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Microsoft Booster at the Microsoft-Leaning Ars Technica: UEFI Restricted Boot is Good

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Summary: Ars Technica hardly pretends to be journalism anymore; advertisers get the bias they must be paying for (money for ads in expectation of reciprocity, e.g. in coverage)

GIVEN what we know about the NSA (thanks to whistleblowers), UEFI Restricted Boot is quite the horrific thing which blocks choice and can also remotely brick PCs (at hardware level). Germany has already banned UEFI on its PCs, perhaps precisely for these reasons (advice from its secret services must have led to this).

Peter Bright, a longtime Microsoft booster who gives Ars Technica somewhat of a tabloid's reputation (and he is not alone), is trying to Windowswash the GNU/Linux-powered Steambox and his disgusting (sub)headline says: "In the brave (relatively) new world of UEFI, things happen to mostly just work."

That's utter nonsense; UEFI is still a mess for GNU/Linux users (new example in [1]) and even Microsoft could not properly deal with UEFI. It bricked PCs. To Bright's credit, he has shed off his camouflage a bit. He recently changed his bio to better show his real agenda (more like a mole). He now describes himself as "Microsoft Contributor at Ars." He also moved to Texas.

So, Microsoft is a whole section at Ars Technica now? Good to know. Well, it sure seems to be accepting a lot of advertising money from Microsoft (sometimes the front page of the site is a collage of Microsoft ads and promotions); it must feel like it needs to give something in return, much like CBS (grossly filled with Microsoft boosters and even former Microsoft employees).

Once upon a time Ars Technica had an "Open Source" section. It has been dead for years (the only person who sometimes covers FOSS over there is a Microsoft booster from a FOSS-hostile site, Network World/IDG), just like the analogous section at CBS sites like CNET and ZDNet.

We need to identify sites that seed disinformation and pin down the reasons for it. Sometimes the choice of authors is a managerial choice made by publishers seeking to appease particular sponsors.

Related/contextual items from the news:



  1. Tech Note: How To Install Linux On A Laptop With UEFI


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