I think this is a great initiative by Microsoft. They have shown that they greatly care about the environment and common good. Not only that, but they spend lots of money on their R&D (Microsoft Research) which has come up with tons of great things that has made the world better.

On top of that Microsoft's founder Bill Gates has spent most of his fortune to help the world, especially for healthcare and making the poor countries better. Even if you don't like MS products you have to have deep respect for them for this reason. Compare this to Google CEO's who spend their money on luxury yachts.

This shows you don't know how online advertising works. Why would affiliates pay Adscend? This is not how it works. Advertisers pay Adscend and in turn Adscend pays affiliates to promote those advertisers, usually for commissions. They act as kind of broker.

The news piece you pasted clearly says this too, especially the part about Adscend doing business with advertisers and then in turn affiliates.

Knowing the field (but not participating on the dark sides of it), there are many products and ways that are meant to hide the activity from these advertising companies. They exist because the affiliates will get (rightly) banned and no money paid when they are found out of doing shit like this.

They were third party advertising network in the case. It was their affiliates who were spamming Facebook. If you blame them, then you should blame Google too, as people using AdSense can also spam Facebook with likejacking.

Oh yes, because everyone else is an idiot. It's good we have Thansin, who is not an idiot, because what would we do otherwise.

Look, not everything is priced at the lowest point compared to other services like the internet. Yes, per megabyte price for SMS is huge. But who the fuck tries to transfer data with it anyway? On top of that most people have unlimited SMS with their plans now. Even without that SMS price isn't that high and it was very convenient.

By the way, SMS was also developed by Nokia engineers, accidentally actually. Just shows how much groundwork Nokia has done for mobiles and that they actually deserve every patent they have (most of which they've given for free use anyway).