I don't see why we should give into your definition of what's on par with Trump's claim of bugged phones, nor is it controversial that Trump was tapped before he was POTUS. This whole reaction is more about manufactured outrage and distraction from real issues.
But Obama certainly did lie (plenty of variations of "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan." despite millions of Americans seeing their plans terminated which were lies of commission), and commit extrajudicial murder (the so-called 'Terror Tuesday' meetings, as the New York Times tells us, had former President Obama personally selecting targets for assassination. Some of the people killed in these drone attacks include Americans Anwar Awlaki and his 16-year-old son. Others killed in drone attacks are overwhelmingly completely unsuspected innocents who happen to be in the vicinity of the kill zone where the bomb goes). Obama lied by omission about these drone war consequences, but he made time to crack wise about death-by-drone at one of his Correspondent's dinners wherein he quipped about threatening a boy band his daughters enjoyed with death-by-drone ("You'll never see it coming..."). Pres. Obama called the Iraq war a "dumb war" and then kept it going for his entire term (this choice helped make his the first US President to be at war his entire term in office). Oh, don't worry: Pres. Trump is down with all of these policies. Trump apparently plans to keep HMOs intact and in charge of American healthcare with his own spin away from universalizing Medicare (we're learning about the details of this now but the broad strokes are clear) despite what he told "60 Minutes" about universal healthcare. Universalizing Medicare ala HR676 would be useful, is widely approved by Americans, is something real progressives should champion (particularly now) instead of knuckling under to more HMO rule, and would (by design) make it illegal for HMOs to cover the same care covered by Medicare (America's extant single-payer system). But passing HR676 into law would also ensure these HMOs wouldn't fund Democratic and Republican Party campaigns. And on war, Pres. Trump recently had Awlaki's 8-year-old daughter killed in a drone-led campaign in which the Navy SEAL Team 6 shot her in the throat and let her bleed to death. And there's no sign the US is ever leaving Iraq. Not only are these issue far more important than someone's manufactured outrage over Trump's tweet about spying on his calls, they point out how the similarities across administrations on significant issues far outnumber and outweigh the differences between administrations. And this is no accident.
Getting back to pointing out how much manufactured outrage works to obscure more important issues: The NSA's slogan "Sniff It All, Collect It All, Know It All, Process It All, Exploit It All" covers the situation quite well. That slogan is not "Collect some of it, Process most of it, Exploit things here or there but certainly not Trump Tower-related data". So it's perfectly reasonable Trump's communications were tapped. As RT's "The Resident" pointed out (using slightly different words than the next quote) and Ted Rall astutely point out "Of course Obama tapped Trump. Snowden told us. Obama tapped everyone!". German Chancellor Angela Merkel didn't like it when it was revealed her conversations were also being spied upon. The controversy is that the US taps so much regardless of whether they're abiding by US law. That's a far more important point.
Any outrage over Trump's reaction is a pointer to how much that person wasn't paying attention during the Snowden revelations and its consequences (which are ongoing to this day).
"Doing so would make apps like Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp entirely insecure" is what makes running security-minded programs on non-free, user-subjugating, always-untrustworthy, proprietary OSes a joke. People get a sense that they're safer from malware then they really are and they think they get to keep their proprietary conveniences as well. Openwashing will not help you.
I know it's a lot of work to learn new things and change your views and your behavior. I understand that software freedom is differently political than what you're encouraged to adopt, and software freedom requires you to consider more than what's listed in virtually every features & money-based ad campaign from monied proprietors. And I get that coming to terms with the consequences of software freedom runs directly contrary to believing that you don't need to think any further than what proprietors and their "open source" friends tell you to think about (because no proprietor frames their offerings in terms of the freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify the software, hence proprietors are more likely to sanction the open source movement which eschews these values and even celebrates partnering with proprietors like Red Hat's recent uncritical commentary on Microsoft's software and Microsoft's new campaign regarding "Linux"—no mention of GNU which might bring software freedom to mind). But in the real world you need to stop trusting proprietary systems to keep you safe, respect your privacy, or other practical consequences of software freedom. Proprietary software wasn't designed to do that and therefore that software never will do that job. There is no middle ground which allows you to run proprietary software while retaining the benefits of software freedom. It's time to value software freedom for its own sake.
Even if all published software were free, exploits like these are possible because all complex software has bugs. Perfect security is not the issue. The issue is who gets to control their own computer and how we treat each other. Even after these exploits are published by WikiLeaks and people have had time to consider them and protect against their adverse effects, proprietors will still have power over users who run their proprietary software. Users won't be able to tell what other exploits are out there and therefore it will be harder to protect against them. The difference between proprietary subjugation and software freedom becomes more clear: Free software users will be able to run, inspect, improve, and share improvements with others making that software more able to prevent future attacks. But proprietary software users won't be allowed to do the due diligence they need in order to help themselves no matter how technically skilled they are or how willing to repair things they are. No computer user deserves to be treated that way. It will take a lot of work to get people to understand why they too should care about software freedom even if they're non-technical (like most computer users are). So I urge you to understand software freedom for its own sake and to try to help others understand as well.
Relatedly, the Free Software Foundation's "Respects Your Freedom" campaign has some new hardware on the list. I recommend buying some and using it, even if it's not up-to-date with the latest capabilities and seemingly expensive for what's offered. We need more people to invest in free replacements for proprietary, locked-down, user-subjugating systems. We need to make investments in our own collective future by funding the free products available today so we can have modern, highly-capable, and fully user-controllable POWER8, RISC, etc. systems which will respect the owner's control.
Are you making claims beyond your knowledge? The device runs on proprietary software. By default we have no idea when the device is listening (most likely all the time, otherwise how would it know when someone uttered the 'wake word'?), we have no idea if there's a recording made, and we have no idea where that recording goes (users certainly don't get to control where the recordings go somewhere or if any such recordings are made).
Perhaps this is why it's a better idea to manually bring up a website & order something, or (by extension for TVs which are now "smart") not get a TV running proprietary software with a camera and mic aimed at the user...often in their bedroom aimed at squarely at their bed.
How many unwitting porn stars are there now? Just give us a round figure, so to speak.
