Made by Rami M. Amin

Microsoft's Vista 10 'damage control' has become rather laughable. The operating system is so buggy that mega-patches are being released and forcibly installed (remotely) more than once a week, clogging up home and corporate networks. Lots of binaries are being changed with no 'paper trail', not even textual. It would seem like a joke if Windows wasn't so ubiquitous and Windows Update quite so banal. People cannot know what the programs running on their computers are doing and any behaviour of these programs can be silently changed by Microsoft at any time. Microsoft also reserves the 'right' to remotely delete programs (not just Microsoft's programs). People have grown accustomed to it (Stockholm Syndrome) and many blindly accept this or don't even know about this. The practice has been expanded to all post-Vista versions of Windows, which inherit all the malicious antifeatures of Windows Vista. Microsoft boosters euphemistically call this "Cumulative Update" even though it addresses "five critical flaws, including two hitting all versions of Windows," according to this headline. Over in our IRC channels, Ryan (ex-Microsoft MVP) wrote: "No changelog = coverup for true number of bugs."

It's "business as usual," as MinceR put it, for Microsoft already admitted secretly hiding severe bugs in order to game these numbers. Microsoft's close partner, the NSA, must be pleased.

"Microsoft Pushes a Dozen Security Updates," Krebs wrote, but NSA back doors remain and surveillance may have been silently expanded, not curtailed (the latest EULA shows almost no legal limitations). Vista 10 is a monstrous surveillance apparatus and every computer that it's put on becomes a bug. Vista 10 is little more than a 3GB keylogger. No sane person would touch it as it is hard to tell what it's actually doing and when, who for, etc. Vista 7 and Vista 8 have meanwhile been modified (by Windows Update) to incorporate many of the same surveillance capabilities, so it's time to escape to GNU/Linux or *BSD. The sooner, the better. Windows is being statically (in-place) modified for espionage purposes.

"Lots of binaries are being changed with no 'paper trail', not even textual. It would seem like a joke if Windows wasn't so ubiquitous and Windows Update quite so banal."Demonstrating that even the corporate media recognises the severe problems with Vista 10 (noting that it is piece of very malicious spyware), leading British papers said the other day (even in headlines) that "Microsoft is recording EVERYTHING you type". No doubt Microsoft is aware of this negative publicity and it working hard to change perceptions, not to change privacy infringements in Vista 10. Microsoft's propaganda network 1105 Media (includes "Redmond Channel Partner") is openwashing Windows again (see "Is It Time for Microsoft To Open Source Windows?") as if people will come to believe that Microsoft is moving in a direction other than making Windows even more malicious. People from inside Microsoft have told me explicitly that privacy violations are only going to get worse in future versions of Windows.

"Microsoft is so desperate to infect the enterprise with its Surface products," told us a source, "that it has compiled a list of companies you should no longer support under the guide of an "enterprise initiative" (IRC logs will have more details on that).

"'Microsoft Expands Surface Pro Options for the Enterprise,' says a blatant Microsoft booster," according to our source. "Dell will be reselling it and offer its own enterprise services for them."

Well, Dell has (with few exceptions) become an extension of Microsoft, so it's not terribly shocking. Enterprise are especially sensitive to data leaks, so there will be resistance for sure. Microsoft knows that OEMs are increasingly leaning towards GNU/Linux and Android, so Microsoft pays a lot of money to get them under Microsoft's control and to get patent royalties on Linux (yes, Dell recently signed yet another patent deal covering Linux-based operating systems). As we noted last week, "Microsoft's Vista 10 Still a Failure, So Focus Shifts to Attacks on GNU/Linux, Android". It mostly alludes to and pertains to patent monopolies, not technical merit or anything ethical. ⬆