"Is Microsoft into trojans or spyware?"
A: Yes. Both, and worse.
It's that simple.
Watching the Win10 saga of horrors gradually awakening more people to the unpleasant truth about Microsoft is very amusing. Good to see, but by God, why does it take some people so long to get it?
Here's some psychology reading about psychopaths:
http://everist.org/archives/links/__Psychopaths.txtAlso read the list of common cognitive biases:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biasesPsychopaths are generally very personable and skilled manipulators. On casual impression they seem like great people. To others who aren't able to recognize when they are being manipulated and falling into an abusive relationship, psychopaths continue to seem 'all good' even when they are doing terrible things to those around them. They manage to convince others that any problems are due to failings in themselves, that it's 'all your fault.'
I encountered an example of this years ago, when someone very popular and influential in a social group I frequent, did something appallingly bad, that only I found out about. It happened that I had read a little on psychopaths, so recognized what was going on. I read up more, and realized this guy was definitely a psychopath and severely dangerous to the group. Years went by, a few others in the group came to realize something was wrong with that guy, but most were still under his almost magical spell and wouldn't hear a word against him.
Finally... *finally* he slipped up, and did something in front of a whole bunch of others that was far beyond socially acceptable. Wish I'd been there to see it, but I heard about it later and saw the result. Suddenly the entire group recognized him for what he was - really a deeply evil person. Sudden moment of group enlightenment, putting odd past events together, re-interpretation in light of new awareness, etc. He was permanently expelled from our circle. But it took that extreme in-your-face event to do it.
The power of normalcy bias, group-think, bandwaggon effect and other social herd thought patterns is very strong. Most people, being intrinsically well intentioned themselves, flatly refuse to believe in real evil in others. (In general, that tendency to interpret others' actions as if they thought and were motivated the same way as yourself is called 'projection' btw.)
Now to Microsoft.
I started out in electronics before the personal computer existed. Before microprocessors even. I worked in the first computer store in Australia, starting very soon after they opened. I'd been working around the corner in an electronics job as the first microprocessors were released. My first computer was an S-100 machine. My Apple II was the second one imported to Australia (I believe) right after they were released. I watched the start of Microsoft, collected early MS technical manuals and read widely on their corporate development, leading persons, and background.
A lot of the public myths about Microsoft are false. They are fables constructed to make Bill Gates and the company look good. The 'simple hard-working boy genius Bill Gates who succeeded through his own efforts and some good luck' for instance. It's crap.
Did you know Bill Gate's mother was a major shareholder and board member of IBM?
Or that IBM ran several different development projects for a 'personal computer' and chose to market the worst one?
Or that there's at least one clear case of the first PC having had features (that would cost nothing extra) removed at the design stage, purely as a deliberate crippling. (The original parallel port card was designed to be bi-directional. The manufactured design had *one* *track* removed, to make the card output-only.)
It appears the choice of a segmented memory CPU as opposed to one with a sensible MMU was another deliberate cripple.
And why?
On one level, because IBM had vast investments in mainframe computer technology, while recognizing that small 'personal computers' had the potential to evolve rapidly in an open market, to quickly obsolete IBM's mainframe investments.
On another level, because IBM is run by people who count themselves among the financial Elites. The *last* thing these people want to see, is empowerment of the masses with free and open information computing technology. This is something they will fight to the death. (And have been ever since.)
So, IBM developed a 'personal computing' architecture that was deliberately optimized to be as bad as possible. Then, to ensure it was adopted as a worldwide standard base for future development, they made it freely copyable. Remember that at the time, IBM had advanced circuit board and IC packaging technology. Ultra-high density PCBs with 10+ layers, and flip-chip packages that would be near impossible to reverse engineer if IBM chose to include some in the PC design. Instead they used nothing but widely available chips, on plain 2 and 4-layer boards. And published the full schematics. There was also the PC BIOS - at that time just plain assembler-code, complete with IBM copyright message, held in easily read back EPROMs.
Of course the early PCs were copied and extended, and produced in large numbers particularly in Asia. The clone machines even had the exact same BIOS code, byte for byte. I read some, even the "(C) IBM" text was intact in the clones. Amazing.
But was there even one case where IBM sued for copyright violation? You'd think they would, if profit was their prime intention, wouldn't you?
