A while back Novell created a YouTube channel to collect and share some of the great videos that we create showing Novell solutions at work around the globe from Copenhagen to Cape Town.
That’s nice of Novell to admit that it rubbishes YouTube with the same disinformation that already floods many television sets. █
“IT IS NEVER our own fault,” Microsoft would vigorously insist. Even when its systems are open to user intervention-free hijacking, it wants to find scapegoats, be them the ‘stupid’ users or those ‘evil’ crackers who merely exploit an open door.
Had the world embraced Microsoft’s logic, banks would not be liable for loss of money when the safe is left open to intruders and the ‘stupid’ customers would be blamed for not spotting anomalies in their bank statements.
Anyway, rants are being written at a high pace at the moment, particularly because even military computers are being suspended for running Microsoft Windows.
So why isn’t Microsoft being sued into oblivion? Businesses sue each other all the time for stupid stuff. Is it against the Secret Code of the Suit to engage in litigation on meaningful issues? I don’t get it. Manufacturers get in trouble with government regulatory agencies all the time for unsafe products, and even when customers misuse their products and get hurt. I would say that using Windows at all is a classic case of misuse, because it is impossible to use it safely.
Why aren’t news media treating this like the scandal that is? They get all foamy over some Congresscritter using public funds to buy him or herself some expensive goodies, which for an especially talented spendthrift is a few tens of thousands of dollars. That is nothing compared to the tens of billions of damage caused by Redmondware every year, and I can’t put a price tag on not being able to fly the fighter jets when they’re needed. Is Microsoft more powerful and fearsome than Congresspeople?
Lawsuits are an interesting possibility, which we wrote about a few months ago.
I hadn’t thought about it for a while, but given the recent Conficker outbreak, I got to rethink of the whole thing again. Now…. there was something that bothered me A LOT…. and it still does (though I’m not working with them anymore, I still feel like I’m a part of the family). They are still developing applications in-house using proprietary frameworks tied to Windows. And here is why it bothers me: They have invested and continue to invest time (hence money.. public money, should I add) on getting themselves tied to one proprietary platform. Every line of code that they add up to their already enormous code stack is another line of code that ties them even tighter to Windows. And that’s sad. What’s done is done.. there’s not much they can do about the code they have already written… but they could be changing the languages they use to develop their applications that could allow them to move to another platform if they so wished later on (doing it gradually). When I was about to leave, the head of development quit his job as well… and that would have been (probably) the best moment to make a push for multiplatform languages, but unfortunately I was quiting as well so there was no change in development frameworks.
It hurts me to see one organization that I care so much about tied to that security hole disguised as an operating system that’s Windows. And even more that they still don’t take the necessary measures to try to get out of that platform, even if it’s one small step at a time. Conficker just reopened that small wound I carry with me.
One reader recommended this lecture series. He wrote: “The first lecture, by Clarke, is quite interesting, especially if consider the Microsoft Exchange / Microsoft Windows Server angle to preventing access to records. Being able to blame “technology” is a lot easier than carting off and locking up / burning shelf meters of paper.” █
Charter Communications Inc, which is controlled by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection by 1 April after striking a deal with senior debt holders yesterday.
Charter, which was started by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, said its planned Chapter 11 filing was intended to trim about $8 billion from its $21 billion in debt. After extensive negotiations, a committee of debtholders agreed to the plan, under which Mr. Allen will retain control of the company.
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has sold all of his remaining shares in DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc.
It’s very fascinating to see just how much of Microsoft’s money is hovering among and landing on media companies that inform or misinform people. Apple’s Steve Jobs is another party that’s involved in this type of investments.
THIS POST binds together news reports from several days ago. Together, when laid in the correct sequence, these hopefully illustrate just how Microsoft is fooling the whole world, essentially abusing it while pretending to be a victim of the very same abuse that it promotes.
We start this post by looking at this excellent analysis from Sam Varghese in the Australian press. He does a good job at showing that Microsoft truthfully likes the notion of counterfeiting, which is conveniently labels “piracy” for dramatic effect.
Public memory has always been woefully short. With the advent and popularisation of the internet, it has become even shorter; people can only absorb information in dribs and drabs.
[...]
Hence, when Microsoft talked about piracy recently, few, if any remembered, that the company’s own co-founder, Bill Gates, once admitted that he watched pirated movies on YouTube.
Gates has also, in the past, confirmed how important piracy is to Microsoft: “Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don’t pay for the software… Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
Here is another news article which accuses Microsoft of fighting against Chinese sellers whose work it once encouraged (see quote in the article from Sam Varghese) while at the same time embracing wage slavery and poor working conditions.
Microsoft defends sweatshop conditions in China
[...]
Microsoft fends off bad factory conditions
A new report claims Redmond-based Microsoft is more concerned about its copyrights and piracy in China than the workers who make their products there.
