Bonum Certa Men Certa

Novell Pays Ponemon Institute, LLC, to Help Generate Fake News

Ponemon



Summary: Larry Ponemon's firm, which sells bias, helps Novell seed some favourable coverage in news sites following a paid-for 'study' and paid-for press release

THE MOVEMENT known as "sceptics" (or skeptics for the north Americans) has grown rather popular. It is associated with developing critical skills that are derived to an extent from science, encouraging people to tell apart fake news from real news and facts from fiction (including so-called 'conspiracy theories'). Here at Techrights we encourage everyone to take a critical look and remember the role of PR agencies. The PR industry in the United States alone is said to have a turnover of over one trillion dollars. It's that industry which tells unsuspecting members of the public what products are "good", what foreign policies are "good", which companies are "good", and which people are "good". Bill Gates, for example, spends over one million dollars per day on PR, i.e. telling the world how wonderful he and the Gates Foundation are. It's a really massive industry generating bias and making deliberate deception "acceptable" (because "everyone's doing it!"). It's why a lot of sociopaths happen to be affluent, even if they are not genuinely clever.



"It's a really massive industry generating bias and making deliberate deception "acceptable" (because "everyone's doing it!")."While it is rare to see companies targeting Novell (whose future is just a trademark possibly to be abandoned), these still rarely exist and the company still has those rare press releases, from Provo even (not Boston). This new one for example is based on some claims Novell paid someone to make as means of generating promotional pseudo-articles (pasted press release) and exaggerated claims that help Novell make sales. That last one says: "The average cost of compliance associated with storing unstructured data is $2.1 million per year, according to a report prepared by the Ponemon Institute for software firm Novell."

Another one repeats the same claims, which Novell merely bought. It's not real research, it is tainted.

The Ponemon Institute conducted the research for networking vendor Novell, to look at the storage, control and compliance challenges that derive from the proliferation of unstructured data such as documents, presentations and spreadsheets.


Watch this Novell propaganda spreading:

The Ponemon Institute, on behalf of networking and data management firm Novell, looked at the compliance costs of managing business data at 100 firms.


How were those 100 firms selected? Did Novell put any strings on the finding? Any incentive to tilt it in one direction or another (e.g. for future contracts)? No journalist seems to be questioning those claims, just reposting them. It's pure laziness. This is no better than PR, like like this new "Novell Customer Success Story" which is totally within Novell's control (just like the Vibe PR blitz in YouTube, as we noted before). Novell is just trying to inject its idealogy into articles as well as inject product names like "Novell Identity Manager" into articles like this one. If this is the state of today's journalism (no research, no days taken for independent audit of claims), then we are seriously in a miserable state of affairs. News just becomes surrogate for PR and here in Techrights we fought against shallow coverage about Novell, which mostly echoed Novell's PR rather than investigate. If there is something people can take away from this site, it will hopefully be critical skills. It's not just about Novell and we have decent wiki pages on this subject. These can be generalised. Had journalists done their job properly (covering, not promoting), Microsoft would not get so far with racketeering and Novell would probably avoid a treasonous deal with Microsoft.

"News of the World" is dead today, after well over a century. What a testament of our times.