In other words, kiosks help you preserve more of your locational privacy in exchange for a minor wait you can definitely afford (I'm guessing around 10 minutes or less). Consumers are trained to think that their convenience should come at whatever price is offered and that's not wise. In the case of running apps on your computer you're also possibly handing over your mic data, address book data, and anything else you're doing with your tracker. That app is proprietary, so you're speaking beyond your knowledge when you say the itinerary tracking is "optional". You don't know all that it's copying or where the copied data is sent and you're never given a chance to review the data before sending it or the option to make sure the program isn't lying to you by presenting you with less data than it is actually copying and sending. The parties you're handing the data to: more unaccountable people at the restaurant who don't care about your privacy and have no reason to stop tracking your movements should they find that useful for them.
All this because you thought saving 10 minutes or less was "so last year".
Your framing, as with anyone who says DRM is somehow necessary, is giving into those who would take away the freedom the web was built on. I'd rather have a free web than a web DRM-based business owners feel more comfortable with because I value my freedom.
Even in the narrow terms defended by DRM quislings DRM doesn't work to exclude those who share copies of DRM'd works; virtually everything Netflix publishes is available gratis online anyhow. So what we end up is the very divided web DRM proponents claim will be avoided with DRM. Thus this debate isn't really about pursuing that alleged unification. Better to push for the freedom that got us to the point where businesses took an interest and sought to divide and conquer.
I wouldn't be worried about the caching from third parties picking up snapshots (ala Internet Archive's Wayback Machine) because I doubt there's any way one could make the organization delete their copies on the basis of a third-party bug (the web is global and no single legal regime covers it all), particularly when adversely affected users need only change their credentials to avoid inadvertent credential exposure.
As to allowing a few organizations act as gateways to the information on the web: that's a major issue and I charge the sites that choose to use the caching services with the responsibility. It's bad enough that the web is so centralized—there's no easy way to replicate even websites that have largely static data so that one can browse them offline, for instance. But caches one can't avoid make this worse by making users contend with single points of failure that are also empowered to needlessly require Javascript, discriminate against traffic from VPNs, etc., on behalf of so many websites. My experience is that admins who choose to use such cache services aren't so picky about the elements I recommend against (browse with JS off, eliminate a site's cookies soon after the need for those cookies are gone, don't run nonfree software, etc.). Unavoidable caching is a very bad choice and the caching feature strikes me as no benefit worth the price of giving away such power.
Not just a rootkit, there's also another new patent-encumbered format you don't really need for doing something you'd be better off doing another way, and proprietary firmware that will take away advertised features at some as-yet unannounced date. David Manning says it's "this year's hottest new star!" but I think you'll BE MOVED to consider other options.
Microsoft, owner of Skype (which Microsoft changed specifically for spying, not that Skype was trustworthy under its previous owner either as The Guardian tells us, "Eight months before being bought by Microsoft, Skype joined the Prism program in February 2011.") and NSA "provider" since 2007-09-11 (the NSA's first PRISM provider) wants us to understand their "commitment to our customers' security". Apparently that commitment is as little as they can get away with.
That's true of every software proprietor, Google included. The problem is the lack of software freedom which is designed to leave users at the mercy of the only programmers allowed to inspect, alter, and publish improvements to the proprietary software—these are the very programmers users couldn't trust with their security in the first place.
I don't think that will be sufficient or even a good plan for the car owner.
The correct and complete solution is simple (and it's high time/. readers start endorsing this to each other and to their Congressional representatives): complete corresponding source code for all of the car's software licensed to the car owner under a free software license. I recommend the AGPLv3 or later in order to help maintain software freedom when people provide remote services to do this job. This would allow the car owner to have an application they trust running on and in the car which allows them to list all connections to other parties and selectively break whichever connections they wish ad-hoc. Few dealers would prefer this because it cuts them out of the loop; only dealers that genuinely want you to have the best available support and service, even extending beyond the dealer's business.
Practical problems with a dealer-only arrangement include: no possibility of getting this fixed ad-hoc (dealers in the US often don't do business on Sundays) which means your privacy means less to them than their ability to engineer new monopolies, no way to trust that the connection to someone's monitor is complete (you're trusting the dealer not to screw you but they have already shown a desire to do that in other ways), dealers are like any other business in that they sometimes go out of business which leaves car owners in the dark for getting this operation done, cooperative dealers are sometimes too far to realistically deal with (if I sell the car from the US mainland to someone in Hawaii they won't want to ship the car back to get this done because their Hawaiian dealer either doesn't exist or isn't cooperative).
It appears that multiple posters are buying right into the unproven, undefended assertions the article makes. A couple of strong claims go well beyond the article author's knowledge.
If you are worried about hackers or government agencies accessing this
data, you shouldn't. As long as you properly secure your iCloud account
with a strong password and two-factor authentication, the data is only
accessible by you.
For all one knows, Safari, a proprietary program running on proprietary OSes, uploads data to the user's server account encrypted with two keys, one supplied by the user the other by Apple. This would allow Apple to decrypt the data and access whatever they wish. Without knowing what the software does we can't assert that users ought not be worried about others gaining access to their data.
The article also claims
Apple may be in the process of fixing this, as some accounts are now only showing two weeks worth of deleted records. It isn't clear why all records have not been purged.
Unfortunately this result is indistinguishable from Apple hiding data from users. Any competent developer knows how to not return all the data in the database to a user's query. Any competent sysadmin knows how to move data from one place accessible to the user interface to another place only accessible to Apple. In other words, we can't know if data is "purged" as the article claims.
So this is what the shills have to offer—a blanket and unjustified declaration that people in the know (who presumably read/.) should not only be willing to be treated badly but an attempt at narrowing the scope of allowable debate to exclude reminding people of Sony's horribly bad choices which treat consumers badly ("pointless rant"). Sony's defenders/shills must be seeing the increasing retelling of such stories as a threat, otherwise there would be no need for posts such as the parent post in the first place.
Please guys that write this stuff - you cannot make unilateral decisions on security and not impact workloads. Yes, the average Internet user is an idiot and needs to be protected, but those non-idiots don't have the hours of time needed to get around your unilateral coding decisions.
Apparently they can and they do just that, hence your plea for help. But discussing this in terms of your workload is really discussing a distraction. Computer owners benefit from software freedom because software freedom grants users the ability to make the software do what they want it to do. If your chosen Java runtime doesn't behave the way you want, pick a free software Java runtime and customize it to be more efficient for your needs. If Firefox doesn't have the UI you want, you can customize it to gain that UI or port older code you liked to the current version. Sure, this comes at a price: learning development, testing code, documenting one's work, and possibly coordinating changes with others (such as publishing for upstream adoption). But the alternative is non-free software where you don't have options and you beg developers to see things your way—as you said, the proprietors "make unilateral decisions" and these decisions affect more than just security issues. Software freedom lets you decide how much you want others to control your computer.
