OpenBSD for work.

Linux, Steam and emulators for games.

Are we to assume that Apple is as pure as the driven snow?

People called me tinfoil when in a a joke mode i said that Microsoft would be working together with special agencies to spy on its users..... i was hoping it was just a joke....

Remember when the American government painted places like Russia as well.. "places like Russia" that spied on you even in your most private of moments and snuck in your house under the cover of darkness? That was hilarious.

You seem to be attacking evil Microsoft but they're just obeying the government you voted for.

this is pure insanity. MS doesn't need to violate your Constitutional right to privacy.

If the government compels them, they don't have a choice.

They were only following orders!!

you're joking right?

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The draft EU legislation reportedly says:

"illegally accessing or interfering with information systems, illegally interfering with data, illegally intercepting communications'

It doesn't take much contortion of this to say its being violated when a network mgr who's monitoring outgoing (LAN>>WAN) connections blocks a Gov't-installed or required piece of software from making its normal connection. The Gov't could claim its there & operating by secret, but legal order, therefore interfering with its normal operation is illegal and prosecutable (in secret of course).

For example, if a 'rogue' employee with a conscience somehow functionally & deliberately disabled the flow of the company's customer data into one of NSA's taps at one of the telephone hubs, the Gov't could attempt to prosecute him with similar logic.

If so, then anyone using internet connections monitoring and control software to ID & block outgoing connections could be faced with the risk of the same violation if it happens to originate from or be part of Gov't installed secret software, trap doors, APIs, ad nauseam.

trust no one

Microsoft cares that you need them and their products, not necessarily that you trust them.

Another journalist who doesn't understand MAPP. Microsoft tells the government before a fix is released. They also tell a lot of other people. It's not to give them time to come up with a hack. It's to help them not get hacked.

Good joke.
Suppose I sold 100 people a system and I discovered a flaw in it after a year. What should be the first thing I do? 1. Tell some people that there is a problem and then start trying to patch the hole
or
2. Don't tell anyone about it and patch the hole as soon as possible

You tell me, which one is more logical?

You don't appear to understand MAPP, either. MAPP members are private companies that design and market commercial security software. Microsoft's DISP program is the one through which they provide advance security vulnerability info to governmental agencies. The kind of info sharing with the NSA and CIA that the author is discussing goes well beyond their published DISP program.

So what about Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Verizon, ATT and all those other major tech companies that did the same?

Obviously the problem is our government....

So the author is making a sweeping statement for the entire company and dozens of their products based on:

1. A rumor from the 90s
2. A patent
3. A single tainted product they themselves didn't write

I don't see how Microsoft is any worse then any other big tech company. The author just wants a sensationalist story with an easy target for more web hits.

business as usual..

The moment I can run modern games, popular applications, and all the other good stuff we run on Windows now I'll make that switch. until then I have to use MS products if I want to participate.

There are plenty of well written articles on this topic that don't have the misinformation this article does. http://news.softpedia.com/news... of course if you like your tin-foil hat, you won't be interested in those pesky facts.

Fixed the title of this article for you: "How can any company ever trust the government again?" - Pretending that a gag order and secretive NSA tactics to force companies to provide information is not the root cause is only making this problem worse. Put the blame where it belongs: with a deceitful president who not only knew about but continues to try to defend the program despite the fact that one of his biggest campaign promises was transparency and a security view that did not violate the constitution, with law enforcement officials that did not blow the whistle soon enough, and with a media that portrays companies like Microsoft as the problem instead of the government that forced them to provide information.

Uh. Two presidents and two parties. Dubya did it, Obama happily continued it. Congress and the Senate expressed their outrage with a thunderous "Well, so long as I can get re-elected, I guess I'm cool with it." Almost everyone in government that could have helped stop it didn't. Governments should never be trusted. Authority should always be questioned. This is an ironclad rule and always has been.

But that evades the larger point: with closed source, you can't find these backdoors easily. With a centralized corporate entity that can be attacked and controlled, you cannot keep a government from leveraging its power over them to spy on you. It's not just Microsoft you can't trust. It's any company writing software you count on while keeping the source closed. Cisco, IBM, Apple, Google, they all have closed pieces of software many of us use on a daily basis. NONE of it can be trusted. Microsoft is just the obvious target because their role in this kind of surveillance has been known in some shadowy fashion for years now.

