08.15.13
Posted in FUD, Google, Microsoft at 3:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The privacy laws apply only to Google, claims Microsoft
Summary: Some new lies from Microsoft against Google and also apparent AstroTurf against Google in court
Microsoft, the NSA’s best friend, loses to Google on many fronts including office suites and operating systems. Google has done what many companies could not do because of Microsoft corruption (there are antitrust cases and other lawsuits shedding light on this). Right now Microsoft is resurrecting a hypocritical "Scoogled" campaign, which is factually flawed. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explains yet another reason for this hypocrisy:
Talk about having things both ways! A few months ago in its “Scroogled” ad campaign, Microsoft was complaining about how Google uses your search terms and Gmail contents to deliver targeted ads. Now, Microsoft is touting how Windows 8.1 uses your search terms to deliver targeted ads, even when you’re doing searches on local drives.
Do people at Microsoft ever talk to anyone outside their own groups? Does the Bing team need to be introduced to the Scroogled team? Scroogled? How about Bing-Bang-Bungled?
Microsoft is also censoring competition in the results — an accusation it habitually throws Google’s way. Microsoft is the same if not worse, yet scrutiny is only being directed towards Google. Recall Microsoft’s antitrust complaints against Google (over operating systems). How dare Microsoft do this given its own status? Watch how Consumer Watchdog, which seems to be tied to Microsoft, smears Google right now. From the press:
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Google has made it clear that people who send or receive email via Gmail should not expect their messages to remain private.
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Critics call revelation ‘a stunning admission’ as Google makes claim in court filing in attempt to head off class action lawsuit
Seemingly a Microsoft AstroTurfing front which is connected to Edelman, a Microsoft PR ally, this ‘watchdog’ perpetually ignores Microsoft’s violations. It is never doing anything at all regarding Microsoft. That’s rather revealing. █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Oracle at 3:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s hostility towards FOSS and Linux persists, based on the company’s actions
A few years ago Microsoft was building attack groups to halt migrations to OpenOffice.org. That was before Oracle messed things up. It is now being demonstrated that Microsoft is censoring results:
In its efforts to take down as much infringing content as it can, Microsoft has started to censor legitimate links to competing software. Hoping to remove pirated versions of Microsoft Office from the Internet, the software company has sent several DMCA takedowns to Google, listing copies of its open source competitor Open Office as copyright infringements. An honest mistake perhaps, but also a terrible one.
And Microsoft trying to accuse Google of doing this. Look who’s talking.
Incidentally, Microsoft hates Google so much that it is leaving out the market leader, Android, which is Linux-based. According to this report about the Microsoft-acquired Yammer:
Android, for now, remains on the outside of the Yammer love circle.
Also see this:
Yammer is opening up its social features to third-party enterprise apps built for iOS phones and tablets and Windows Phone 8 devices — but for Android for now.
And later they tell us that they’re warming up to Linux and playing nice, They just simply rely on moles like Walli to infiltrate FOSS sites and pretend there’s a pro-FOSS angle at Microsoft. Deeds don’t stack up to match the PR.
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Posted in Microsoft at 3:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Downtime for Microsoft’s servers that cannot stay online 365 days of the year and some news from the government-controlled press, which seems to be staging a DDOS crisis (real or perceived)
Microsoft s Office 360 [1, 2] is having uptime issues again, making it deserving of this name that does not imply 365 days of uptime. Here are some details:
Microsoft’s Outlook, SkyDrive, and People technologies are experiencing problems, making it difficult for some people to access the cloud services.
The issues began on Wednesday morning and affected Microsoft’s hosted storage, email and contact services. Its Azure cloud coincidentally reported problems for SQL databases in the North Central US data center region.
[...]
In typical Redmond fashion, information on the nature of the faults was scant, with Redmond saying “services such as Hotmail, Messenger, and SkyDrive are experiencing technical difficulties. We appreciate your patient as work on the problem.”
The AP report says that:
Microsoft is trying to fix a technological breakdown that has cut off some people from their email accounts on Outlook.com and files stored on the company’s SkyDrive service.
