06.22.09
Posted in Bill Gates, Marketing, Microsoft at 4:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The role of the Gates Foundation in GMO, or multinationals’ crops
SUFFICE to say, especially for those who have already been reading on this subject [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9], the Gates Foundation is similar to what Rockefeller achieved with the Rockefeller Foundation. It is a self-serving establishment which to the public seems like it’s all about goodwill.
“It is just too convenient to dismiss critical views of Gates Foundation as “jealousy”.”Microsoft deserves credit for mastering PR — that is, being very able to perpetually deceive the public, especially the more mentally-feeble or those who have neither time nor desire to research for themselves. Here is a new case of sentimental blackmail in a Microsoft press release and here is another new example from the PR machine (this latter one comes from Children International). To an outsider it would seem innocent and characteristic of this big company’s self-acclaimed innocence.
There is a lot more to the Gates Foundation than the mainstream press permits people to know (to a high degrees it is a matter of press ownership), but professors have become more outspoken in their criticism of the Gates Foundation in recent years. This only gets scarce coverage, if any at all. It is just too convenient to dismiss critical views of Gates Foundation as “jealousy”. One of our readers did some studying on a particularly important subject, so we present it as follows for readers to take further interest in and maybe contribute more information. The narrative below is the contributing reader’s, not mine.
I’ve been looking today into food and GMO and found something that BN can perhaps use. First, let me quote this article. It is well written and contains cites to a couple of academic articles under the heading “The Genetic Engineering of Food and the Failure of Science”. The two articles are:
1. The Development of a Flawed Enterprise [PDF]
2. Academic Capitalism and the Loss of Scientific Integrity [PDF]
I haven’t fully read these yet, but what struck me is that multinational corporations are promoting GMO as a way to solve world hunger even though it is still unproven science. Also, the biogenetics field is largely corporate funded and speaking against it entails a risk for those in that field. The author of the above two peer-reviewed articles, Don Lotter, has decided to take the risk even though he isn’t on a tenor track and it may damage his career prospects. It also struck me that, while some multinationals are campaigning for us to stake the food chains of the future on their unproven science, other multinationals are pointing to the “unproven science” of climatologists to paint them as “untrustworthy politicians” and to promote skepticism of global warning.
Going back to the Huffington Post article, I noticed something very similar to what I’ve seen frequently on Boycott Novell. That is, someone posts an article critical of multinational corporations and ad hominem or FUD attacks on the articles quickly arrive in the comments. It’s worth reading Don Lotter’s response to this.
Finally, there is a link between Monsanto, GMOs and the Gates Foundation. I found the following article from 2008 cited in the Huffington Post article:
From the article:
The Gates Foundation made its first foray into agriculture in 2006 with a $100 million grant to create an initiative with the Rockefeller Foundation called the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).
Based in Nairobi, AGRA took as its model the original Green Revolution, which helped relieve widespread famine in the 1940s through the 1960s by boosting production of maize, wheat and rice in Latin America and Asia.
Part of the controversy lies in the Gates Foundation’s choosing that approach.
Using strains of crops that required fertilizer, pesticides and irrigation, the Green Revolution methods increased yields. But they also damaged the environment, favored wealthier farmers and left some poorer ones deeper in debt.
Also:
The situation was further complicated when former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, now chairman of AGRA’s board, made a statement that African journalists interpreted as rejecting the use of genetically modified seeds.
The Gates Foundation later said Annan was misquoted.
And:
The Gates Foundation, whose science-and-technology efforts are led by a former Monsanto researcher, is helping African governments develop biosafety standards and regulations and training local researchers in the latest plant breeding.
While the article says that “it will be a decision for African governments and farmers” whether to use GMOs, I won’t be surprised to see the Gates Foundation promoting their use. I have started to read the first Lotter paper and already I have found a juicy quote on page 5:
Illustrative is the Monsanto Corporation’s global marketing vision from a 2005 company document: “full adoption of GM crops globally would result in income gains of US$210 billion per year within the next decade, with the largest potential gains occurring in developing countries at a rate of 2.1 percent gross national product per year” (Lopez Villar et al., 2007).
Much of this push is being done with the help of US foreign aid agencies such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID) as well as well-endowed nGos such as the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations (African Centre for Biosafety, 2007; Ho, 2007; Lopez Villar et al., 2007). USAID is mandated to partner with US biotechnology corporations to promote the companies’ crops in developing countries (Brenner, 2004).
