Summary: We're fishing and putting together plenty of old material about Microsoft's crimes that got it in antitrust trouble (Microsoft was found guilty, but it was never split up and Bill Gates went on to bribing the media, reinventing his identity, in effect substituting reality with self-serving fiction)
THE reason we're assessing "Internet rot" every now and then is the importance of preserving history. This past summer we were aiming to preserve as much as possible of IBM history, seeing that IBM went out of its way to obstruct and destroy evidence of its role in the implementation of the Holocaust (falsely claiming that material about it was no longer available or was disposed of). History is a teacher and companies with a "keen sense of Public Relations” want history to just go away.
"Don't let history go astray in the same way IBM tries to make us forgot what it did 80-90 years ago."Similarly, Microsoft and Bill Gates have long wanted these videos to go away (become impossible to find, inaccessible to future generations). Seeing that Groklaw is rotting away (in the "Internet rot" sense) due to everything being turned into static pages, we've decided to retain key resources. Notably Gates "Deposition Audio and Video" (transcripts also); the reason we reproduce these is that it's hard to find them anymore. Minutes ago in IRC Chaekyung said: "I searched a bit, it does seem to find very hard to find the videos outside of something called "youtube" [sarcasm noted]" (but they're not in open formats and there are censorious tendencies there; the poster, moreover, can choose to remove these at any time).
An associate of ours found all the pertinent videos [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13] but then noted: "All that searching yesterday really poisoned YouTube for me. Now it's recommending all kinds of stuff by Bill's fanbois and shills."
"Gates sponsors videos there," I responded, as I myself saw it. There are "recommended" videos there that are pure PR, likely paid-for Gates puff pieces. In effect, Google profits from laundering the reputation of criminals and it would not be reluctant to net some more money from the Gates Foundation in the name of 'combatting misinformation'. So one cannot rely on YouTube. In the coming days expect us to provide local copies of all the footage, plus commentary and partial transcripts. Don't let history go astray in the same way IBM tries to make us forgot what it did 80-90 years ago. Enough of the "dog ate my homework!" As a side note, earlier today I searched a lot for material about IBM's roots/genesis (over in YouTube and in Google Search). More than 90% of it was self-promotional spam and fluff, obscuring and almost rendering invisible factual or objective information about IBM's roots and Watson's controversial beginnings. ⬆