The National Labor Committee spotlighted a factory in Dongguan City, China, that makes keyboards and other parts for Microsoft, as well as Dell, HP and others. It found the workers are being subjected to miserable conditions.
Among the findings: young workers sit on hard stools for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week – exceeding China’s legal limit.
They’re allowed one second to snap each key on a keyboard into place, performing the same operation a million times in a month. Each is paid a base wage of 61-cents an hour.
This bodes badly for Microsoft, which was accused by the India Daily of what it shrewdly called “cyber slavery under the American corporate banners.” They want cheap labour, which they can typically earn using political corruption. A state senator recently complained about this behaviour from Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4].
Microsoft Applauds the Senate Passage of the Economic Stimulus Bill
[...]
From the earliest, planning, stages of the U.S. economic stimulus bill, Microsoft has indicated strong support for the initiative, arguing the critical necessity of the financial package. Last week, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer addressed the U.S. House of Representatives Democratic Caucus Retreat, emphasizing yet again the need for the stimulus in order to sustain what the CEO referred to as the restart of the economic engine. On February 10, 2009, Fred Humphries, managing director, U.S. Government Affairs, Microsoft, applauded the Senate passage of the economic stimulus bill, and underlined that U.S. Congress needed to take critical steps to pass legislation that would jumpstart the economy, including handing out the necessary funds.
“Economic stimulus” is a very Orwellian term. It sounds as though it’s about recipients of wealth, which is it; but it’s the wealthy who receive this wealth, which the broad public is stimulated to supply for them.
What Microsoft asks for, Microsoft gets. But where is the resistance to this appalling act of theft from the public? It’s important to (re)check who runs this country. █
WE OCCASIONALLY take a glimpse at Microsoft seniors/alumni and especially where they happen to land after leaving Microsoft. Such shady figures can cause more damage from inside other companies, which they are likely to ‘marry’ with Microsoft. Unless there is sufficient opposition and sanity, companies might wed an eternal betrayer, just like EMC did.
Today we look at 4 more reports that are worth keeping an eye on.
NComputing/Will Poole
Will Poole prefers to present himself as a man of goodwill, but he helped the sabotage of GNU/Linux-based OLPC XOs (leading, eventually, to the possible destruction of this charity as a whole). He also participated in programmes and groups that are related dumping techniques (EDGI) against GNU/Linux [1, 2]. It’s about getting children “addicted” to Microsoft, to borrow Bill Gates' explanation of this situation.
Poole is one of the most prominent ex-Microsofties to leave the company in the past year. Until last September, he was vice president of Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group (one of the better division names, in my opinion), and was in charge of providing software to markets in less-developed nations around the world. Before that, he was responsible for the Windows desktop operating system, so he knows a few things about shipping large-scale products. He first came to Microsoft in 1996 through its acquisition of eShop, a company he co-founded in 1991. Some of his post-Microsoft insights can be found on his “creative capitalism” website here.
[...]
Poole says NComputing is having a “profound effect on markets that were previously unable to use computer infrastructure because of cost.” His role is to help the company build its business from a strategic perspective, using his knowledge and contacts from around the world. “The exciting thing about NComputing is they’re already at scale,” he says. “It’s cheaper to fill up a school [with these PCs] than any other choice out there.” Poole says NComputing has about 150 employees in 14 countries, and they’re currently selling into 90 countries.
This can be more sinister than it sounds assuming children are turned into clients of foreign companies, only to be exposed to artificial limitations such as DRM.
Sprint Nextel
Another Microsoft executive has landed inside the board of another company, this time Sprint Nextel. It’s worth bearing in mind in case Microsoft signs some deal or collaborates with Sprint Nextel in the not-so-distant future.
Sprint Nextel Corp. has appointed a former Microsoft executive to the Clearwire Corp. board.
Brian McAndrews’ appointment to the Clearwire board took effect immediately, Clearwire said in a Tuesday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. He most recently led the advertiser and publisher solutions group of Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) as senior vice president and also is a director of Fisher Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: FSCI).
Wipro
Wipro was recently banned for malpractice, but most people may recognise Wipro as Microsoft’s ‘shill’ in India [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] because it helps suppression of GNU/Linux and freedom across the country. Here is Wipro doing a lot more legwork for Microsoft, based on this new report.
Wipro says that it has deployed Office Communications Server 2007 to more than 80 customers, who range in size from 10,000 to 80,000 employees.
Wipro has a role in what locals sometimes call Microsoft's “Axis of Evil”, which together with the EDGI programme (see above) makes it clear that the country is exploited, as opposed to offered any real help. As we noted before, the India Daily said that “Wipro is just a servant of Microsoft facilitating Indian cyber slavery under the American corporate banners.”
SOMEWHERE at Microsoft, there is a closet packed with leftover Slate umbrellas — a monument to the folly of asking people to pay for what they read on the Internet. These umbrellas — a $20 value! — were the premium we offered to people who would pay $19 for a year’s subscription to Slate, the Microsoft-owned online magazine (later purchased by The Washington Post). We were quite self-righteous about the alleged principle that “content” should not be free. The word itself was an insult — as if we were just making Jell-O salad in order to sell Tupperware.
