It is true that Microsoft was restricting and spying on XP users, but Vista
came with a whole new framework for it. Peter Gutmann wrote an excellent
analysis of Vista at release time,
https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
This is not just a historical curriosity. Microsoft's Vista logo program
continues to plague X86 hardware, and the company is working to push it into
ARM. UEFI and "secure boot" can be thought of as implementations of the
same. As Richard Stallman warned after the Sony music CD fiasco, software
owners learned their lesson and burnt digital restrictions into firmware so
they can't be removed. Please see the Libreboot FAQ for the continuing
efforts of software owners to claim complete control of your computer,
https://libreboot.org/faq/
This is a grim time for free software. We must do everything we can to avoid
aiding the companies responsible for it, and to reward those doing what's
right.
These things should have been obvious before Snowden proved them to us. In
this context, DDG should never have used Bing results. Post Snowden, it will
be difficult for any US company to recover their lost reputation, but
especially difficult for those that played Microsoft's game.
