Bonum Certa Men Certa

When Blogs Become Marketing and Benchmarks Become Product Promotions

Video download link | md5sum 7981b8c10b1b12c9687f52aae5a48708 AMD and Phoronix Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: Having boasted about hardware worth as much as a house (likely in breach of FTC regulations, not just the most fundamental ethical guidelines), apparently coming from AMD, Phoronix discredited itself or tarnished its image as a trusted, objective source; now it seems to be deleting the image of this epic (EPYC) gift, though only after some backlash

Techrights has linked to Phoronix literally tens of thousands of times. So has Tux Machines, which according to Alexa (the traffic analysis site) is a leading source of inbound traffic for Phoronix (highest except Phoronix itself). I've spent years defending Phoronix from its critics, linking to the site in Social Control Media as an act of solidarity. I routinely used it as a source so it's very frustrating to see what it became [1, 2]. It's part of an ongoing trend. Presenting itself as hard-working and impoverished 'underdog', the site has crossed over to the "dark side" and is shamelessly sharing photographs of gifts. Not a gift like a laptop or a processor but something about 1,000 times more expensive. There's no valid explanation and none has been given.



To make matters worse, it now looks like parts of the forum are being removed (like the image posted there; I show this in the video above and I've verified again since) and no explanation is being given. Half a day ago I wrote (as a 15-year forum member): "What is going on here? Michael, those chips cost a fortune [sic] and are not needed in these quantities for the purpose of testing/comparing. Who sent these? Please clarify."

Intel CoreIt's perfectly possible that AMD isn't alone; AMD is one that we know about. The image on the left was posted this year as well. It is difficult to know, however, what is inside that cabinet (or the quantity). It's not entirely unreasonable to ship something for review, but how many?

Seeing that an administrator saw and approved my post, I expected an imminent response but received none. So I followed up with: "I've linked to Phoronix literally tens of thousands of times and defended it a lot from its critics. I need to see the AMD contract by which this transaction was done, dated too (to avoid it being revised in a face-saving exercise)."

Half a day has passed and no reply was given. I said upfront: "I'll give another few hours for response, seeing my posts did get approved, so they're being read. I'll draw my own conclusions if no response is posted soon."

Phoronix is aware and has posted 4 or 5 articles since (as of the time of writing), so clearly my messages were seen. As the image from the forums has been removed I'm reproducing one of several screenshots below. The video above says a lot more and today's IRC logs will add context.

Phoronix thread #1



Phoronix thread #2



Phoronix thread #3

Recent Techrights' Posts

Linus Torvalds Blasts Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) for Attempting to 'Protect' Linux
Like it 'protects' women
New Record for GNU/Linux in Australia (at Microsoft's Expense)
Windows is at an all-time low, GNU/Linux... all-time high
Fighting Over Whose Pockets Are Deeper (or Who Borrows More Money)
When processes favour those who are more wealthy (or more willing to go into infinite debt or steal money of other people) those processes match the attributes of lawfare rather than law
Starting a Book With a Flawed Premise or Weak Hypothesis
To me, Schneier is a sort of "RMS of sec"
Microsoft's Mass Layoffs (30,000+ in 2025) Not About "AI", Just Business Failure
"AI" is replacing... the old excuses for mass layoffs
EPO People Power - Part XVI - Berenguer Does Not Speak German, So What Did He Tell German Police That Busted Him?
based in Germany and does not speak the language
Challenges for EPO Insiders to Try to Tackle in 2026
Nothing will get solved as long as the circus that runs this show tries to keep the circus going
 