Recent Techrights' Posts

The Register Bill
The Register MS - putting the "MS" in your centre of the universe
Analogies for "Memory Safety" in Rust
Don't worry, it's Rust! It can do anything!
Nobody Denies That SecureBoot Will Cause Problems After September 11
Not even Microsoft
Gemini Links 06/09/2025: Infinite Scrolling and Posting from Emacs
Links for the day
Links 06/09/2025: GitHub Meltdown Over Slop, "U.S. Jury Says Google Should Pay $425 Million in Privacy Lawsuit"
Links for the day
Despite Its Severe Financial Problems Gnome Foundation Inc Paid Rosanna Yuen Over 100,000 Dollars Last Year
maybe relocation should be considered
The "Left" and the Right"
It poisons everything
Mozilla and Rust Are Not Leftists
they're part of the mass consumerism machine
Disposable to Microsoft
There is an extensive set of people who got used by Microsoft, only to be thrown away a month later or a year later or a decade later
The UEFI 9/11 - Part VII - This Coming Week Many PCs Will Refuse to Boot "Linux" (Because of Microsoft's Expired Certificate)
The real solution is, disable "secure boot" or "SecureBoot" while it's still possible. [...] Just like submarine patents, a lot of this problem was "hibernating" for a while
The Thing Nobody in Red Hat Wants to Talk About Openly
There is a real sentiment or worry among Red Hatters, Europeans and Americans in particulars (because of higher salary expectations)
Slopwatch: Small Parade of Fake News About "Linux" and Scams Borrowing the Name (or Word) "Linux"
In practice, LLMs are a risk
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, September 05, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, September 05, 2025
Genini Links 05/09/2025: Community, ROOPHLOCH, and PITkit
Links for the day
Links 05/09/2025: Vaccine Sceptics Poison the Well, Two Exploited Vulnerabilities Patched in Android
Links for the day
Gemini Links 05/09/2025: Logitech Lift and DIY Gemini Servers
Links for the day
Links 05/09/2025: Sainsbury's Caught Spying on In-Store Shoppers and Microsoft "OpenAI is Using Legal Threats to Harass its Critics"
Links for the day
BASIC Predates Microsoft by Over a Decade, Microsoft-Controlled Sites Like The Register MS Don't Want You to Know This
The state of the media is really bad when it relies a lot on oligarchs' money and is appointing editors who are working for oligarchs
Brian Kernighan, "Only Third to Dennis Richie and Ken Thompson" (UNIX), Agreed With Someone Who Said Rust Was Just Hype, Should Not Replace C
17 hours ago
Reminder: Microsoft's "Secure Boot" Certificate for "Linux" Will be Expired in One Week
Many PCs won't manage to 'rotate' to another certificate
"Many of the Red Hat Employees Are Still Looking for Work"
Shame on IBM's CEO
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, September 04, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, September 04, 2025
Microsoft Started With Code Literally From The Trash, Nothing Has Improved Since
The reality is, there are systems and code that are reliable. But they're not Microsoft's.
Hypothesis That New McKinsey/Microsoft Executive Inside Red Hat Will Outsource Research and Development Operations to India (Like They Do in IBM)
IBM is floundering
Slopwatch: Scams, Fake Articles About "Linux", Plagiarism, and Worse
Perhaps some time soon the LLMs or the "Big LLMs" will run out of money (to borrow) and go offline, leaving those slopfarms in a tough place
Gemini Links 04/09/2025: Means of Production and Rusting Out
Links for the day
Links 04/09/2025: Science, Hardware, and Eyes on China
Links for the day
Gemini Links 04/09/2025: Digital Minimalism and Social Control Media
Links for the day
IBM's GNU/Linux Divestment, Based on Hard But Anecdotal Evidence (IBM Fails to Recognise How Much Money It Made and Can Still Make From "Linux")
Love us or hate us, a lot of what we've been saying about Red Hat under IBM turns out to be rather accurate
Links 04/09/2025: Massive Microsoft Staff Cuts (Barely Reported), "Strange Conspiracy Theory Is Reportedly Spreading Inside OpenAI"
Links for the day
Activists Can Win, But Keep an Eye on the Ball and on the Trophy
GitHub is dying, it was a loss-making trap, not free hosting
Gemini Links 04/09/2025: Katrina Remembered, Distracted Driving, and Virtual Economics
Links for the day
At This Point It's No Longer Matthew Garrett But People Who Fund Matthew Garrett (or Companies That Fund His SLAPPs Against My Wife and I)
The only thing worse than misogynists are misogynists who fail to respect other people's right to go on holiday
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, September 03, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, September 03, 2025
The UEFI 9/11 - Part VI - This Serious Harm Was Planned for Over a Decade, Not an Accident or Merely Some Misfortune
The term "Serious Harm" is legally meaningful here
GNOME Unfit for Diversity and Inclusion
GNOME's leadership is using "bad words"
Brodie Robertson Addressing the Recently-Discovered Comments
Most people probably knew nothing about this until he wrote a response
Red Hat QA Team "Had Shrunk by Half Over the Past Year." (After IBM Divestment)
If Red Hat's workforce is being moved to the East, then RHEL can become a national security problem
Slopwatch: "Open Source" and "Linux" News Faked, Made by Bots and Entered Into Google News
Spam combined with slop about "Linux" has entered Google News