Inside Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit

jfruh writes "You may find it mildly creepy that Microsoft has a private police force, but the Digital Crimes Unit has helped real law enforcement do things like disrupt huge botnets. According to Richard Boscovich, assistant general counsel for the Digital Crimes Unit, Microsoft is only able to do all this by relying on the company's existing infrastructure, including its Azure cloud service. The DCU can provision compute time from the cloud as necessary to combat complex threats, he said, and also uses cloud services to share information with law enforcement agencies quickly."

yeah yeah yeah, but...

[BringsApples]

They may assist the police with some things, but what they mostly do is go around making sure that you have (the correct) licenses for your windows boxes. Anyone that's dealt with Microsoft's licenses knows that it's a huge mess that's difficult to understand as some licenses overlap in their design. Once you have the wrong license, even if the license that you have is much much more expensive than the one you need, these guys come at you bro, hard - as if you are a criminal.

It's this very business model that we all loathe so.