A perfect example of the point I made earlier and previously when talking about Star Wars under Disney versus under Lucas. Not funding your own oppression is hardly radical, it's quite sensible to recognize that politics are very much a part of the matter involved in dealing with corporate media (such as Hollywood movies and TV shows). This also isn't a matter of seeking perfection -- if/.ers stop paying to see Star Trek we don't take down Paramount -- that argument puts more power in your hands than you have (flattery) and then tries to argue how you shouldn't use that power to get what you (presumably) want: more Star Trek-related works and the option of being a participant in that, not just a consumer. It's a matter of recognizing whether you want your money to go toward organizations that needlessly restrict their biggest fans from celebrating the work or organizations that show they're not jerks by letting the derivative works coexist and even considering them a challenge to come up with better plots, interesting characters, and another innovative series.
Earlier today, Melinda Taylor (one of Julian Assange's lawyers) spoke to RT from The Hague. But unfortunately the interviewer stacked so many different questions on top of each other in his interview with Taylor, she could easily escape having to plainly answer whether Assange will turn himself in to the US sometime in May after Manning walks free. At one point (2m06s) the interviewer asked:
Right, so what is the likely outcome of that going to be? What's your best guess at the moment, you are one of his lawyers, what do you think is gonna happen next? Are we gonna see him going off to America? Is there some sort of deal behind the scenes as well, you think? There has been some surmising that there may be some kind of behind-the-scenes deal in Obama's last few days to finally try to get him to go over to America. Is that—any mileage in that or not?
So many/. posters won't do this eminently sensible thing. A story comes out about how copyright term extension hurts Americans and lots of people who read/. know that Disney was a big push behind the Sonny Bono Act, but/. won't stop giving Disney their money anytime a Star Wars movie comes out. Paramount alienates their core audience by not only not making more Star Trek TV show episodes but working to restrict or shut down fan-made shows./. readers won't stop seeing Star Trek movies in the theaters (and probably already paid CBS in anticipation of the next Star Trek TV show). They also won't run free software because it might get in the way of their gaming. And I'd bet most of them own trackers (cell phones, mobile phones) despite the non-freedom and constant tracking. Privacy, security, and not handing over sovereignty to corporations are all things to be given lip service to here but not actually acted on by making wise choices and having the spine to say "no" on principled grounds.
All proprietary software should be suspected of being malware. Microsoft Windows before version 10 was known to not behave in the user's interest and certainly not in the user's control (as per the definition of proprietary software). Microsoft tried pushing a Windows 10 "upgrade" on users by force, for example. Other "features" in Windows 10 (such as ignoring a user's privacy settings and doing what is in Microsoft's interest) were simply more along this line. Microsoft's aggressive sales tactics pointed to in this/. story are another example. In time there will be an announcement that Windows 7 will no longer receive updates and the hard sell for Windows 10 (or some other Windows variant) will continue. The question for all Windows users is how much more treatment like this they'd like to receive. It's never been easier to switch to a fully free software OS and run nothing but free software on top of that.
So the threat of death is enough for you to argue the status quo standing behind proprietors and denying the user full control of a device they obtained (in Sandler's case wear inside their body) but not enough for you to let the user control. We still don't think that's the case for more common devices that are involved in lot of harm such as cars. In light of what's actually already happened to Sandler, your response is remarkably sycophantic to power. Automakers would probably be interested to talk to you in light of the ongoing embarrassment they face in Dieselgate.
Interested people already modify the source code to the software running on various devices, it's a matter of which people get to inspect, share, and modify. For all you know, in Sandler's case she could take said code to someone who is sufficiently skilled. In any event, to whom the user takes the source code is nobody's business but theirs and not a justification for the failures that have already occurred or foreseeable problems to others.
Chrome does that now, but Google could make Chrome behave differently and not ask, simply accept the new plugin (with its spying turned on by default) without prompting the user.
Ultimately this allegation of "smarts" is not under the user's control, it's unsafe and a minor stroke of luck that things happened to work out the way they did for now. It doesn't strike me as smart to dismiss this as a settled matter, just as it was not smart for Microsoft Windows 10 users to believe that the OS privacy settings were being obeyed when they weren't.
Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, has an enlarged heart (hypertrophic cardiomyopathy) and is at risk of suddenly dying (due to a medical condition called "sudden death"). She has no symptoms. She has given a talk about this many times at tech conferences, you should be able to find a copy of her talk online quite easily. She calls herself a "cyborg lawyer running on proprietary software" because she needs to wear a pacemaker/defibrillator device on her heart which keeps her heart beating within a predetermined acceptable range (not too slow, not too fast) by shocking her heart until it beats at an acceptable rhythm. Sandler said she's been shocked before and it's like being kicked in the chest and it takes the wind out of her for a while, requiring her to take some time for recovery.
She knew of software freedom and figured on these weaknesses in these devices, some of which can be controlled remotely at some distance, because all of them run on proprietary software. She tried to get the source code, even offering to sign a non-disclosure agreement to do so, and nobody would share the code with her. She said she was the only one to ask her doctors about what ran on the device. She therefore chose an older model which requires the "programmer" device which sends a signal to the pacemaker/defibrillator be quite close to her body so that she'd probably know if someone were doing things to her device. The lack of software freedom and full user control (ownership) of the device is quite obviously a health risk and possibly lethal. Don't let anyone tell you a lack of software freedom isn't serious.
An interesting thing happened during her pregnancy, which she explained in an update to her talk: She learned that a pregnant woman's heart sometimes naturally races. For most women of childbearing age this isn't a problem as they're unlikely to need a pacemaker/defibrillator, so their heart can occasionally race without serious consequences. For Sandler this racing triggers the device to shock her back into an "acceptable" heart rhythm. It appears that the pacemaker/defibrillator device makers didn't test this device on women young enough to be of childbearing age but they're apparently happy to sell the devices for implanting into users of any age. This lack of testing in combination with the lack of software freedom means the device manufacturers aren't doing due diligence and they're preventing younger women, such as Sandler, from looking out for their own interests—avoiding "sudden death". One can only imagine what horrible multiply lethal outcome could predictably result for a pregnant woman with the same condition Sandler has whose heart races when she was driving while receiving a shock from her non-free pacemaker/defibrillator device. Don't let anyone tell you a lack of software freedom isn't serious.