I think that’s more evidence for my speculation that the Gates Foundation is helping to spread GMO foods to developing countries. What they do now seems very consistent to me: I know that they like to “donate” Microsoft software to libraries and schools, they like to donate pharmaceuticals to developing countries and now I find that they like to spread GMO foods there as well. Whatever they do seems to have the side-effect of encouraging or spreading dependencies on multi-national corporations. █
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Posted in Google, Microsoft, Search at 4:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s anti-Google lobby exposed yet again in another place
TAST WEEK we wrote about the anti-Google "whisper campaign", which is just the latest among a relentless wave of attacks that consistently come from Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. Microsoft harasses Google by paying or strongly encouraging (through incitement) others to do so. Well, Microsoft keeps getting caught. The latest:
Google Critic Paid By Microsoft
[...]
While Cleland asserts that his testimony reflects his personal views and not the views of his clients, Google sympathizers wonder if his new affiliation with Microsoft might further fuel what they believe is an already staunchly anti-Google agenda. Last December, Precursor issued a report alleging that Google “is by far the largest user of Internet bandwidth,” the company’s share of bandwidth usage is rising rapidly, and it’s bandwidth use “is orders of magnitude greater than its payment for its cost.” Google’s telecom counsel Richard Whitt responded to the attack, calling the report “payola punditry.” Google Associate General Counsel Nicole Wong will testify Thursday, presumably in defense of her firm’s practices.
PR Watch called this stunt “Another Kind of Payola Pundit,” to which it added mostly fragments from the report above.
“Telecommunications analyst Scott Cleland, whose work is bankrolled by companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, also signed on as a hired gun for Microsoft earlier this year,” reports National Journal. Cleland is “a frequent critic of Google” who “runs Precursor, an industry research and consulting firm, and chairs NetCompetition.org, which he describes as ‘a pro-competition e-forum funded by broadband companies.’”
This is important to us because Microsoft also pays a lot of money for companies to attack GNU/Linux. SCO is a good example, but there are more.
What will the government do about these vicious attacks from a monopoly abuser? Obviously nothing because it’s in Microsoft’s pocket [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Fred Williams remarks: “The DOJ is owned by Microsoft. They will do nothing! It would take an act of God to get them to pry their lips of Microsoft’s butt. Is it OK to say butt?” GreyGeek then replies:
It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Microsoft OWNS Obama and most of both major political parties, thanks to their “campaign contributions” and the LACK of ethics by all parties concerned. Hardly 6 months in office and Obama has backpeddled on so many of his oft-repeated campaign promises those who voted for him are beginning to feel used, and those who campaigned for him feel more like they’ve become members of the first profession.
If the TRIPS FOR JUDGES website is any indication, judges are treated to luxury “seminars” hosted by PR firms financed by Microsoft and other monopoly interest where the judges are taught HOW to circumvent the anti-trust laws in their rulings.
The one under antitrust scrutiny is now Google, not Microsoft. This is what happens when the watcher becomes dominated by that whom it is supposed to watch [1, 2].
Microsoft has many reasons to fear Google. Microsoft is now relying on Google to advertise a Google rival and Google — unlike Microsoft — does not suffer much from the bad economy. In fact, ComScore shows that Google keeps climbing in the latest survey.
Google actually saw a 0.8 percent increase in its May over April numbers, taking 65 percent of the searches conducted. Yahoo came in at 20.1 percent, Microsoft sites 8 percent, Ask Network 3.9 percent and AOL captured 3.1 percent. Bing’s share of U.S. use rose 0.8 percent.
Nielsen’s numbers look even more impressive as they show Microsoft losing 14% in the latest report.
Microsoft’s search engine suffered a steep usage drop in May, right before the company launched Bing, a new version of its search engine, according to the latest market share figures from Nielsen Online.
As the links at the bottom ought to show, no matter how much PR and disinformation Microsoft spreads ($100,000,000 gets spent on advertising, which is essentially deception and imposed ignorance), Bing already suffers from growing pains. In addition, regulators ought to look at how Microsoft deliberately deceives people by messing about with search results. As one reader told us yesterday, “searching for ‘knoppix’ on Bing ~1 mil results, searching for ‘ubuntu’ ~100k results. They are totally censoring their results.”
