What is criminal is Microsoft deciding that millions of PCs running its software are suddenly obsolete and will no longer be given crucial security updates, as it did with Win XP machines.
We all know this was done to try to force owners to dump the old PCs and buy new copies of Microsoft's operating system. It was a cash grab that failed. It failed for many reasons. In the NHS case, it failed because NHS could not afford to upgrade. If failed in my case because I have an old netbook (Dec 08) that still works just fine and I am not throwing it away just because MS has a quarter coming up.
Yes, NSA and GCHQ should spend more time defending citizens and public IT infrastructure and less time on seeing who can build the biggest useless metadata database.
But MS, as long as there are millions of XP machines out there, should still be required (if it won't do the right thing voluntarily) to distribute key security upgrades.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