Snowden confirmed beyond any doubt that Microsoft is an NSA partner and spying is big business (that's why the NSA has so many partners amongst software proprietors). We all knew Microsoft was and is a software proprietor. After this 'feature' becomes commonplace it will be easier to convince people that they don't need or want that pesky indicator light next to the camera/mic showing when the camera/mic is on. After all, it's always lit and therefore 'useless'.
A right and proper view would say you can't trust software proprietors (yes, as long as the corporate repeater sites like/. keep publishing the same kinds of stories, they'll merit the same responses because these stories all have the same lack of software freedom at their core). That indicator light was always under proprietary software control anyway, so you couldn't ever really trust the device wasn't on even when the light was off. Increasingly computers are a user-accepted means of spying on people in their homes, their cars, their workplace, and anywhere else they travel. A combination of desktop and portable computers all running proprietary, user-subjugating OSes with built-in cameras/mics has made this degree of spying viable for years. Consider the power of data collection in your tracker (or, less honestly: "cell phone"/"mobile phone") which primarily tracks your location many times a minute (via GPS and cell tower triangulation); this device has a mic you don't control and can't determine when it's on. The computer is very capable of secretly recording and sending audio data. Most trackers have video cameras too, with predictable benefit for spying. People can be monitored all-day every day, even while they sleep (some people sleep in front of a "smart" TV with a computer and camera/mic built into it, because that makes the TV "smart"!). They also have a charging tracker next to them all night long (because they're desperate to believe that they need to be reachable all the time).
Sadly, there are too many IT people who haven't thought this through and value minor conveniences over privacy. Knowing when such monitoring is beneficial and when it's harmful is beyond the scope of allowable debate in the corporate media, and there's simply no room for teaching people about software freedom or why we should value software freedom for its own sake. IT pros should help teach people what's possible here, not act as a bulwark for proprietors, spies, and push deeper user subjugation.
You've overlooked an important benefit of freedom: only software freedom grants users the ability to either learn what needs to change and change it, or hire someone with the needed skill to do this job for them. You appear to have a preference for init over systemd (my experience is that the only people who bring this up dislike systemd), so you could do this work (or participate with others in doing this work) and then distribute the fruits of your labor, even commercially, so nobody else need live with the alternative you dislike. I doubt non-technical users will know what systemd or init are much less have a preference, but perhaps technical users will be interested.
Saying these freedoms are worthless without being technical enough to exercise them is thus not only untrue, it misunderstands the point of freedom. Your claim is akin to arguing that freedom of speech is pointless because you don't plan to speak against the powerful. Others would find such freedom useful, so arguing against that freedom does them no favors, and you can't tell what the future holds. Every programmer wasn't always a programmer, they probably started using computers as a non-technical user before they became a programmer. The wiser course is to value the freedom for its own sake and use it when needed.
You also conflate very separate issues: "closed source" is a reference to the open source developmental methodology which eschews the very freedoms I wrote about. That group is a right-wing reactionary effort founded over a decade after the free software movement and denies the focus on ethics and community the free software movement (a social movement) makes central to its activism. This has a profound consequence: Open source enthusiasts, when faced with an implacable proprietor who won't free their software or accept the offer of improving development by including the users, is all too willing to go along with proprietors. A free software movement activist, on the other hand, reacts by refusing the proprietary software offer and perhaps working to do the same job with a free program instead.
Finally you mentioned "commercial" in such a way as to suggest that commercialism is a relevant part of a problem here. It's not. There's nothing wrong with commercially offering free software programming talent. I recommend you charge as much as you can get for, say, offering your init-based variant of a systemd-based GNU/Linux distribution. You would hopefully offer a complete working operating system, not just the Linux kernel.
You're right in that the headline text is filled with lies (typical of the corporate tech press and their corporate repeater friends like/.) and things like this should all be opt-in by default. But without software freedom, even those changes would be necessary but insufficient to ensure user's privacy because there's no way to check to make sure the software actually behaves in accordance with the settings.
Much to the apparent chagrin of moderators in the recent Microsoft thread about letting Windows 10 users opt-out of automatic updates who marked down posts about software freedom, the real answer remains the same here—no software freedom means no real control over one's computer and that includes no privacy for the user. Network dumps reveal some of what the software does but not all; it's very easy for programmers to encrypt data they want to send somewhere and/or delay sending data in an attempt to not show up when the system's network output is being watched.
Microsoft's promises (which boil down to "Trust us this time! Really!") must be interpreted in the context of taking the word of a liar whose secret software should now be trusted. That makes no sense to do, and the same logic applies to all non-free/user-subjugating software. No matter how much technical skill you have you have to assume proprietary software is doing what you don't want it to do because you don't have the permission to check out what it's actually doing, change it to make it obey you, or help your community by sharing copies of improved software.
The only way to get real and full control over your computer is to run nothing but free software. Free (as in freedom) software gives you the freedom to choose what you run, and to alter how the software behaves if you find you don't agree with what it does. No proprietor offers that as a choice. I suggest considering a computer recommended by the "Respects Your Freedom" campaign and other computers in which you can run fully-free OSes and free firmware (there are modern POWER8 and Intel-compatible systems to do this as well as older lower-end hardware).
As to Microsoft in particular, this story effectively comes to nothing. You'd have to be quite naive to believe that a proprietor will give up its power over the user to not have some way to make their system run what the proprietor wants. If Microsoft ever claims they don't have such backdoor access to Windows systems, keep in mind there's no way to verify that no such backdoors exist or fix them if they're later discovered. Microsoft has an ugly history (some of which the public knows about in the Windows 10 software that was forced on some users at various points) which should prevent anyone from believing them. This whole story is nothing but a PR move trying to make Microsoft look better in light of Windows users apparently rejecting Windows 10 and sharing information about times when Windows 10 was forcibly and immediately imposed. The tech press is so thoroughly corporate now you'll find sycophants saying otherwise but they can't talk away the lack of software freedom that forms the basis of a proprietor's power over their users.
As we learned years ago from IBM's "Think" magazine, #5, 1990
You get value from patents in two ways," says Roger Smith, IBM
Assistant General Counsel, intellectual property law. "Through fees,
and through licensing negotiations that give IBM access to other
patents.
The IBM patent portfolio gains us the freedom to do what we need to
do through cross-licensing--it gives us access to the inventions of
others that are the key to rapid innovation. Access is far more
valuable to IBM than the fees it receives from its 9,000 active
patents. There's no direct calculation of this value, but it's many
times larger than the fee income, perhaps an order of magnitude
larger.