Links 28/12/2025: Fascination, Holidays, and Mormonism
Links for the day
Microsoft's Weapon Against the Reality of XBox (the Console) Dying Seems to be LLM Slop
XBox is dead/dying
Raffles for the Immaterial: Unauthorised Bingo for Red Hat "Vouchers"
This is IBM and some slop images
Andy Farnell on Standing Up Against Technological Oppression
some portions from it
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, December 27, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, December 27, 2025
Once Again, GAFAM Deletes All Your Data, Only Corrects This After Millions of People Lead an Uproar Online ("Richard Stallman Warned Us About This")
No lessons learned, eh?
You Know Your Critics Are Jealous and Have Inferiority Complex When...
One day we'll write about all this in great depth
"But Corruption is Everywhere"
"We'll always have Polio..."
Days Without Slop About "Linux"
It's time to move on
Links 27/12/2025: Canada Post Strike Called Off, Debate About Europeans "Working Over Christmas"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 27/12/2025: Household Appliances and Flight Fright
Links for the day
Links 27/12/2025: US Cracking Down on Whistleblowers, Expanding Bombardment Campaigns Worldwide
Links for the day
Resuming EPO Coverage Today, Can António Campinos 'Survive' Cocainegate?
We said we'd continue in the weekend
Links 27/12/2025: More Attacks on Media (Meduza Co-founder Sentenced to Prison in Absentia), "What Owning Music Means To Me"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 27/12/2025: geminiprotocol.net Downtime and Capsular Gemlog Manager
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, December 26, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, December 26, 2025
Tossing Embarrassing News Under the Christmastime Bus
This isn't just some coincidence; those are conscious choices
Victim-Blaming in Debian
Verhelst previously did blame-shifting when Debian suicide clusters happened
IBM Cuts in Japan, Red Hat is Attached to a Sinking Ship
IBM, which controls Red Hat, is a rapidly shrinking company
Manchester United Dumped Microsoft Because Qualcomm Sort of Did
The Windows PCs were an utter failure
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Supported by Unconventional Digital Bartering Communities
But no strings attached
Geminispace: 5,000 Capsules in 2026
There are 4.8k now
Gemini Links 26/12/2025: Careful What You Eat and "My Secret Santa"
Links for the day
The Indigenous Community Versus Corporate AstroTurt and 'Cancel Culture'
Good people will recognise exactly what's happening here and respond to it tactfully
Richard Stallman: Epstein is a Serial Rapist. Bill Epsteingate: Epstein is a Friend.
Supporting the FSF (or Richard Stallman) is supporting those who asserted Epstein had serially raped women
The Paradox of GAFAM: Saying You Protect Women, Appointing Abusers of Women to Run the Company
older articles
Censored by FreeBSD Core Team Secretary, Reinstated After Talking About it in Public
FreeBSD misfiring a CoC?
Links 26/12/2025: Chatbot Toys Terrorising Children, US Undeclared "War on Terror" Unilaterally Extends to Nigeria During Holidays
Links for the day
Links 26/12/2025: French Postal Services Under Russian Attack, U.S. Cheetos Accuse People Who Obstruct Information Warfare by Russia of "Censorship"
Links for the day
Debian's Daniel Kahn Gillmor is Wrong, Signal is No "Gold Standard" (It's Also Promoted by Proponents of Back Doors)
I'm not too sure why Debian or the ACLU would wish to associate with this
Next Year Will be the Year of Quantum, Just Like 2020, 2015, 2010, 2005 and So On
"Quantum" is the future
The Silent Power of Coercion Over Speech
The important thing is optics
Kazakhstan Doesn't Need GAFAM Datacentres (Spy Hubs)
Suffice to say, as far as we can gather nothing came out from the empty (false) promises of GAFAM's "data centers in Kazakhstan"
So Simple That You Can Touch and Feel It
In light of recent experiences
Christmas Music Project: Back to When Music Was Music
now Canonical (or Ubuntu) says we should make available tens of gigabytes of disk space
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Under Attack by Cross-Network Spam Floods
So far we've been spared (our network has not been targeted at all) [...] Let's hope the spam won't discourage the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who still use IRC
An "AI-Infused" Windows
Microsoft Windows isn't becoming a worthless pile of garbage by accident
Microsoft Laid Off Over 30,000 People This Year, Coders Are "Too Expensive"
Go get some popcorn. Microsoft "slopware" is about to get real!
Critics Have Long Said Microsoft Produces "Slopware", Microsoft Wants to Prove Them Right
Slop instead of code is a step in the right direction?
The Top 8 Innovations of IBM in 2025
What innovations will come out from IBM in 2026?
And as the Year Turns...
The significance of new years isn't based on geology or astronomy or anything like that
Appliances Versus Computers
Replacing a computer inside an object of some kind or inside an appliance (which nowadays includes "modern" cars) isn't simple and isn't cheap
A Dark Side of Europe
They try hard to silence people who speak about these issues
Why People Love Techrights (and Also Loved "Boycott Novell")
I will continue to publish for many decades to come
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, December 25, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, December 25, 2025
Browsing Techrights With a GUI and 10 Megabytes of RAM Per Tab
Some people say it's not possible in 2025, maybe in part because they depend on very bloated software
A Tribute to Richard Stallman
It's about knowledge and sharing
Links 26/12/2025: Impermanence, Salt and Thermometer, Freetube
Links for the day