Part of what Snowden revealed was that the NSA had secured from Microsoft the algorithm for generating the hash and salt.
If Microsoft is giving away their salt and hash algorithms, they will be removed from the entire network of PKI providers because they can’t be certified as authentic. This would be business suicide for MS.
Now, if they are salting the TPMs in Win8 with their own salt and hash algorithms, that’s a different story. THAT is a big security concern for anyone using the platform. That’s a big loss of privacy and access to one’s own system. Hence my disdain for Win8 in general.
MS won’t get any more of my money. Not with great Linux OSes like Ubuntu out there now.