20260616-mcroslop.txt

Recently I found out that someone has a vendetta against MS, for good
reason. He had pointed out a vulnerability and instead of paying him
for the bug bounty, he was threatened and intimidated, supposedly had
his "life ruined." I can't verify the veracity of his life being
ruined, but I wouldn't put it past MS to be absolute pricks to people
exposing bad or malicious code.

What makes this different is, based on some assumptions, that he
exposed backdoors that MS was going to exploit itself, or rather allow
government agencies to do so. That's where I get extremely angry. Not
only is this guy doing good work exposing vulnerabilities. For his sin
of doing his bounty hunting job, he gets ignored at best, threatened
and harassed on- and offline. He was looking out for the common man
and MS is so lost that they've destroyed any goodwill I had for them
remaining. This is not the company that Bill G. built.

I'm sure I'll have critics as many people hate Bill. I don't totally
blame them: his business strategies were far from fair or even
completely legal. What I liked about the company is at least for a
while they focused on making a good product, at least half the time.
Ruthless or not, Bill still cared about the customer enough to try to
give them a good experience. When customers were unhappy, things were
generally done to address those complaints. Now MS does nothing of the
sort until it affects their stock prices. I'm not sure if it's some
sort of "high-balling" maneuver: make unthinkably-terrible changes. If
people don't whine, all the better for the stockholders. If people do
whine, make some empty promise to reverse some of the unthinkable
changes, but not all of them. It's really just a matter of time before
they implement the changes they wanted, just slowly and/or secretly
over time.

I'm done defending MS. They truly got me into a lot of different
computing things and I'm very thankful for XP and 7, but this is too
much. I mean I abandoned Win 10 for underhanded network activity while
I was on a metered connection. I cannot let nostalgia for what MS or
Win was override the current regime and what kind of unfathomably
villainous malware they've inserted without even bothering to hide
them.