Nope. Not one. IBM seemed to be quite happy for as many companies, even big ones, to clone and extend their design. Because that's exactly what they wanted all along. Bwahahaha! Talk about poison seeds...
Then there was the software. DOS, .BAT files, EDLIN, BASIC, segmented architecture workarounds...
Ha ha ha! If you think this appalling crap was all just simple incompetence, then you are an idiot, or completely ignorant of other streams of computing language/OS development at the time.
It could just faintly have been due to stupidity of the Microsoft/IBM crowd, though I don't believe it.
Then Microsoft Windows came out.
When I realized what they'd done, in particular with the Registry and intermingling of user-config and system-config data, and that this could only have been done with the deliberate intention of making installations impossible to clone to other machines with even slightly different hardware configurations, was when I gave up on system programming for PCs.
That was really a brilliant move of Microsoft's. It set computing back massively, and is *still* crippling the potential.
In general everything Microsoft does, has an underlying intention to cripple and undermine the social benefits of widespread cheap computing power. Of course they have to obfuscate this, by appearing to be delivering advancements. Also they are of course also out to make money, but this is balanced with their intent to shovel poisonous crap to the public. It's a tradeoff, and they are well practiced in application of the Hegelian Dialectic - when you want to do something you know will be unpopular and you don't want to be seen to be trying to do that, you manufacture some seemingly unrelated 'problem'. To which the natural solution appears to be to do what you originally intended. Thus you get what you want, while pretending it wasn't what you wanted. This is standard Game Theory, is used in politics all the time, and most people are too naive and immersed in their own affairs to notice it.
Hence the Win7, 8, 10 sequence. Do a reasonably good OS to gain approval, then a really awful one, then bring out the 'solution to that mistake' - but which includes the evil things you wanted to do all along.
On my primary machine I use a cut-down version of WinXP, mainly because (I hope) all the remote surveillance, backdoors and auto-update crap are removed. Also the system GUI is still reasonably un-obfuscated and direct, there's no 'protected system files' bullshit and the huge overheads, and the OS doesn't try (much) to lie to me about disk data structures. Not too much deliberate OS churn in support of MS's expiring 'certified windows professional' course fees income stream.
Only recently I discovered that Win7 removed the ability to manually arrange icons in folders other than the desktop. Huh? On checking I found there's a registry patch to re-enable this. Get it? The code capability to manually arrange icons (something few but power users would want) is still there, but MS *added* code to disable that capability. On top of the abortion of having icon arrangements stored in obfuscated form deep, deep down in the registry, and get randomly deleted. As opposed to sensibly having such data stored in situ, in the relevant folders. Why wasn't it done that way originally? Because... the human brain deals best with information as visual arrangements. Allowing users to structure their own data, in their own folders, to appear as visual arrangements that never change unless they choose to change them, and allowing such arrangements to be easily backed-up and cloned to other machines, would be too user-empowering. So MS did it in a way that sabotages that. But not sabotaged enough, so in Win 7 the ability was deliberately, specifically disabled.
Anyway, summary:
Microsoft is the corporate equivalent of a psychopath; an evil-intentioned, manipulative and abusive character, but which markets itself well as benevolent, and proceeds via carefully planned series of acts that each appear 'OK', to push the public into a submissive, beaten-down abused dependency. In which they will accept any kind of abuse of their rights and destruction of their privacy and ability to act independently, all the while being convinced that any problems they encounter are somehow all their fault.
Thin-client, subscription-model computing, enforced DRM, full-spectrum remote monitoring of all user activity, enforced 'updates', closed boot model disallowing anything but approved OS installs, etc, being examples of the kind of abusive and restrictive computing platform crippling that one would expect from a psychopath.
If someone did these kinds of things directly to another person, they could be charged with mental cruelty, invasion of privacy and causing deliberate injury. But from Microsoft, most of us are conditioned to accept it.
More reading material in folder
http://everist.org/archives/links/__WinXP_info.txt
__Win_Vista.txt
__Win7_links.txt
__Win8_links.txt
__Win_10_info.txt
__MS_Longhorn_links.txt
__MS_Palladium_links.txt
__UEFI_secure_boot_links.txt
__xbox_bunnie_MS_links.txt
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