Who Are the Communists?
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2010-06-19 00:56:00 UTC
- Modified: 2010-06-19 00:56:00 UTC
"Bill Gates cites copyright enforcement to justify Chinese censorship. Microsoft executives used to call us communists, but they are now clearly revealed as the ones who support communist-style dictatorship."
--Richard Stallman
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Brett Wilson LLP Sent Over 5 Kilograms (or Over 12 Pounds) of Legal Papers! Because Writing About Microsoft Abuses is 'Illegal'.
- How do you guys sleep at night? On a big pile of Microsoft money?
- Extremism as a Weapon Against GNU/Linux (Microsoft Lunduke)
- He ought to know the Halloween Documents. Wasn't he a Microsoft employee when these came out?
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- Microsoft-Sponsored Propaganda Site Has Removed False 'Hit Piece' About Dr. Stallman (With Fake and Misrepresented Imagery) But Only After 4 Years
- So they only removed that page some time around 2025, i.e. about 4 years after it had been published
- Always Check Your Inputs
- Garbage in, garbage out. Or wrong assumptions, wrong corollary.
- Dan Neidle Said That Tax Evasion Facilitator Mr Zahawi (Working to Silence Bloggers Through Brett Wilson LLP) Targeted Not Only Him (But The Others Kept Quiet)
- "Mr Neidle said after repelling Mr Zahawi he was contacted by bloggers and tweeters who had received similar threats. They deleted their work “and in most cases never commented publicly on anything again”."
- SLAPP Funding Transparency Urgently Needed in the UK and Elsewhere (in Practice, Not Just in Theory)
- Writing about crime - including Microsoft crime - is not a crime
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, July 09, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, July 09, 2025
- Elodie Bergot Still Doing Illegal Things at the EPO, Based on the Local Staff Committee Munich
- They keep taking away from the staff while compelling the staff to do illegal things
- Gemini Links 09/07/2025: Extreme Testing and Golang Documentation in Geminispace
- Links for the day
- Vice President of the European Patent Office (EPO) Complains That Techrights Gives Visibility to Legal and Technical Issues at the EPO
- "Follow-up on enquiries relating to Dir. 1218 and 1001"
- Slopwatch: linuxsecurity.com and Various Slopfarms That Lie About "Linux" and Are Promoted by Google News
- Google does not seem interested in tackling this problem
- Links 09/07/2025: War Updates and Microsoft Moving to India to Cut Costs
- Links for the day
- GNU/Linux Was Always a 'Movement' of Inclusion of Tolerance
- Even the licences themselves remove access barriers
- Links 09/07/2025: "Subprime AI Crisis" and "OpenAI May Be in Major Trouble Financially"
- Links for the day
- Huge Piles of Legal Papers ('Paper DDoS') Do Not Impress Judges and Regulators
- they just make judges and regulators even more suspicious of the eagerness to resort to 'paper DDoS'
- Lunduke Isn't Even Hiding His Anti-Linux Agenda (From "Linux Sucks" to "Linux is Pedophiles")
- just trying to make a lot of trouble
- Some People Use Computers to Get Actual Work Done
- Tolerance and inclusion must extend to acceptance that some people don't agree with you, might never agree with you, and imposing what allegedly works for you on them is unreasonable
- Example of "Old" Things That Still Work
- The notion that something being "old" implies it must be discarded is typically advanced by those looking to sell more of something
- Some Scheduled Maintenance Later Today
- Typically the most vulnerable service during short interruptions is IRC
- Computers Are Just a Tool
- People don't get married because they love weddings, folks don't join the army because they love war, and most drivers don't drive to work because they love cars
- Apple Way Past Its Prime
- Apple deserves a decline
- The FSF's SysOps Team Recovered From Serious Hardware Issue Within Hours
- About half a day ago I noticed that all/most GNU/FSF sites were not reachable and thus reached out to a contact for any details
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 08, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, July 08, 2025
- Slopwatch: Turning Bugs Into FUD About "Linux", Getting Basic Facts Wrong
- all the screenshots are of fake articles; we don't want to link to any
- Technical Reasons, Not Politics: With Wayland "it feels a lot like Linux from 20-25 years ago, which is horrendously frustrating, because it feels like we wasted one or two decades of progress and stability"
- Lately, quite a few benchmarks were published to show Wayland compares poorly compared to what we had
- PCLinuxOS Recovering From Fire
- It looks like a nightmare scenario, where even backups onsite get destroyed
- Links 09/07/2025: More Heatwaves, Officials Culled in Russia
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 09/07/2025: XScreensaver and Resurrection