The value IBM gets from
cross-licensing measures the trouble that the patent system would
cause IBM if IBM could not avoid it. IBM's estimate is that the
trouble could easily be ten times the good one can expect from one's
own patents--even for a company with 9,000 of them.
Obviously that was written back when IBM had fewer patents, but it's no less true today. Continuing from the analysis:
For IBM, this trouble is hypothetical--cross-licensing prevents it
from happening. For ordinary companies which cannot do likewise, the
burden is real. IBM's estimate suggests that for a typical software
company, patents will do ten times as much harm as good. Only the
elimination of patents from the software field can enable most
software developers to continue with their work.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see why we should give into your definition of what's on par with Trump's claim of bugged phones, nor is it controversial that Trump was tapped before he was POTUS. This whole reaction is more about manufactured outrage and distraction from real issues.
But Obama certainly did lie (plenty of variations of "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan." despite millions of Americans seeing their plans terminated which were lies of commission), and commit extrajudicial murder (the so-called 'Terror Tuesday' meetings, as the New York Times tells us, had former President Obama personally selecting targets for assassination. Some of the people killed in these drone attacks include Americans Anwar Awlaki and his 16-year-old son. Others killed in drone attacks are overwhelmingly completely unsuspected innocents who happen to be in the vicinity of the kill zone where the bomb goes). Obama lied by omission about these drone war consequences, but he made time to crack wise about death-by-drone at one of his Correspondent's dinners wherein he quipped about threatening a boy band his daughters enjoyed with death-by-drone ("You'll never see it coming..."). Pres. Obama called the Iraq war a "dumb war" and then kept it going for his entire term (this choice helped make his the first US President to be at war his entire term in office). Oh, don't worry: Pres. Trump is down with all of these policies. Trump apparently plans to keep HMOs intact and in charge of American healthcare with his own spin away from universalizing Medicare (we're learning about the details of this now but the broad strokes are clear) despite what he told "60 Minutes" about universal healthcare. Universalizing Medicare ala HR676 would be useful, is widely approved by Americans, is something real progressives should champion (particularly now) instead of knuckling under to more HMO rule, and would (by design) make it illegal for HMOs to cover the same care covered by Medicare (America's extant single-payer system). But passing HR676 into law would also ensure these HMOs wouldn't fund Democratic and Republican Party campaigns. And on war, Pres. Trump recently had Awlaki's 8-year-old daughter killed in a drone-led campaign in which the Navy SEAL Team 6 shot her in the throat and let her bleed to death. And there's no sign the US is ever leaving Iraq. Not only are these issue far more important than someone's manufactured outrage over Trump's tweet about spying on his calls, they point out how the similarities across administrations on significant issues far outnumber and outweigh the differences between administrations. And this is no accident.
Getting back to pointing out how much manufactured outrage works to obscure more important issues: The NSA's slogan "Sniff It All, Collect It All, Know It All, Process It All, Exploit It All" covers the situation quite well. That slogan is not "Collect some of it, Process most of it, Exploit things here or there but certainly not Trump Tower-related data". So it's perfectly reasonable Trump's communications were tapped. As RT's "The Resident" pointed out (using slightly different words than the next quote) and Ted Rall astutely point out "Of course Obama tapped Trump. Snowden told us. Obama tapped everyone!". German Chancellor Angela Merkel didn't like it when it was revealed her conversations were also being spied upon. The controversy is that the US taps so much regardless of whether they're abiding by US law. That's a far more important point.
Any outrage over Trump's reaction is a pointer to how much that person wasn't paying attention during the Snowden revelations and its consequences (which are ongoing to this day).
"Doing so would make apps like Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp entirely insecure" is what makes running security-minded programs on non-free, user-subjugating, always-untrustworthy, proprietary OSes a joke. People get a sense that they're safer from malware then they really are and they think they get to keep their proprietary conveniences as well. Openwashing will not help you.
I know it's a lot of work to learn new things and change your views and your behavior. I understand that software freedom is differently political than what you're encouraged to adopt, and software freedom requires you to consider more than what's listed in virtually every features & money-based ad campaign from monied proprietors. And I get that coming to terms with the consequences of software freedom runs directly contrary to believing that you don't need to think any further than what proprietors and their "open source" friends tell you to think about (because no proprietor frames their offerings in terms of the freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify the software, hence proprietors are more likely to sanction the open source movement which eschews these values and even celebrates partnering with proprietors like Red Hat's recent uncritical commentary on Microsoft's software and Microsoft's new campaign regarding "Linux"—no mention of GNU which might bring software freedom to mind). But in the real world you need to stop trusting proprietary systems to keep you safe, respect your privacy, or other practical consequences of software freedom. Proprietary software wasn't designed to do that and therefore that software never will do that job. There is no middle ground which allows you to run proprietary software while retaining the benefits of software freedom. It's time to value software freedom for its own sake.
Even if all published software were free, exploits like these are possible because all complex software has bugs. Perfect security is not the issue. The issue is who gets to control their own computer and how we treat each other. Even after these exploits are published by WikiLeaks and people have had time to consider them and protect against their adverse effects, proprietors will still have power over users who run their proprietary software. Users won't be able to tell what other exploits are out there and therefore it will be harder to protect against them. The difference between proprietary subjugation and software freedom becomes more clear: Free software users will be able to run, inspect, improve, and share improvements with others making that software more able to prevent future attacks. But proprietary software users won't be allowed to do the due diligence they need in order to help themselves no matter how technically skilled they are or how willing to repair things they are. No computer user deserves to be treated that way. It will take a lot of work to get people to understand why they too should care about software freedom even if they're non-technical (like most computer users are). So I urge you to understand software freedom for its own sake and to try to help others understand as well.
Relatedly, the Free Software Foundation's "Respects Your Freedom" campaign has some new hardware on the list. I recommend buying some and using it, even if it's not up-to-date with the latest capabilities and seemingly expensive for what's offered. We need more people to invest in free replacements for proprietary, locked-down, user-subjugating systems. We need to make investments in our own collective future by funding the free products available today so we can have modern, highly-capable, and fully user-controllable POWER8, RISC, etc. systems which will respect the owner's control.
Are you making claims beyond your knowledge? The device runs on proprietary software. By default we have no idea when the device is listening (most likely all the time, otherwise how would it know when someone uttered the 'wake word'?), we have no idea if there's a recording made, and we have no idea where that recording goes (users certainly don't get to control where the recordings go somewhere or if any such recordings are made).
