Microsoft and Securities Fraud: The two make a nice couple.

Microsoft has come out with it's answer to Google, it is called Bing. But Microsoft is busy stacking the deck to artificially pump up both Internet Explorer 8's and Bing's numbers. Microsoft has decided to force-feed IE8 by packaging it as a critical update. Which means that Windows Update (or it's newest iteration, Microsoft Update) will constantly nag you to download and install it. Most people (and I used to count myself among them, although I have learned how since then. Microsoft does not go out of it's way to tell you how, and for most things, you should not need to.) don't know how to silence the nag, so they will just install it out of frustration. That is what Microsoft is counting on, because IE8 does a couple of very unethical things, it automatically makes itself your default browser, even if you would normally use Firefox or Chrome or Safari or Opera, it also replaces your default search engine with Bing.

So network analytics will see a sharp spike of both IE8 and Bing use, which would not otherwise be seen because it was force fed to the XP using public. They will then be able to point to these numbers and proclaim just how popular both are, thereby pumping up their stock price.

This is a new variation of an old pump and dump scheme. It is unethical, and it is illegal. The SEC needs to investigate this, PRONTO.