- Links for the day
- Links 08/07/2025: "Cyberattack Deals Blow to Russian Firmware" and "Cash Remains King"
- Links for the day
- FSF40 T-shirt message
- by Alex Oliva
- Gemini Links 08/07/2025: Creativity, Gotify with NUT Server, and Sudo Bugs
- Links for the day
- More on "Lunduke is Actually Sending His Audience to Attack People"
- "pepe the frogs"
- Links 08/07/2025: Sabotage of Networking Infrastructure, Microsoft XBox Game Pass Deemed “Unsustainable”
- Links for the day
- Dalai Lama Succession as Evidence That Determined, Motivated People Can Reach Their Nineties
- And we need to quit talking about their death all the time
- Many Lawyers (for Microsoft) and 1,316 Pages to Pick on a Litigant in Person Who Exposed Serious Microsoft Abuses
- Answers must be given
- Gemini Links 08/07/2025: Ancillary Justice and Small Web July
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, July 07, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, July 07, 2025
Comments
twitter
2010-06-19 13:18:38
The results of the lack of freedom are nowhere more apparent than on the desktop. After ten years of free software on my desktop, using Windows for any extended time is like moving into an East German apartment block. The system is restricted, confining, drab, featureless, and bare of utilities and luxuries I'm used to. The owners are intrusive and the place is filled with their propaganda. My neighbors often suffer dissaster and perform many paranoid but futile rituals. The owners watch the tenant's every move and communications in a way that's surpasses the Stasi's wildest dreams and George Orwell's worst nightmares. All that I can think while I'm using Windows is how nice freedom is and how sad it is that my neighbors are so mislead and abused. It's creepy to me that I can't escape non free software propaganda by simply avoiding Windows because it is carried by the increasingly consolidated and partially owned by Microsoft media, even on state owned public TV.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2010-06-19 17:35:39
"Before he installed Windows 95, John Dodge connected to the Internet using software from a Microsoft competitor, CompuServe's Internet in a Box. Not anymore—Windows 95 silently disabled a key piece of his setup and made it too difficult for him to reinstall it. € "Dodge is no novice. He is senior executive editor of the trade journal PC Week and so had access to the highest-level support engineers. But life is short and even software professionals learn to take the path of least resistance—in this case, the path leading to Microsoft. He has become a regular user of the new Microsoft Network, though he has trouble with its Internet features.
"Still, he believes Microsoft executives when they deny trying to gain market share by sabotaging competitors' software. He just wonders whether Microsoft "has a full appreciation of its actions in the market place." € "There is reason to believe that Microsoft does." € [...] € "Accusations that Microsoft's people lie, cheat and steal information are as much a part of the company's lore as its cadre of millionaires with FYIFV (". . . I'm fully vested") buttons. Microsoft knows it has clout, and it uses what it has: to pressure small competitors, trade-show operators, journalists, retailers (shelf space for non-Microsoft software will be at a premium this Christmas) and everyone else. € ""Can you name anybody that's happy about being in the same industry with Microsoft?" Mitchell Kapor asks. € "Microsoft lives according to a "thin ethics," as he sees it: "Anything not a direct lie or clearly illegal is O.K. to do and should be done if it advances Microsoft's tribal cause. This licenses the worst sorts of manipulations, lies, tortured self-justification and so on." Microsoft is hardly alone, of course; plenty of its competitors would play as rough, if they only could. Others in the industry suggest that Microsoft's small-company scrappiness has kept it from facing the issue of corporate ethics: behavior that people will forgive, or at least understand, in a start-up looks considerably less attractive when David grows into Goliath."
Needs Sunlight
2010-06-19 18:26:34
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2010-06-19 18:52:36
--Steve Ballmer
"Thanks to Mr. Gates, we now know that an open Internet with protocols anyone can implement is communism; it was set up by that famous communist agent, the US Department of Defense."
--Richard Stallman
"A common danger tends to concord. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In Communism, inequality comes from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence."
--Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
"Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is exploitation of the strong by the weak."
--Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
twitter
2010-06-19 21:51:17
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2010-06-19 22:08:10