Bonum Certa Men Certa

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Gets the 'Wikileaks Treatment' From MasterCard

MasterCensor



Summary: Harassment by proxy seems like a possibility now that funds to the FSF are being discouraged

Donations to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) are a dangerous or suspicious activity now (like post-Cablegate Wikileaks), at least based on this account from a reader/contributor of ours. Donations to the FSF are made more difficult now. Microsoft did this type of thing last year [1, 2]. Here is how the latest story goes:





Master Card called me about my FSF Subscription That's very strange because I've been making monthly payments for about a decade. Someone is doing something nasty to the FSF.

At 8AM, I got a call from the fraud prevention department of my credit card asking me to "verify some recent activity". I saw it in my email when I woke up about an hour after they called.

My Mastercard was robbed once before, so I checked online and called the customer service number printed on my bill. There was nothing suspicious in the online report or the last bill. I was not about to call the number left on my answering machine, which simply identified itself as "TOLL FREE CALL" It took some time to escape the menu, which was uninformative and dangerous because it wanted to change things. The key phrase "human being" did the trick and I was promptly routed to an operator at the fraud department.

The representative told me that my monthly FSF subscription charge had triggered the call and that means hundreds of false charges had been made in the FSF's name. When she told me the FSF charge was responsible for the call, I said that was strange because I had been making regular automated payments since 2004. She told me that the trigger was probably false charges to other accounts. I asked her how many false charges it would take to make such a trigger. She said that it changes daily but that it would probably take hundreds.

I can think of four explanations for this:

1. The FSF made a mistake in billing. Unlikely.

2. Mastercard wanted to harass the FSF. Unlikely but they have a history of cutting off funds to Wikileaks and can not really be trusted.

3. Someone made fraudulent payments to Mastercard on many accounts. That could be done maliciously or as a misguided help, the result would be the same and no one should do that.

4. Someone wanted to harass the FSF by setting up fake accounts to play games.

Whatever the actual reason, damage is being done to the FSF's reputation and it should never have happened to me. An algorithm that overlooks my long history of monthly payments is broken. Operators should be given the exact reason that a company has been labeled suspicious. The call was inconvenient and damaging. Further speculation added to that damage. Hopefully, Mastercard itself is not responsible for this and will get to the bottom of it.

I started a FSF Forum thread about this hoping to call the right kind of attention to the problem.

http://www.fsf.org/associate/forum/community/612250276


Discouragement through discomfort is an effective strategy. Proving this to be intentional is hard, almost impossible even.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols celebrates a decade of fighting back against SCO, whose funding from Microsoft is evident. Showing the intention or proving it is the hard part. With uncertainty or lack of concrete evidence, these attacks can carry on, little by little, proxy by proxy (one of the latest seems to be Nokia). Groklaw covers another curious attack, namely Oracle (a friend of a friend, Apple). The latest is this: "Google has now responded to Oracle's appeal in the Oracle v. Google API copyright case. Plus it adds its own cross appeal."

Copyrights were also used by SCO. In all cases, and wherever FOSS takes over, the intend is to tax GNU/Linux or impose a sort of blockade.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Links 28/08/2025: Chatbots Distorting/Fabricating History and Also Driving Suicide
Links for the day
Open Source Initiative (OSI) Resists Software Freedom, Even by Attacking Its Own
The OSI is compromised
 
Richard Stallman (RMS) Talk in Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress Will be Remote
This past week RMS received lots of accolades online
The Register MS (Run by Microsoft Operatives): Free Software is Putin, Hence Evil and Dangerous
The current editor in chief is an American Microsofter, the previous one went to work for Google (US)
Gemini Links 28/08/2025: Back in Japan and Why "Hacker News" Sucks
Links for the day
A Much-Needed Wake-up Call to Users of Wordpress.com, Blogspot, Substack and All Those Other Outsourced (and Centralised) Platforms
There are several lessons in there
The UEFI 9/11 - Part II - Campaign of Censorship and Defamation Against Critics
In dictatorships, humour serves an important role. It's tragic.
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, August 27, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, August 27, 2025
Slopwatch: linuxsecurity.com, Slopfarms in Google News, and More
Some readers of ours end up sending us links that are from slopfarms, not realising those are slopfarms
Gemini Links 27/08/2025: Katrina Memories and Google Versus Software Freedom
Links for the day
Links 27/08/2025: Police Against Media Freedom in the UK, Energy-Hungry Countries Targeted by China
Links for the day
Microsoft Windows Fell to All-Time Lows in Egypt This Summer, Vista 11 Adoption Decreases While GNU/Linux Increases
Vista 11 is going down rather than up
Links 27/08/2025: Microsoft Demoralises Staff With Slop Demands, Leaving Mastodon Explained
Links for the day
12 Hours Ago The Register MS Published a Fake (Paid-for) Article, But This One for a Change Did Not Promote a Ponzi Scheme
There are also Free software alternatives, but they don't pay The Register MS for "synthetic" so-called 'journalism'
More People Need to Call Out and Put a Stop to Serial Sloppers
Unless slopfarms are stopped, people will read and share Microsoft propaganda made by chatbots
Gemini Links 27/08/2025: Headphones and Tartarus
Links for the day
Morale at Microsoft is Terrible (Proprietary Plagiarism Machines Have No Future, LLM Slop is a Bubble)
The slop sceptics/critics are going to have lots of "told you so" moments
GNOME "governance issues, staff reduction, etc." amidst Albanian whistleblowing and women trafficking
Notice the connection to Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) and GNOME
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, August 26, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, August 26, 2025
Richard Stallman (RMS) Was Right About "Sideloading" in 1996
We now have computers that treat booting GNU/Linux like an act of "Sideloading"
Panama: Windows Down From 97% "Market Share" to Less Than 30%
In 2009, Windows was measured at 97.24% (compared to 62.32% right now or less than 30% if one also counts Android)
The UEFI 9/11 - Part I - Introduction to Impending Catastrophe (Microsoft Preventing People From Booting Non-Windows Systems)
eight-part series
Why Techrights is Slow Today (Bot Floods)
We don't know if those bots are connected to LLMs (we have not checked), but that is a possibility
Slopwatch: DDoS Slop, LinuxBSDos.com Spam, and Slopfarms in Google News, Including webpronews.com
Among the news we also found fakes, albeit not so much today
Links 26/08/2025: "Ballooning Debt" in France and "Transnational Repression in the UK"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 26/08/2025: Listening to Alcest and Google Doing Evil (Users Installing Software is "Sideloading" and Prohibited)
Links for the day
Links 26/08/2025: DNS Tampering and TikTok Layoffs
Links for the day
Microsoft's Windows "Market Share" Overestimated
Microsoft's income sources are shrinking
We Shall See...
My wife and I are hardly the first victims of Brett Wilson LLP
This New Determination on a Case Echoes the Modus Operandi of Microsoft's Serial Strangler vs Techrights (Its Online Decision/Judgment Says Truth and Public Interest Defend the Publisher)
Noel Anthony Clarke hopefully has enough money left to pay his victims, which include the publishers
Going Offline
There was life before the Net
The Register MS Has Apparently Shut Down Its Office
It is basically a fake address on the face of it
There Are Also Expectations of IBM Layoffs Very Soon With "Narrative Control."
Some of them mention Red Hat and how IBM failed to achieve anything substantial with that acquisition
After at Least Two Rounds of Mass Layoffs in August Microsoft Said to Have "September Layoff Confirmed - Performance Based"
Those "M5 level meetings" sound plausible
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, August 25, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, August 25, 2025