Perhaps this is why it's a better idea to manually bring up a website & order something, or (by extension for TVs which are now "smart") not get a TV running proprietary software with a camera and mic aimed at the user...often in their bedroom aimed at squarely at their bed.
How many unwitting porn stars are there now? Just give us a round figure, so to speak.
In other words, kiosks help you preserve more of your locational privacy in exchange for a minor wait you can definitely afford (I'm guessing around 10 minutes or less). Consumers are trained to think that their convenience should come at whatever price is offered and that's not wise. In the case of running apps on your computer you're also possibly handing over your mic data, address book data, and anything else you're doing with your tracker. That app is proprietary, so you're speaking beyond your knowledge when you say the itinerary tracking is "optional". You don't know all that it's copying or where the copied data is sent and you're never given a chance to review the data before sending it or the option to make sure the program isn't lying to you by presenting you with less data than it is actually copying and sending. The parties you're handing the data to: more unaccountable people at the restaurant who don't care about your privacy and have no reason to stop tracking your movements should they find that useful for them.
All this because you thought saving 10 minutes or less was "so last year".
Your framing, as with anyone who says DRM is somehow necessary, is giving into those who would take away the freedom the web was built on. I'd rather have a free web than a web DRM-based business owners feel more comfortable with because I value my freedom.
Even in the narrow terms defended by DRM quislings DRM doesn't work to exclude those who share copies of DRM'd works; virtually everything Netflix publishes is available gratis online anyhow. So what we end up is the very divided web DRM proponents claim will be avoided with DRM. Thus this debate isn't really about pursuing that alleged unification. Better to push for the freedom that got us to the point where businesses took an interest and sought to divide and conquer.
I wouldn't be worried about the caching from third parties picking up snapshots (ala Internet Archive's Wayback Machine) because I doubt there's any way one could make the organization delete their copies on the basis of a third-party bug (the web is global and no single legal regime covers it all), particularly when adversely affected users need only change their credentials to avoid inadvertent credential exposure.
As to allowing a few organizations act as gateways to the information on the web: that's a major issue and I charge the sites that choose to use the caching services with the responsibility. It's bad enough that the web is so centralized—there's no easy way to replicate even websites that have largely static data so that one can browse them offline, for instance. But caches one can't avoid make this worse by making users contend with single points of failure that are also empowered to needlessly require Javascript, discriminate against traffic from VPNs, etc., on behalf of so many websites. My experience is that admins who choose to use such cache services aren't so picky about the elements I recommend against (browse with JS off, eliminate a site's cookies soon after the need for those cookies are gone, don't run nonfree software, etc.). Unavoidable caching is a very bad choice and the caching feature strikes me as no benefit worth the price of giving away such power.
Not just a rootkit, there's also another new patent-encumbered format you don't really need for doing something you'd be better off doing another way, and proprietary firmware that will take away advertised features at some as-yet unannounced date. David Manning says it's "this year's hottest new star!" but I think you'll BE MOVED to consider other options.
Microsoft, owner of Skype (which Microsoft changed specifically for spying, not that Skype was trustworthy under its previous owner either as The Guardian tells us, "Eight months before being bought by Microsoft, Skype joined the Prism program in February 2011.") and NSA "provider" since 2007-09-11 (the NSA's first PRISM provider) wants us to understand their "commitment to our customers' security". Apparently that commitment is as little as they can get away with.
That's true of every software proprietor, Google included. The problem is the lack of software freedom which is designed to leave users at the mercy of the only programmers allowed to inspect, alter, and publish improvements to the proprietary software—these are the very programmers users couldn't trust with their security in the first place.
I don't think that will be sufficient or even a good plan for the car owner.
The correct and complete solution is simple (and it's high time /. readers start endorsing this to each other and to their Congressional representatives): complete corresponding source code for all of the car's software licensed to the car owner under a free software license. I recommend the AGPLv3 or later in order to help maintain software freedom when people provide remote services to do this job. This would allow the car owner to have an application they trust running on and in the car which allows them to list all connections to other parties and selectively break whichever connections they wish ad-hoc. Few dealers would prefer this because it cuts them out of the loop; only dealers that genuinely want you to have the best available support and service, even extending beyond the dealer's business.
Practical problems with a dealer-only arrangement include: no possibility of getting this fixed ad-hoc (dealers in the US often don't do business on Sundays) which means your privacy means less to them than their ability to engineer new monopolies, no way to trust that the connection to someone's monitor is complete (you're trusting the dealer not to screw you but they have already shown a desire to do that in other ways), dealers are like any other business in that they sometimes go out of business which leaves car owners in the dark for getting this operation done, cooperative dealers are sometimes too far to realistically deal with (if I sell the car from the US mainland to someone in Hawaii they won't want to ship the car back to get this done because their Hawaiian dealer either doesn't exist or isn't cooperative).
It appears that multiple posters are buying right into the unproven, undefended assertions the article makes. A couple of strong claims go well beyond the article author's knowledge.
For all one knows, Safari, a proprietary program running on proprietary OSes, uploads data to the user's server account encrypted with two keys, one supplied by the user the other by Apple. This would allow Apple to decrypt the data and access whatever they wish. Without knowing what the software does we can't assert that users ought not be worried about others gaining access to their data.
The article also claims
Unfortunately this result is indistinguishable from Apple hiding data from users. Any competent developer knows how to not return all the data in the database to a user's query. Any competent sysadmin knows how to move data from one place accessible to the user interface to another place only accessible to Apple. In other words, we can't know if data is "purged" as the article claims.
So this is what the shills have to offer—a blanket and unjustified declaration that people in the know (who presumably read /.) should not only be willing to be treated badly but an attempt at narrowing the scope of allowable debate to exclude reminding people of Sony's horribly bad choices which treat consumers badly ("pointless rant"). Sony's defenders/shills must be seeing the increasing retelling of such stories as a threat, otherwise there would be no need for posts such as the parent post in the first place.
Apparently they can and they do just that, hence your plea for help. But discussing this in terms of your workload is really discussing a distraction. Computer owners benefit from software freedom because software freedom grants users the ability to make the software do what they want it to do. If your chosen Java runtime doesn't behave the way you want, pick a free software Java runtime and customize it to be more efficient for your needs. If Firefox doesn't have the UI you want, you can customize it to gain that UI or port older code you liked to the current version. Sure, this comes at a price: learning development, testing code, documenting one's work, and possibly coordinating changes with others (such as publishing for upstream adoption). But the alternative is non-free software where you don't have options and you beg developers to see things your way—as you said, the proprietors "make unilateral decisions" and these decisions affect more than just security issues. Software freedom lets you decide how much you want others to control your computer.