It was the same with MSN/Live, which uses the same underlying engine. It is broken and biased by design, so no wonder Microsoft would even pay people to use it [1, 2]. It’s advertising/propaganda, not a gateway to information. They need only tweak results about software. There is little or no need to hand-tweak the rest (e.g. food, hardware, celebrities) because that has no substantial effect on Microsoft business, not directly anyway. It’s like packet throttling for competitive reasons, only worse. █
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Posted in America, IBM, Microsoft, Patents at 2:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: IBM person may be put in charge of an office that grants monopolies on algorithms
It’s almost official now. David Kappos, whom we previously mentioned in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], may become the director of a Free software-hostile establishment, the USPTO. Kappos comes from IBM and here is a reference page from the USPTO’s newly-redesigned Web site:
President Barack Obama on Thursday announced his intent to nominate David Kappos, an experienced patent professional with more than 20 years of experience, as the new Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the U.S Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
IBM may be no foe of Free software, but it is no foe of software patents either, so there is a big conflict here and it proves problematic. TechDirt has the following new information:
theodp writes “The next time IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano is late for a big meeting and can’t be reached via his BlackBerry, the other attendees will thankfully have a patent-pending way of finding him. In its just-disclosed patent application for a Method for Exploitation of Location Proximity to Derive a Location of an Employee in a Corporation, Big Blue describes an ‘invention’ of two of its PhDs that could be used to track Palmisano down – call or IM those who sit near Sam’s office and ask if they’ve seen him. By the way, IBM VP David Kappos, who recently lamented the diminished quality of patents in the US, is a frontrunner to be the next Director of the USPTO – perhaps he could comment on the patent-worthiness of this invention.”
FFII’s president says that the “USPTO President [is] recruiting unpaid examiners.” Putting it differently, he claims that “The Peer to Patent project aims to recruit unpaid examiners to legitim[ise] software patents and business method patents.” According to the FFII’s Web site, “Peer-to-Patent” is essentially a pursuit for free labour. In a way, “Linux Defenders” is similar, but Groklaw seems fond of the concept. Maybe it’s better than nothing.
The core of the quality problem was already addressed by Tim O’Reilly and Jeff Bezos with their BountyQuest venture. The reason it failed is the basis for the FFII’s examination reform proposal.
In BountyQuest the examination fee was not paid by the polluter but by volunteering victims. It requires that one victim stands up and pays up on behalf of the public. All the other victims benefit as free-riders.
The FFII proposal shows how the incentives would need to be set straight if “peer2patent” examination is to work:
Privatize Examination, Make Bad Patenters Pay
The system of obligatory patent examination should be replaced by a system where patents are registered free of charge on the Internet, and examination is performed by private parties who, when they find an invalid patent claim, are entitled to charge an examination fee from the patentee
The European Patent Office has taken interest in the Gauss project and is preparing to build a similar wiki-based system.
Here is another new post: “The next USPTO Director & the Peer-to-Patent experiment”
Obama has chosen Patent Attorney David Kappos to be the next Undersecretary Of Commerce For Intellectual Property And Director Of The U.S. Patent And Trademark Office (USPTO). Here is an article related to a US-National Public Radio interview with Kappos (http://cairns.typepad.com/peertopatent/2007/08/david-kappos-on.html) that gives a good introduction as to why we should be excited.
People seem overly excited about this whole Peer-to-Patent scheme, but “The Peer to Patent project is sponsored by patent trolls such as Intellectual Ventures and Microsoft,” warns FFII’s president.
“Patent Troll Intellectual Ventures [will be] lobbying WIPO next 13 July in Geneva,” according to this [PDF]. It did not escape the attention of the FFII. Microsoft’s very own patent troll joins this debate having cooked a ‘study’ that defends the practice of patent hoarding and trolling. █
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06.21.09
Posted in IRC Logs at 8:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Read the log
Enter the IRC channel now
To use your own IRC client, join channel #boycottnovell in FreeNode.
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Posted in Antitrust, Microsoft, Search at 7:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Ultra-aggressive tactics by Microsoft show true determination to restore browser monoculture
Sentimental blackmail is evidently a recurring theme in Microsoft’s business strategy [1, 2, 3] and so are kickbacks, which Microsoft is now offering to people who ditch rival Web browsers.
This move is not so radical considering Microsoft’s search engine bribes [1, 2]. The company is simply trying to buy some market share. Silverlight is another good example of this costly strategy.
