Microsoft has disclosed, over the weekend, that hackers have hacked into and accessed Microsoft users’ Outlook email, Hotmail email, and MSN email, over the course of several months, ending just last month (March of 2019).

A Federal court has ruled that Microsoft is within its rights to refuse to comply with a U.S. warrant that demanded the production of email stored on a Microsoft server located in Ireland. The decision in the lawsuit, involving a warrant issued by the government under the Stored Communications Act (SCA), was handed down by a Federal Court of Appeals in the United States, meaning that unless the Feds want to take it to the Supreme Court, it is now the law of the land.

As we reported last month, Microsoft has been pushing the update to Windows 10 on its users even if they didn’t ask for it, don’t want it, and thought they were refusing it. Now Teri Goldstein of Sausalito, California has won $10,000 from Microsoft after suing MS for the unauthorized upgrade, which she says ruined her computer.

Microsoft and LinkedIn have announced that Microsoft is buying LinkedIn for a cool 26.2 billion dollars.

The BBC is reporting that Microsoft has changed the way that it ‘suggests’ that you upgrade to Windows 10. When you get the update pop-up, saying that “Windows 10 is a recommended update for this PC”, if you click on the X to dismiss the pop-up, rather than dismissing the message, it schedules the update!

That Microsoft website that guesses your age, how-old.net (hashtag #HowOldRobot ) is actually a cleverly disguised system designed to grab your metadata from your photos so that it can be used to advertise to you. Some of the data that how-old.net has been grabbing while guessing how old you are includes your gender, your age, and your location (along with your User Agent string). Exactly the type of data they need for targeting marketing.

Internet technology news sites are reporting the death of Internet Explorer (IE), following Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela essentially announcing as much last week.

Microsoft has released a critical update to patch a “privately reported” Microsoft Secure Channel (“Schannel”) vulnerability which affects all current versions of Windows and Windows Server. Says Microsoft, “This security update resolves a privately reported vulnerability in the Microsoft Secure Channel (Schannel) security package in Windows.”

Microsoft has released Microsoft Windows 10 as a “Windows Technical Preview”. That means that it is sort of like a beta version of Windows 10, out for testing in the real world. And yes, as part of this, they include what can be described as key-logging, or a key-logger, meaning that your keystrokes – the characters that you type – are recorded as you are typing them.

Yesterday we told you about how Microsoft is one of several companies who are encrypting their services and hardening their systems against the prying of nosy agencies like the NSA. Now Microsoft is fighting a Federal court order that they turn over the data for a user’s email account whose email data resides on a server outside of the U.S. (in Ireland, to be specific).

Coincident with the Reset the Net effort, in which they are taking part, Google and Yahoo, along with Microsoft and Facebook, and others, are moving at speed to block the NSA’s snooping, and to tighten up their systems to make it more difficult for the NSA, and others, to eavesdrop on their data.

Employees of more than a dozen high tech giants were subject to a secret agreement (see the smoking gun documents) between the companies to not poach each other’s employees. The deal, labelled “Techtopus” by journalist Mark Ames, included Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Dell, IBM, eBay, Microsoft, Comcast, Clearchannel, Dreamworks and Pixar, and British public relations company WPP (which stands for Wire and Plastics Products – they started out as a manufacturer of shopping baskets).

Call us conspiracy theorists, but the first thing that we thought of when we heard that Microsoft and Nokia had inked a deal for Microsoft to buy Nokia – and with it Stephen Elop, who left Microsoft three years ago to become the CEO of Nokia – was that this was an inside job. Are we the only ones who are suspicious?

Microsoft has disclosed that it has sought permission from the U.S. government to disclose to the public how it handles requests from the Federal government for user data. Microsoft says “We believe the U.S. Constitution guarantees our freedom to share more information with the public, yet the Government is stopping us.”

A couple of weeks ago we talked about the concerns that many had that the new Microsoft Xbox One had built-in spying capabilities, especially as it needed to be connected to the Internet at least 1 hour a day. In fact with the leaks about the NSA PRISM program some were even wondering whether the new Xbox One would have an ‘NSA Spycam’ (in fact we had someone searching for that on our site).