Microsoft spams corporate users with messages denigrating their IT departments

If your company hasn't "upgraded" your computer to Windows 10 — a tendril of what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism masquerading as a "free OS" — you may start receiving messages from Microsoft telling you that your IT department is holding you back: "Your system administrator has blocked upgrades on this PC. Check with your system administrator about upgrading this PC to Windows 10."


Though Windows 10 is free, previous versions were not. That means that the businesses that paid Microsoft for their previous products are now being bypassed as the company reaches out directly to their employees to try to get them to get onto the company's preferred business-track. Forget "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Today, no matter what, you're the product.

Admins all over the world are waking up to an unwelcome development: Microsoft has snuck a Get Windows 10 malware variant onto their customers' systems. All signs point to an infected Patch Tuesday update — above and beyond the Internet Explorer "security" patch with its own Windows 10 ad.

Admins beware: Domain-attached PCs are sprouting Get Windows 10 ads
[Woody Leonhard/Infoworld]

(via The Inquirer)