Anyway, Microsoft does not get enough from all the tactics above, so there is also a Twitter AstroTurf for IE8 and even this PR trick:
Users looking to take part can travel to Microsoft’s “Browser for the Better” site, and download IE 8. For each download Microsoft will donate $1.15, up to a total of $1M USD.
This is also covered here and here, but it remains clear that it’s the same old IM (Microsoft Messenger) scam where people were sold a “feel good” value in exchange for ditching or avoiding Microsoft’s competition. In this case, it is also sentimental blackmail.
Aggressive marketing, eh?
Well, that ain’t enough for Microsoft. Regardless of this "PR offensive" -- to borrow Nathan Myhrvold's expression — Microsoft is also “pushing IE8 down people’s throats,” to use the words of IDG.
In its effort to get users onto IE8, Microsoft might end up alienating its intended audience instead. For starters, Microsoft pushed out IE8 as a critical security patch via AutoUpdate, which caused some users to install the browser when they didn’t want it. Plus, the standard settings make IE8 the default browser, as has been Microsoft’s custom, so some users not only ended up with a browser they didn’t want, that browser became their default.
Earlier this month we learned that Microsoft was even steering IE6 users away from Yahoo! and Google — pushing them to use Bing instead. This should become an urgent matter for antitrust regulators to handle. Microsoft is, as always, totally out of control. On the Internet — without a doubt — Microsoft is making itself many enemies; Marc Benioff is more outspoken than most and here is his very latest:
Salesforce CEO jabs at Microsoft cloud moves
[...]
Marc Benioff, a former Oracle Corp (ORCL.O) employee who founded Salesforce.com 10 years ago, rarely misses a chance to bash Microsoft as he spreads his gospel of cutting out software installed on users’ computers and getting companies to use applications over the web.
“We are all about no software and they are all about software,” Benioff said at a lunch in Seattle, when asked about Microsoft. “We are all about creating a whole new movement of cloud computing to move companies away from Microsoft’s proprietary technology and monopolistic business practices.”
“Monopolistic business practices” indeed. █
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Posted in Europe, OpenDocument, Standard at 7:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Dutch meeting promotes the use of the only interoperable document standard
• ODF Plugfest at The Hague
The Dutch government program, Netherlands in Open Connection, and the OpenDoc Society cosponsored the two-day ODF “plugfest” at the Royal Library in The Hague, 15-16 June 2009, where vendors and open source projects were able to test ODF capabilities with each other in real-world, collaborative scenarios. OASIS TC chairs, Bart Hanssens, (ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC), and Rob Weir (co-Chair ODF TC), participated and delivered presentations.
• Improving Interoperability ODF in Office Applications
Over more than forty organisations and a total of sixty representatives from businesses, public sector organisations, open source projects and research institutions, came together this Monday and Tuesday to improve the interoperability of their office applications on the implementation of the open standard Open Document Format (ODF) during the ODF Interoperability Workshop . The support for ODF as an open standard is required for Dutch government organisations in accordance with the actionplan Netherland Open in Connection . ODF is a modern and flexible exchange format for word processors, spreadsheet programs and presentation programs and offers an alternative to vendor specific file formats.
• New ODF Interoperability Initiatives Launched At Dutch Government Workshop (as PDF)
The Hague, June 17, 2009. New ODF interoperability initiatives were unveiled this week at an international conference organized by the Dutch government, which has mandated ODF for reading, writing, exchange and publication of documents and also initiated a requirement to ask for ODF when issuing or renewing IT contracts. The Dutch government program Netherlands in Open Connection (NOiV) and the OpenDoc Society cosponsored the two-day ODF “plugfest” at the Royal Library in The Hague, where vendors and open source projects were able to test their ODF capabilities with each other in real-world, collaborative scenarios.
• ODF and the Art of Interoperability
While OOXML-compliant software seems conspicuous by its absence, ODF goes from strength to strength: there is literally no contest between the rival standards in this respect.
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Posted in Europe, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, Standard at 6:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The BSI’s new link to Microsoft is Datawatch, a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner
GROKLAW has caught this very interesting press release. It says:
Datawatch Corporation (NASDAQ-CM: DWCH), a leader in Enterprise Information Management (EIM) and BI, today announced the appointment of its Senior Product Manager, Gareth Horton, to the British Standards Institution (BSI) Technical Committee IST/41. As a co-opted expert member of the committee, he has also been nominated to the Working Group (WG4) of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34, which is responsible for the ongoing maintenance of IS29500 (Office Open XML).