Fresh layoffs at Microsoft-owned (MSFT) ad agency Razorfish, with 70 employees being let go (4% of the workforce) in Seattle, Portland, San Fran, and LA. That follows thousands of layoffs at Microsoft generally, and 40 positions cut from Razorfish in New York in November.
Microsoft has surprised the market by announcing its intention to stop selling PerformancePoint Server as a standalone product, just 17 months after its original launch.
Looking back at coverage, it all happened very quietly in a fashion which resembles other ‘foldings’ of products that include WinFS. As for other units, some people forgot all about Bungie Studios, which Microsoft betrayed and abused. This new story about Microsoft Flight Simulator brings back this debate.
On the Venturebeat blog, Dean Takahashi notes “In the past year or so, Microsoft has shut down or divested itself of a lot of its hit-making studios. It recently decided to close Ensemble Studios, maker of the Age of Empires strategy games, and spun out Bungie, the maker of Halo games.”
Shortly after the announced the move, Age of Empires creator Bruce Shelley took to his blog to explain Microsoft’s financially motivated rationale for closing Ensemble. As part of his post, he revealed that a portion of Ensemble’s leadership team had plans to set up a new development outfit, headed up by current studio chief and founder Tony Goodman.
Hysteria can make elephants out of mosquitos, so when I say there’s a new Xbox 360 “red ring of death” rumor running rampant, digest with caution and sangfroid, dear reader.
The panicked dispatch in question comes from a thread over at Microsoft’s official Xbox forums titled “Todays [sic] Update Red Ringed my 360?” The message was posted on February 4th by a perplexed user and reads as follows…
Microsoft already stands trials for its XBox360 failures (caused by negligence). The company has lost billions of dollars in this area. █
“Just keep rubbing it in, via the press, analysts, newsgroups, whatever. Make the complete failure of the competition’s technology part of the mythology of the computer industry.”
IN A RECENT SERIES of posts we covered concrete examples where Microsoft had paid analysts to ‘engineer’ dirt about its competition [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. A similar strategy is being applied to those who are in the media (such occupations are mostly intertwined). As a bit of general background on the subject of media bias, the following multi-part documentary is worth a watch.
Turning to today’s main story, it’s worth reminding ourselves that IDG, one of the largest news networks covering technology these days, is owned by IDC, which in turn is closely tied to Microsoft [1, 2]. Microsoft pays IDC|IDG a lot of money (sometimes gifts) to manufacture lies about GNU/Linux and praise its own products. Microsoft also uses IDG to publicly deny Microsoft's crimes.
“Microsoft pays IDC|IDG a lot of money (sometimes gifts) to manufacture lies about GNU/Linux and praise its own products.”But hey, that’s journalism [1, 2]. Those who have the money also have control over information, so they get to have their own story told while certain other stories are neglected or buried. Editors can easily shoot down reports, even for fear of their superiors. The hiring process takes much of this into account and authors whose work is rejected may sometimes choose to walk away not because they were officially censored but because they did not fit the culture of ‘obedient’ coverage that blindly sticks to imposed consensus and pleases potential advertisers.
Anyway, the previous post spoke about possible misconduct in Microsoft Australia. There is actually a lot more coming from Microsoft Australia, which has just passed quite a bit of money to IDC (parent company of IDG). They were paid to daemonise threats/competitors of Microsoft and guess who bears and spreads this ‘news’? That’s right — IDG.
More people use pirated software in Australia than in Sweden — home of a popular pirate site — according to a report by research firm IDC.
A separate telephone survey of 1100 Australians conducted last month by Galaxy Research and commissioned by Microsoft Australia, found up to 64 percent would use pirated software for personal use.
[...]
Microsoft Australia business consumer product manager Steve Johns said users are jeopardizing computer security by using pirated software.
Surely, IDG and IDC have a nice tag-team act going there. The publisher, the study, the benefactors, and the funder are all financially linked. It doesn’t take long to realise what is happening here and it’s merely part of a known pattern that we see recurring very occasionally.
Microsoft appears to have just practiced what it internally calls “Project Marshall”, better known to many as “MOU”. This is a strategy which Microsoft uses to exclude competition from government contracts and it is arguably illegal. There was very scarce coverage of this in the press (such deals are intended to be kept largely secret), so we could only find this one article.
THE federal Government hopes to save at least $15 million per annum over four years through a new whole-of-government arrangement with Microsoft Australia.
The chorus here is similar to the one from Microsoft and BECTA [1, 2]. They only crow about how much they “save”, not how much of taxpayers’ money is spent on a convicted monopolist that further ties up national assets to itself. Australia is far from the only victim of such tactics, which may sometimes be assisted by shells like the Gates Foundation. █
