Summary: A day or so after Yahoo was revealed to have been used to illegally spy on users' webcams the former Skype chief executive resigns (effective immediately)

SOMETHING TRULY ugly is happening at Microsoft. Not only did Microsoft collude with the criminal NSA but it also turned Skype into a surveillance machine. To make matters worse, Microsoft is now shamelessly hoovering up personal data from Windows PCs (article in German) and executives are fleeing (can anyone blame them?).

"Tony Bates, the former Skype chief executive and currently head of Microsoft’s business development, is to leave the company immediately," says this article (titled "Microsoft Loses Two Top Executives"), "while Reller, co-head of Microsoft’s Windows unit, will stay on board during a transition period" (damage control). Yesterday we wrote about Microsoft's Kinect as a target of surveillance (mentioned in the context of Yahoo). It doesn't get any worse, does it? Even video of people who use Microsoft products seems to be intercepted and saved, obviously against the law (millions are affected, so there is no reasonable suspicion). The timing of this immediate resignation is interesting to say the very least because it overlaps reports about Yahoo video chats as targets of interception and mass violations (GCHQ is said to have watched and probably recorded hundreds of thousands of innocent people masturbating). Based on previous leaks (about Skype), it is reasonable to say that Skype is not exempted from this and its violations are no different. We just haven't seen enough documents about it (yet).

Meanwhile, as Sam Varghese notes [1], Red Hat is failing to exploit these scandals to its own advantage, perhaps because Red Hat too has something to hide [1, 2, 3].

It would be nice if more people started to appreciate Free software, at the very least because of privacy (which a lot of people understand and value). ⬆

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Linux companies never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity

   It would be heartening to see James Whitehurst, the head of Red Hat Linux, the biggest commercial Linux outfit, and one that has seen billing go above the billion-dollar mark, deliver a speech at some official forum that underlined the fact that his company's product - and that of other commercial Linux companies - provides a guarantee against the insertion of backdoors.