Pamela Jones adds: “Co-opted precisely how?”
For those who are new to the scandals of the BSI, see:
To add icing to this little cake, almost exactly a year ago Datawatch announced that it continued to “Cement Partnership with Microsoft.”.
Chelmsford, Mass.—June 25, 2008—Datawatch Corporation (NASDAQ-CM: DWCH), a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner and leading provider of solutions to the Enterprise Information Management market, announces several significant achievements and activities regarding its partnership with Microsoft.
Microsoft Certified Gold Partner. No conflict of interests there, eh? The BSI has been filled with such conflicts all along. What a fiasco. █
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Posted in GNOME, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Ubuntu at 6:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
What Microsoft has
What Microsoft wants
Summary: Addressing a new danger that the GIMP gets replaced by Mono, by default
A few days ago we wrote about the brand new proposition that GIMP should be removed from the default installation of Ubuntu, the most ubiquitous desktop distribution of GNU/Linux. The justification for this was that a Mono-based application can serve as an acceptable replacement. A closer look reveals that this proposal came from a former Microsoft employee. Here’s a fragment:
# Lead Program Manager at Microsoft
# User Experience Manager at Microsoft
[...]
Usability Engineer, Usability Manager
Microsoft
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; MSFT; Computer Software industry)
March 1998 — May 2005 (7 years 3 months)
Usability engineer, and later usability manager, for Microsoft’s Visual Studio family of products. Lead user centered design efforts across the suite of of developer tools.
“Visual Studio,” eh? A good deal of Mono hype tends to come from Microsoft employees or pro-Microsoft reporters, as we have shown many times before. Interestingly enough, anti-Linux trolls love to extol the virtues of Mono, which is telling. They just try to spread it.
But why replace the GIMP with .NET/Mono in the first place? F-Spot is hardly suitable as an image editor. There is already opposition to this move.
How to I scale an image in f-spot ? If there’s a way, I have not been able to find it (same for red eyes). How do I annotate an image (putting text somewhere) ?
Yet people ask “Gimp is cool but.. should it belong to LiveCD?” I’ll give you a better question: what should belong to the LiveCD ?
Removing GIMP from the LiveCd fully defeats the showing off purpouse of the LiveCd and lives you without any handy tool to perform basic manipulation on images. Now, it can be just me, but I can’t find anything useful in that regard inside Jaunty’s f-spot.
I can’t see how f-spot belongs to the live cd more than the Gimp. And sure the Gimp UI sucks (at least, I hate it. Not that I love f-spot’s though) but it can take burden of tasks that nothing else provides. Should we leave our users without even basic image manipulation, just like OS X users ? Shouldn’t Ubuntu be better than that ?
Another person wants to remove F-Spot (altogether) from the LiveCD.
We all know that it’s as tight on the LiveCD as a metro during rush hour. It’s almost impossible to fit something else on it, most of the times you’ll have to sacrifice something for it.
Unfortunately localisation of the LiveCDs is something that can’t be supported because of a lack of space. It’s one of the many things that can’t be put on the CD because of a lack of space.
Ubuntu would look a lot more professional if it would actually use the language you selected on boot. Looking professional is essential. In my eyes the LiveCD should show the best what we have to offer. F-Spot isn’t exactly the epitome of supreme look & feel and is useless on the LiveCD since there are no photos to use it with.
The threat of Mono is not just perceived or exaggerated, it is very real and sometimes very explicit. Here is another new article which debunks Mono myths. Like anyone who ‘dares’ to criticise Mono, the author of this article is often attacked viciously rather than his message.
Shields makes a claim that Mono is hundreds of times faster than Python – but offers no benchmarks to back up this incredible claim.
He makes no mention of the fact that Microsoft first tried to corrupt the Java standard and then, and then only, came up with C#. a language similar to Java.
And, above all, he avoids mentioning the fact that .NET is wholly Microsoft technology and therefore the chances that it holds patents on the same is much higher than in the case of any other technology on which it claims to have patents.
Mono is good for Windows, so it is hardly surprising that the Microsoft crowd advances it [1, 2, 3]. It’s time to say “No more”, not “Mono”. █
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