It's not to demonize Microsoft or call them evil or anything like that. It's just looking at logically from a security and privacy perspective, closed source software from centralized third party entities must by nature be treated as untrusted. Period. End of story.

How dare you imply that the government would ever do anything wrong?

Well, what if I just don't give a damn about someone spying on me?...

Then you don't deserve a voice in this world

Governments are above the law. If you make the rules and can silence anyone who objects than how can you say we are living in a democracy. We all know how unjust the system is but are happy to accept the stays quo with food in our belly's and roofs over our head. We don't live in fear and are well protected for the most part, so the government provides good management of us.

Microsoft provides early access to its patches before patch Tuesday to many companies, for free, you just have to sign up.

Also I believe that you should make a distinction between what Microsoft chooses to do, and what the government compels them to do.

Where in the article did it say that Microsoft did not voluntarily participate in the info sharing?

They were only following orders!

use linux...

Linux sucks. I can't run Adobe Photoshop nor can I watch movies from Netflix and iTunes on Linux.

By the way, that avatar of yours, please don't tell me you're a communist.

yes you can run Photoshop and not i'm not a communist i just like the guy.

No, you can't. Photoshop is not officially supported by Linux.

wine emulator...

WINE stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. Call it an emulator one more time, I dare you.

And then they want to put an always on camera and mic in every ones house...

This has totally nothing to do with spying on webcams and microphones. That is just over dramatization.

Until of course a vulnerability pops up (as is common in Microsoft software) and anyone can now access your always on webcam/microphone by just hitting the right port with the right 'credentials'

Secretly, of course.

The title should be "How can any company trust any large American software and hardware vendor ?" The US government opened up a huge pro open source reason with Prism.

No-one has mentioned hardware vendors yet - all those firewall boxes out there...

yeah, the firmware exploits. Do you think China is a naive angel from the heaven above?

indeed

What I suspected for all those years now proves right. Many of my friends called me 'nuts' but I always warned for back doors, especially in US software. I don't want big brother sniffing around on my computer, even if I don't have anything to hide. I also don't want the police to come and check my house every once in a while, just to be sure I don't do anything wrong. I'm happy that for the last 8 or 10 years I mainly use Linux (first Suse and now Ubuntu). My advice: switch asap if you feel the same.

Linux is mainly developed by profit-oriented US companies. (I am talking about the kernel itself and most part of the ecosystem.) Google, Intel, Oracle, Red Hat, and so on. The are the main companies behind Linux. Because of this, I don't really understand why do you think that using Linux is a lesser threat to your privacy than using Windows.

Linux is just the kernel, the bulk of the OS was developed by the Gnu team with a long history of fighting for individual freedom.

That said, you can get the source code and compilers from outside the US and OpenBSD is even more secure but doesn't have drivers to accelerate the newest video cards.

If you're that concerned about security you generally are able to accept that your video isn't accelerated. Plus you generally refer to 3D acceleration. 2D is generally easily done by FLOSS these days.

Linux is open source. Sure, Hein personally might not sit around reading hundreds of thousands of lines of code.. but other people have, and people do every day. Linux is not mainly developed by for profit companies.. Red Hat is enterprise level software and one of the only linux distros that you must pay for. It's still open source though - aka why CentOS exists.

Most companies that donate to linux (Google, Intel, Twitter, Facebook, etc) do so because they use linux. If I have 20 servers in a cabinet that I'm not spending $2k+ a year on OS licenses for because they run CentOS instead of Windows, I'm probably (most web companies) going to support the development of that software on some level.. Now imagine facebook who has tens of thousands of servers - would you rather donate any amount of money you choose to some non profit linux developers that further the internet as a whole or be forced into paying (server_count * 35 = total_paid). If I have 10,000 servers that's 350,000$ a year in just OS licenses...

Google has over 1 million servers, do you think they would rather pay out 35 million in OS license fees to Microsoft or donate a few million to a non profit? It's not about paying off people to make it insecure, it's about paying far far less. Sure they could modify and download kernels all day for free, but then they'd be douchebags. You can take a penny out of the jar but some of us like to throw our two cents down so the next guy has what he needs.