The NSA must be upset as it cannot access customers’ data for a while, spying on them with Microsoft’s help. The NSA is right now pressuring to pass new laws that will let it spy even more, under the premise that it would help fight DDOS attacks. Conveniently enough, the rival of the government propaganda site, the CIA Outpost/Bezos Post , has apparently been under DDOS attacks or got cracked:
The Web site for the New York Times continued to have problems Wednesday after an hours-long outage.
The site became inaccessible in the late morning. It came back up about 1:30 p.m., but stories did not appear to have been updated. It is unclear what was the cause of the problem, which also affected the company’s corporate site and its mobile-device apps.
Wait for the NSA to use that as an excuse to justify its spying, just like those closures of consulates in numerous countries (a lot of consulates are secretly used for foreign surveillance and espionage, reveal leaks).
Aside from all this, Microsoft has been openwashing its ‘cloud’ efforts as of late, not without help from old friends. GigaOM, which was previously paid by Microsoft to embed fake content (ads) in articles, doing some PR for Microsoft, seeding yet more such coverage. Placements for agenda masquerading as articles? What do they think they are, the New York Times? █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft, Patents, Samsung at 3:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More about Samsung’s Microsoft-serving code which seems like a gross violation of the GPL
Having been in contact with the source of the Samsung leak for a few days, we now have a lot more information that wasn’t published before. For the uninitiated, see the following three posts [1, 2, 3].
It turns out that the leaked code came from this man, who did not really mean to blow the whistle,
“Thank you very much for covering this story,” wrote the leaker. “It seems like GPL v2.2 is the way to go for this driver, correct?”
“ Kenneth R. Crudup is the one who leaked the driver. He got that driver through working for Broadcom on some android-ware.”
–rxrz (pseudonym)We previously suggested a suitable licence for the leaked code, but we wanted to know who has the copyrights. The leaker explained: “I wish I had those logs, but I found the leak on github, and the original account has been deleted. Although I made a fork of that repo, here it is https://github.com/rxrz/kernel-N8000/tree/master/fs/exfat Kenneth R. Crudup is the one who leaked the driver. He got that driver through working for Broadcom on some android-ware. The driver in that repo is as original as it’s possible to get…
“In those files you can see the version log and the author names. I believe it was written by two people during their contract with Samsung.”
We have already identified and studied one of them. They are in Seoul.
We may still need some legal advice for handling this existing leaked code. The leaker is not sure who to ask. “If you get a minute,” she wrote, “could you please compose a license file for exfat-nofuse? I will merge it asap.”
“Maybe this is something that could be solved over at Groklaw,” said iophk from our team. “The twisty path that the code has taken to arrive where it is now makes it harder to guess who gets assigned the copyright. GPLv2 seems the right choice but who owns it?”
The probe continues… █
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Posted in Microsoft, Vista 8, Windows at 2:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Antifeatures evolve
Found circulating in JoinDiaspora
Summary: The operating system which introduced hardware tie-in is doing so badly that Microsoft will release it again under a different name with minor changes
MICROSOFT’S COMMON CARRIER will soon die unless Microsoft does something major. Vista 8 is doing so badly that Microsoft plans to re-release it under a different number (not much has been changed)later this year.
Microsoft will unleash Windows 8.1 for world+dog to download in October, it’s claimed, a year after it released the touchscreen-friendly, tile-tastic Windows 8.
Vista 8 was partly to blame for Microsoft’s hardware woes too. This has been worse than many people imagined it would be. As one blog put it:
Microsoft’s Surface RT is an “Unmitigated Disaster.” What’s wrong with that?
After Microsoft successfully used Restricted Boot to make dual-booting Linux distributions and Windows 8 on newer desktop and notebook computers a painful adventure.
And after the company successfully locked out Linux distributions from ARM tablets running Windows RT, any bad news streaming from Steve Ballmer’s office is sweet music to my ears.
UEFI people, including some managers, continue to contact me as they are concerned that their work is getting a bad name. Freedom should no longer evade their minds, it’s the users who should be in charge; Microsoft-OEMs collusion prevents this. As long as they are complicit in Microsoft's antitrust abuses, they get what they deserve. █
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