A perfect example of the point I made earlier and previously when talking about Star Wars under Disney versus under Lucas. Not funding your own oppression is hardly radical, it's quite sensible to recognize that politics are very much a part of the matter involved in dealing with corporate media (such as Hollywood movies and TV shows). This also isn't a matter of seeking perfection -- if /.ers stop paying to see Star Trek we don't take down Paramount -- that argument puts more power in your hands than you have (flattery) and then tries to argue how you shouldn't use that power to get what you (presumably) want: more Star Trek-related works and the option of being a participant in that, not just a consumer. It's a matter of recognizing whether you want your money to go toward organizations that needlessly restrict their biggest fans from celebrating the work or organizations that show they're not jerks by letting the derivative works coexist and even considering them a challenge to come up with better plots, interesting characters, and another innovative series.
Earlier today, Melinda Taylor (one of Julian Assange's lawyers) spoke to RT from The Hague. But unfortunately the interviewer stacked so many different questions on top of each other in his interview with Taylor, she could easily escape having to plainly answer whether Assange will turn himself in to the US sometime in May after Manning walks free. At one point (2m06s) the interviewer asked:
RT's article about this (https://www.rt.com/on-air/374100-assanges-lawyer-melinda-taylor/) currently redirects to their news page instead of showing the article "Assange's lawyer Melinda Taylor talks to RT".
Is Kabletown getting a new owner?
So many /. posters won't do this eminently sensible thing. A story comes out about how copyright term extension hurts Americans and lots of people who read /. know that Disney was a big push behind the Sonny Bono Act, but /. won't stop giving Disney their money anytime a Star Wars movie comes out. Paramount alienates their core audience by not only not making more Star Trek TV show episodes but working to restrict or shut down fan-made shows. /. readers won't stop seeing Star Trek movies in the theaters (and probably already paid CBS in anticipation of the next Star Trek TV show). They also won't run free software because it might get in the way of their gaming. And I'd bet most of them own trackers (cell phones, mobile phones) despite the non-freedom and constant tracking. Privacy, security, and not handing over sovereignty to corporations are all things to be given lip service to here but not actually acted on by making wise choices and having the spine to say "no" on principled grounds.
All proprietary software should be suspected of being malware. Microsoft Windows before version 10 was known to not behave in the user's interest and certainly not in the user's control (as per the definition of proprietary software). Microsoft tried pushing a Windows 10 "upgrade" on users by force, for example. Other "features" in Windows 10 (such as ignoring a user's privacy settings and doing what is in Microsoft's interest) were simply more along this line. Microsoft's aggressive sales tactics pointed to in this /. story are another example. In time there will be an announcement that Windows 7 will no longer receive updates and the hard sell for Windows 10 (or some other Windows variant) will continue. The question for all Windows users is how much more treatment like this they'd like to receive. It's never been easier to switch to a fully free software OS and run nothing but free software on top of that.
So the threat of death is enough for you to argue the status quo standing behind proprietors and denying the user full control of a device they obtained (in Sandler's case wear inside their body) but not enough for you to let the user control. We still don't think that's the case for more common devices that are involved in lot of harm such as cars. In light of what's actually already happened to Sandler, your response is remarkably sycophantic to power. Automakers would probably be interested to talk to you in light of the ongoing embarrassment they face in Dieselgate.
Interested people already modify the source code to the software running on various devices, it's a matter of which people get to inspect, share, and modify. For all you know, in Sandler's case she could take said code to someone who is sufficiently skilled. In any event, to whom the user takes the source code is nobody's business but theirs and not a justification for the failures that have already occurred or foreseeable problems to others.
Chrome does that now, but Google could make Chrome behave differently and not ask, simply accept the new plugin (with its spying turned on by default) without prompting the user.
Ultimately this allegation of "smarts" is not under the user's control, it's unsafe and a minor stroke of luck that things happened to work out the way they did for now. It doesn't strike me as smart to dismiss this as a settled matter, just as it was not smart for Microsoft Windows 10 users to believe that the OS privacy settings were being obeyed when they weren't.
Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, has an enlarged heart (hypertrophic cardiomyopathy) and is at risk of suddenly dying (due to a medical condition called "sudden death"). She has no symptoms. She has given a talk about this many times at tech conferences, you should be able to find a copy of her talk online quite easily. She calls herself a "cyborg lawyer running on proprietary software" because she needs to wear a pacemaker/defibrillator device on her heart which keeps her heart beating within a predetermined acceptable range (not too slow, not too fast) by shocking her heart until it beats at an acceptable rhythm. Sandler said she's been shocked before and it's like being kicked in the chest and it takes the wind out of her for a while, requiring her to take some time for recovery.
She knew of software freedom and figured on these weaknesses in these devices, some of which can be controlled remotely at some distance, because all of them run on proprietary software. She tried to get the source code, even offering to sign a non-disclosure agreement to do so, and nobody would share the code with her. She said she was the only one to ask her doctors about what ran on the device. She therefore chose an older model which requires the "programmer" device which sends a signal to the pacemaker/defibrillator be quite close to her body so that she'd probably know if someone were doing things to her device. The lack of software freedom and full user control (ownership) of the device is quite obviously a health risk and possibly lethal. Don't let anyone tell you a lack of software freedom isn't serious.
An interesting thing happened during her pregnancy, which she explained in an update to her talk: She learned that a pregnant woman's heart sometimes naturally races. For most women of childbearing age this isn't a problem as they're unlikely to need a pacemaker/defibrillator, so their heart can occasionally race without serious consequences. For Sandler this racing triggers the device to shock her back into an "acceptable" heart rhythm. It appears that the pacemaker/defibrillator device makers didn't test this device on women young enough to be of childbearing age but they're apparently happy to sell the devices for implanting into users of any age. This lack of testing in combination with the lack of software freedom means the device manufacturers aren't doing due diligence and they're preventing younger women, such as Sandler, from looking out for their own interests—avoiding "sudden death". One can only imagine what horrible multiply lethal outcome could predictably result for a pregnant woman with the same condition Sandler has whose heart races when she was driving while receiving a shock from her non-free pacemaker/defibrillator device. Don't let anyone tell you a lack of software freedom isn't serious.
