Microsoft Remotely Removed Tor Browser Bundle from more than 2 Million Systems

Extremely misleading headline.

According to the article all they did was remove some malware that happened to contain Tor. And from the sound of it there was no 'remote kill switch' or anything involved, they just added the malware to their MSE antivirus definitions which subsequently removed it.

Update: Yup, that's what they did. Here is the blog post: http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/01/09/tackling-...

According to Microsoft's own blog post (http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/01/09/tackling-...), they specifically removed a non-self-updating version of Tor, which was installed by the Sefnit malware. This version of Tor contained a number of security vulnerabilities which would otherwise be left on the victim's computer. They also consulted Tor developers to plan the cleanup.

(Copied my comment over from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7095429)

What happen when they "have" to do it because policies like this one?

http://www.zdnet.com/irish-td-attacks-open-source-browsers-a...