Links 21/02/2008: Lots on Open Source, Lots of Trouble at Redmond, WA
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2008-02-21 15:12:17 UTC
- Modified: 2008-02-21 15:16:19 UTC
Recent Techrights' Posts
- 'Cancel Culture' Doesn't Work (in the Long Run)
- Despite all the attacks, I'm enjoying life, I'm keeping productive, and our audience continues to grow
- GNU/Linux Still up (statCounter Says to 6%) in Bosnia And Herzegovina
- Let's see where it is at year's end
- Making Layout Changes
- Feedback can be sent to us
- Behind an Economy of Fake 'Worths' and Fictional 'Valuations' or 'Market Caps'
- They normalise white-collar crime and say "everyone is doing it!"
- Links 18/01/2026: "South Africa is Running Out of Software Developers", Companies Spooked to Find Slop is a Major Liability
- Links for the day
- Place Your Bets: Who Will Die First? Microsoft or IBM?
- Not even joking; make a guess
- Restoring Professional Pride in the Tech Sector
- Rejecting slop isn't being a Luddite
- Slop Bubble "Is Worse Than The Dot Com Bubble"
- Edward Zitron Says It like it is
-
- Gemini Links 19/01/2026: Analog Cameras and Plucker in 2026, US Losing Acceptability in Europe
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, January 18, 2026
- IRC logs for Sunday, January 18, 2026
- Links 18/01/2026: The "Deepfake Porn Site Formerly Known as Twitter" and Turkey to Block Kids' Access to Social Control Media
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 18/01/2026: Against English as Language of the Net, "Symposium of Destruction"
- Links for the day
- You Would Expect This Kind of Misleading Narrative Shortly Before Microsoft (or GAFAM) Mass Layoffs
- misleading PR
- FOSDEM 2026: democracy panel, GNOME & Sonny Piers modern slavery experiment
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Pump-and-Dump With IBM Shares, Courtesy of People Who Stand to Gain From the 'Pump'
- "3 Reasons to Buy IBM Stock Right Now"
- IBM: Spying on Staff Like Never Before and Implementing Silent Layoffs This Month, Say Insiders
- what we heard from whistleblowers seems to corroborate
- IBM is Not a Free Software Company (It Never Was)
- Red Hat's main product, RHEL, is full of secret sauce and has 'secret recipes' (it is basically proprietary)
- IBM Turning Up the 'RTO' (Stress) and 'PIP' (Fear) Heat on Workers, Rebellion May be Brewing
- Sometimes it feels like today's executives at IBM view IBM workers as a liability
- Links 18/01/2026: Indonesia Against Comedy, Media-Hostile (Censors Comedians) Convicted Felon in White House Defecting to Opponents of NATO
- Links for the day
- Eventually the Joke (and Financial Fraud) is on Microsoft, Stigmatised for Slop
- Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
- GNU/Linux Leaps to All-time Highs in Virgin Islands
- it seems to have started around the "end of 10"
- Making and Keeping the Sites Accessible
- Sometimes less does mean "more" (or "MOAR")
- The "Alicante Mafia" - Part IV - How Europe's Largest Patent Office Recruited Drug Addicts, Antisemites, and People Who Absolutely Cannot Do the Job (But Know the 'Right' People)
- To better overlap industrial actions we might delay/postpone/pause this series for a bit
- Benefiting by Adding Presence in Geminispace
- As the Web gets worse, not limited to bloat as a factor, people seek alternatives
- Google News Recently Started Syndicating Another Slopfarm, Linuxiac
- Even if Google is aware that there is slop there, it's hard to believe that Google will mind
- Software Patents and USMCA (or NAFTA)
- We recently pondered going back to issuing 2-3 articles per day about patents and common issues with them
- IBM Sued Over PIPs
- PIPs are "performance improvement plans"
- Sites With "Linux" in Their Name That Are in Effect Slopfarms and Issue Fake Articles
- We try to name some of the prolific culprits
- Gemini Links 18/01/2026: Raising Notifications From Terminal and Environmental Sanity
- Links for the day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, January 17, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, January 17, 2026
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- Links 17/01/2026: Internet Blackout Normalised, Russian Attacks Civilians by Causing Massive Blackouts
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Lunduke Keeps Distracting From the Real Problems With Rust
- Microsoft Lunduke is stigmatising critics
- Linuxiac Has Become a Slopfarm, Calling Them Out Isn't Fixing That
- What a shame. A once-decent site about "Linux" bites the dust.
- Luzern Lion Monument, Albanian Female Whistleblowers: Swiss jurists were cowards
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- The Splinternet is Already Here, Owing to the Militarisation of Technology (Slop, Social Control Media, Back Doors, and More)
- you know what's gonna happen next...
- Stack Ranking Against IBM/Red Hat Staff and a Signal of Mass Layoffs (RAs) Justified by Red Hat and IBM as Poor Performance/Misconduct/Other
- Working in an atmosphere like this sounds like a nightmare
- Gemini Links 17/01/2026: Slow computing and Environment Leak
- Links for the day
- Links 17/01/2026: US Censorship and Violence Crisis, Growing Anger Levels Against Slop Sold as "Intelligence"
- Links for the day
- Microsoft's "valuation depends on infrastructure that does not exist."
