“They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”

--Bill Gates about the Chinese (1998)

Summary: Microsoft is trying to portray itself and Windows as "open" because China is dumping the NSA Trojan horse that Bill Gates put there a couple of decades ago

BILL GATES is quite openly an NSA proponent and one thing that Gates and the NSA have in common is that they both use the Chinese as whipping boys. Gates likes to urge Chinese billionaires to give away (despite the fact that he himself is hoarding, not giving away) and the NSA pressures China to not do what the US has been doing for decades. Remember that Windows is an NSA Trojan horse, based on Edward Snowden's invaluable leaks.

Bill Gates' Microsoft has collaborated with the NSA like no other technology company (Microsoft is the #1 company in PRISM) and we recently wrote about China's ban on the latest Windows. This is a massive turning point -- one that even Gates lobbying trips to China might not be able to tackle.

Glyn Moody, writing about China's relationship with Linux, has just made some important points alluding to China's relation to Android, some forks of mobile operating systems (e.g. COS), and various GNU/Linux distributions, managed and developed by the world's largest population. Here is his opening paragraph (the article as a whole is worth a read):

The history of Linux in China is chequered. Android is doing extremely well there, even if it tends to be varieties that are more or less independent from Google (no bad thing.) But on the desktop, GNU/Linux has had a pretty disastrous showing. That's strange, because you would think that the Chinese authorities would jump at the chance to adopt a free operating system that was independent of the US, and which could be inspected for NSA backdoors even before the current Snowden leaks showed why that would be a good idea.

Moody quotes Gates on China, hopefully reminding the Chinese how Gates is really viewing them. He uses an old trick for disguising colonialism/imperialism as "charity" -- a trick that the CIA, USAID and various other covert operations have used for decades. Gates does this not only in China but especially in Africa and there are new articles about it [1] in the mass media [2] (finally it's acceptable to say the truth about Gates in some circles of corporate press). Don't forget how Bill Gates advances GMO in Africa through proxies like AGRA (new article about it in [3]) and has lobbied for it in India, apparently with success (new depressing article confirms some successes [4]). In the US, Gates is now seeking to monopolise and profit from schools, prisons, and police (people are complaining these days [5,6]). The 'gift' of private US monopolies is all that Gates seems to be offering, especially because he is a principal shareholder of these monopolies. Some call it profiteering. It's all just a ploy.

Speaking of ploys, watch the Microsoft-funded IDG pushing some Microsoft propaganda in China. Someone called Sheila Lam is apparently trying to respond to China's escape from Windows by openwashing Windows. She writes that "Microsoft is embracing open source in China."

Utter nonsense. Marketing disguised as journalism.

Lam is referring to the malicious proxy known as "Microsoft Open Technologies" (we also wrote about it in [1, 2]). "Earlier this year," writes Lam, "the software giant launched China Microsoft Open Technologies Shanghai to extend its existing open source development to the Middle Kingdom."

This is nonsense marketing and everyone in the Free/Open Source world knows that "Microsoft Open Technologies" exists to whitewash and openwash proprietary software from Microsoft. But don't let facts get in the way of so-called 'journalists' with agenda and bosses who receive payments from Microsoft.

"In 2012," adds Lam, "Microsoft set up a subsidiary--Microsoft Open Technologies--to help bridge the gap between Redmond's proprietary products and non-Microsoft technologies."

Notice that term "non-Microsoft technologies"; it's almost offensive. This is how Microsoft views competition. Microsoft uses the same tactics in the British government right now, as we shall show in the next post. Microsoft just keeps pretending to be the opposite of what it is in order to fit procurement criteria, not only in the UK but also in China. ⬆

“Gates has created a huge blood-buying operation that only cares about money, not about people.”

--AIDS organisation manager, December 2009 (New York Times)

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Why Bill Gates gets it wrong

   Worse, Munk's observations frequently seem to have been, at the very least, greatly exaggerated for narrative effect. Does Bill Gates really believe that I advocated specific crops without worrying about whether there was a market for them, or that I failed to consider national taxation in my ongoing advice to government leaders? Moreover, the agricultural strategies and choices in the MVP have been led by African agronomists, some of the very best in Africa — often working hand in hand with Bill's own agricultural staff in the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).





2. Bill Gates is wrong on Africa

   These are just two of many current examples. Despite Gates being factually wrong, the worst part is that his message steers people and policy makers away from the most critical problem facing Africa: corruption. Not speaking up where such abuses occur and propagating a false message in his letter is dishonest.





3. GMO Crops and Labeling: Barack Obama and the Monsanto Betrayal

   Nor is it coincidental that two of the Obama’s biggest supporters, Bill Gates and George Soros, purchased 900,000 and 500,000 shares of Monsanto, respectively, in 2010.





4. Punjab shortlists Monsanto, two others to provide subsidised HYV maize seeds

   The Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal on Monday approved a proposal of the State agriculture department, which shortlisted Monsanto and two other companies to provide high yielding varieties (HYV) of maize seeds to farmers at subsidised rates during the current Kharif season.





5. It’s Time for Bill Gates to Throw in the Education Towel

   Anthony Cody points out that for the past dozen years or so, Bill Gates has had his fun experimenting with education reform. Obsessed as he is with measurement and data, he imagined that he could impose his narrow ideas on American public schools and bring about a magical transformation.
   
   Does American education need reform and improvement? Absolutely. Stuck as it is in the paradigm of testing and punishment, it sorely needs a revival of humanism and attention to the needs of children, families, and communities. It needs teachers who are well-prepared. It needs a recommitment o the health and happiness of children and to a deeper love of learning.
   
   Yet Gates used HS vast wealth to steer national policy to the dry and loveless task of higher scores on tests of dubious value.
   
   He wanted charter schools, and Arne Duncan, his faithful liege, demanded more charter schools,even if it was central to the Republican agenda.
   
   He wanted national standards and quite willingly paid out over $2 billion to prove that one man could create the nation’s academic standards by buying off almost every group that mattered.
   
   He wanted teachers to be evaluated based on test scores, and Ducan gave that to him too.
   
   But says Cody, everything failed.





6. Gates Foundation, divest from G4S

   The Stanford Class of 2014 Commencement speakers, Bill and Melinda Gates, are currently facing global scrutiny for their foundation’s $172 million investment in G4S, the world’s largest private military and security company. As graduating seniors, we would like to enumerate these concerns and discuss a new campaign, composed of a broad coalition of students that has formed to call upon the Gates Foundation to divest from G4S and other compromising industries and practices, such as privatized prisons, military contracting and labor exploitation.
   
   Because the Gates Foundation has been such a strong force in almost every area of philanthropy, it is very disturbing that it invests in a company like G4S, which is responsible for a litany of human rights abuses affecting many of the same communities that the Foundation targets for assistance. G4S operates private juvenile detention facilities in the United States as well as over 100 vehicles that bring captured undocumented immigrants to detention centers on the U.S./Mexico border. The company fails to properly house asylum seekers in UK detention centers, which resulted in the death of Jimmy Mubenga, who was killed while being deported to Angola, as well as the death of 15-year-old Gareth Myatt, who was killed while being restrained at a youth detention center.