lot about how Microsoft is viewed by security professionals. ⬆

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Microsoft Loves Linux - or So They Say

   Just when you thought Embrace, Extend, Extinguish was going away, the article explains the multi-prong attack that Microsoft is quietly working in the background. And they are relying heavily on their friends in the press. Microsoft has always had its share of shills in the press, but, with the focus on Google Android and Apple its quietly become less of a Journalist career killer to be openly Pro Microsoft. Schestowitz explains the attack as killing Linux Softly with APIs and the lock-ins they bring as more Microsoft packages and services are ported to Linux, and by getting appointments to key Linux Foundation subcommittees, by slinging dollars and software contributions.

"This anti-trust thing will blow over. We haven't changed our business practices at all."

--Bill Gates, 1995 (and still managing Microsoft)