- Indeed
- The Typical Trajectory: Datamation Began Experimenting With LLM Slop for Fake Articles. Then Datamation Died. (Last Month)
- It's always ending up this way
- Accounts or Devices (e.g. Phones) That Get 'Burnt' Have Many Pitfalls
- Embassies and consulates habitually fail at this
- Avoiding the Spooks (Nobody Watches the Watchers, They're Practically Unaccountable)
- If more people adopt encryption, it'll be easier for us to deal with whistleblowers
- Protecting Whistleblowers Requires Technical Knowledge/Skills
- even the highest media judges aren't aware of how to protect sources
- At Least 5 Women Quit Brett Wilson LLP in Recent Months. It's the Firm That Attacked My Wife and I on Behalf of Americans (One of Them Strangled Women).
- It seems like good news that the women escape this workplace
- Slop About Slop and Slop About "Linux"
- In short, avoid slopfarms
- Report/Benchmark Says 'Vibe Coding' Results in Security Holes
- There are risks they don't like talking about
- EPO Abuses Covered in Spanish
- Knowing what we know (and heard/saw), the sinister silence of the media is perceived by some to be complicity of the lower order.
- Richard Stallman Encourages "ICE Out For Good" Protests, His Opponents Do Not (Passive and Uncaring About Human Rights)
- He has done a lot philosophically, politically, and so on
- Record Traffic in Geminispace or Over Gemini Protocol
- it's never too late to join
- The "Alicante Mafia" - Part III - Europe's Second-Largest Organisation on Strike, Protests, Other Industrial Actions to Come Impacting Over 95% of the Workforce
- The EPO's management is highly evasive, weak, and vulnerable
- Claim That IBM Marked 15% of its Workforce for Potential Layoffs
- No wonder we keep hearing from Red Hat people who say they hate IBM
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, January 16, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, January 16, 2026
Comments
CoolGuy
2008-02-21 16:45:45
steve got pwned by larry.
seriously i think M$ is loosing out and steve has lost control over what he is doing. this is a guy who has zero technical knowledge, has never written a single line of code, cant make out any difference between a asp or php code...lol. i dont know if any m$ executive has advised steve over the technical hurdles of moving yahoo to m$ technology.
rofl.i think no one will dare to go near the chair throwing ninja.
entire blame of M$ doom will be on steve and bill has side stepped out of this mess really easy.
by doing a hostile take over - this is really going to blow out of proportion. everyone is making fun of m$ so openly, they have become a joke of what m$ used to be a decade back.
look at the action figures / toys stuff m$ is doing lately. everyone is laughing at them. they are trying so hard to be like google. haha.
just cant stop laughing.
CoolGuy
2008-02-21 16:49:00
BoomBoom
2008-02-21 18:28:35
- A BB for a brain in an empty head. Shake him and hear him rattle! - A pile of stolen patents for things someone else invented! - Extra sweat! - Awesome monkeydance action! - Developers developers developers developers! - Buggy software that doesn't work! - Buggy patches for buggy software that *still* doesn't work! - A fake sense of security! (along with thousands of exploits and weaknesses) - An EULA written by the Ghost of Stalin and the RIAA! - MONO! (Both the poisonware and the disease) - Office chair grenades! - FUD machinegun! - Arrogance out the wazoo! - Megalomaniac world domination plans! - And not a snowball's chance in Hell of ever having a clue.
:P
Roy Schestowitz
2008-02-21 22:39:12
This VNUnet article dovetails nicely with the recent piece on Groklaw[1]
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2210121/microsoft-engages-proxy-fight
I wonder if a deep-cutting summary or analysis can be written to Slashdot without using the M-word.
The plan seems to be to lobby and intrigue behind the scenes to replace the board with a more obedient set. Before that happens, Yahoo should re-license Zimbra as GPL. Also, how big a contributer is Yahoo to open source development in general and BSD in particular? That could be one of the main motivations for hostile take over.
I also notice that the astroturfers have returned to slashdot in droves since about Monday or so and, probably related, there is article after article of advertising.
[1] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071023002351958
Also, about the last attempts to save the cash cow :
Houston, we have a problem ... ... when trying to paint a nice face before the BRM ...
Google News Alert for: (OpenDocument OR ODF) AND ("Ecma 376" OR OXML OR OOXML OR "office open xml" OR "open XML")
Microsoft pledges not to sue over open source CNet News.com Blog - USA The company does not natively support the alternative Open Document Format, or ODF, standard in Office 2007. Although it does not mention ODF specifically ... See all stories on this topic
MS to publish free APIs for Windows, Office Electronista - Santa Clara,CA,USA Office 2007 has been a particular subject of investigation and has been criticized for its switch to the Microsoft-made Office Open XML (OOXML) standard, ... See all stories on this topic
Microsoft Promises Interoperability Digitaltrends.com - Lake Oswego,OR,USA Microsoft also says it won't sue open source developers who build or distribute non-commercial implementations of its protocols, although developers who ... See all stories on this topic
Microsoft is fighting. Don't give it too much room for manipulation.