Snowden confirmed beyond any doubt that Microsoft is an NSA partner and spying is big business (that's why the NSA has so many partners amongst software proprietors). We all knew Microsoft was and is a software proprietor. After this 'feature' becomes commonplace it will be easier to convince people that they don't need or want that pesky indicator light next to the camera/mic showing when the camera/mic is on. After all, it's always lit and therefore 'useless'.
A right and proper view would say you can't trust software proprietors (yes, as long as the corporate repeater sites like /. keep publishing the same kinds of stories, they'll merit the same responses because these stories all have the same lack of software freedom at their core). That indicator light was always under proprietary software control anyway, so you couldn't ever really trust the device wasn't on even when the light was off. Increasingly computers are a user-accepted means of spying on people in their homes, their cars, their workplace, and anywhere else they travel. A combination of desktop and portable computers all running proprietary, user-subjugating OSes with built-in cameras/mics has made this degree of spying viable for years. Consider the power of data collection in your tracker (or, less honestly: "cell phone"/"mobile phone") which primarily tracks your location many times a minute (via GPS and cell tower triangulation); this device has a mic you don't control and can't determine when it's on. The computer is very capable of secretly recording and sending audio data. Most trackers have video cameras too, with predictable benefit for spying. People can be monitored all-day every day, even while they sleep (some people sleep in front of a "smart" TV with a computer and camera/mic built into it, because that makes the TV "smart"!). They also have a charging tracker next to them all night long (because they're desperate to believe that they need to be reachable all the time).
Sadly, there are too many IT people who haven't thought this through and value minor conveniences over privacy. Knowing when such monitoring is beneficial and when it's harmful is beyond the scope of allowable debate in the corporate media, and there's simply no room for teaching people about software freedom or why we should value software freedom for its own sake. IT pros should help teach people what's possible here, not act as a bulwark for proprietors, spies, and push deeper user subjugation.
You've overlooked an important benefit of freedom: only software freedom grants users the ability to either learn what needs to change and change it, or hire someone with the needed skill to do this job for them. You appear to have a preference for init over systemd (my experience is that the only people who bring this up dislike systemd), so you could do this work (or participate with others in doing this work) and then distribute the fruits of your labor, even commercially, so nobody else need live with the alternative you dislike. I doubt non-technical users will know what systemd or init are much less have a preference, but perhaps technical users will be interested.
Saying these freedoms are worthless without being technical enough to exercise them is thus not only untrue, it misunderstands the point of freedom. Your claim is akin to arguing that freedom of speech is pointless because you don't plan to speak against the powerful. Others would find such freedom useful, so arguing against that freedom does them no favors, and you can't tell what the future holds. Every programmer wasn't always a programmer, they probably started using computers as a non-technical user before they became a programmer. The wiser course is to value the freedom for its own sake and use it when needed.
You also conflate very separate issues: "closed source" is a reference to the open source developmental methodology which eschews the very freedoms I wrote about. That group is a right-wing reactionary effort founded over a decade after the free software movement and denies the focus on ethics and community the free software movement (a social movement) makes central to its activism. This has a profound consequence: Open source enthusiasts, when faced with an implacable proprietor who won't free their software or accept the offer of improving development by including the users, is all too willing to go along with proprietors. A free software movement activist, on the other hand, reacts by refusing the proprietary software offer and perhaps working to do the same job with a free program instead.
Finally you mentioned "commercial" in such a way as to suggest that commercialism is a relevant part of a problem here. It's not. There's nothing wrong with commercially offering free software programming talent. I recommend you charge as much as you can get for, say, offering your init-based variant of a systemd-based GNU/Linux distribution. You would hopefully offer a complete working operating system, not just the Linux kernel.
You're right in that the headline text is filled with lies (typical of the corporate tech press and their corporate repeater friends like /.) and things like this should all be opt-in by default. But without software freedom, even those changes would be necessary but insufficient to ensure user's privacy because there's no way to check to make sure the software actually behaves in accordance with the settings.
Microsoft's record shows this to be the case. The GNU Project's surveillance section of the Microsoft malware page does a good job of collecting stories about how this has already failed Windows users who thought they had tweaked the settings in just the right way to get Windows 10 to not "phone home" or report details of what happened outside the machine. These settings failed to do that job because the software was designed to fail in this way.
Much to the apparent chagrin of moderators in the recent Microsoft thread about letting Windows 10 users opt-out of automatic updates who marked down posts about software freedom, the real answer remains the same here—no software freedom means no real control over one's computer and that includes no privacy for the user. Network dumps reveal some of what the software does but not all; it's very easy for programmers to encrypt data they want to send somewhere and/or delay sending data in an attempt to not show up when the system's network output is being watched.
Microsoft's promises (which boil down to "Trust us this time! Really!") must be interpreted in the context of taking the word of a liar whose secret software should now be trusted. That makes no sense to do, and the same logic applies to all non-free/user-subjugating software. No matter how much technical skill you have you have to assume proprietary software is doing what you don't want it to do because you don't have the permission to check out what it's actually doing, change it to make it obey you, or help your community by sharing copies of improved software.
The only way to get real and full control over your computer is to run nothing but free software. Free (as in freedom) software gives you the freedom to choose what you run, and to alter how the software behaves if you find you don't agree with what it does. No proprietor offers that as a choice. I suggest considering a computer recommended by the "Respects Your Freedom" campaign and other computers in which you can run fully-free OSes and free firmware (there are modern POWER8 and Intel-compatible systems to do this as well as older lower-end hardware).
As to Microsoft in particular, this story effectively comes to nothing. You'd have to be quite naive to believe that a proprietor will give up its power over the user to not have some way to make their system run what the proprietor wants. If Microsoft ever claims they don't have such backdoor access to Windows systems, keep in mind there's no way to verify that no such backdoors exist or fix them if they're later discovered. Microsoft has an ugly history (some of which the public knows about in the Windows 10 software that was forced on some users at various points) which should prevent anyone from believing them. This whole story is nothing but a PR move trying to make Microsoft look better in light of Windows users apparently rejecting Windows 10 and sharing information about times when Windows 10 was forcibly and immediately imposed. The tech press is so thoroughly corporate now you'll find sycophants saying otherwise but they can't talk away the lack of software freedom that forms the basis of a proprietor's power over their users.
As we learned years ago from IBM's "Think" magazine, #5, 1990
The analysis presented in that text file is valuable to us to understand what this means:
Obviously that was written back when IBM had fewer patents, but it's no less true today. Continuing from the analysis: