01.29.23
Posted in Deception, Marketing, Microsoft at 9:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 13710c5705fc5898bd3786f45667d586
AI Hype in the Media
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: “Hey Hype” or “Hey Hi” (AI) has been dominating the press lately and a lot of that seems to boil down to paid-for marketing; we need to understand what’s truly going on and not be distracted by the substance-less hype
THE thing I’ve dubbed “Hey Hi” (about 2-3 years ago when the media was losing its mind over it) Andy has called “Hey Hype” and this morning we published his article about this phenomenon.
Almost nothing that’s presented in the media about it can be considered new. Even the chatbots are old; the only novel thing about them is the size of the set they were trained on, probably owing to Microsoft’s over-provisioned and underutilised ‘Azure’ (even Microsoft now openly admits to its shareholders there’s a “slowdown” in Clown Computing).
“Expect many more Microsoft layoffs later this year.”My thoughts in the above video are personal and Andy’s article stands on its own. We extended it a bit this morning with a paragraph he wished to add.
Due to personal ordeals (covered in passing in the video above) we’ve not produced many articles and videos lately, but that will change soon. We’re building back better (BBB) and when the Sirius ‘Open Source’ series is over we hope to produce about 10 articles/videos per day.
We’ve been reading many rumours about Microsoft layoffs (what’s to come, who’s affected etc.) and it sounds far worse than the Microsoft-connected media nonchalantly puts it. Expect many more Microsoft layoffs later this year [1, 2]. All that “Hey Hype” is the media lends to the delusion about Microsoft having a bright future based on perceived leadership in something. █
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12.08.22
Posted in Deception, Marketing, Microsoft at 5:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 1e65fb4c4a3159d40d16b7660f950bbf
IDG Microsoft Ads or Articles?
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Microsoft puff pieces are published as “opinions”, disguised as “news” while in fact serving no purpose other than marketing
THe ‘media’ company IDG was always bad, but in recent years it became Communist China-level bad. It’s just state propaganda-like corporate propaganda, usually sponsored by the same companies covered in the ‘articles’. There’s no room for ‘dissent’ or for questioning what companies like Microsoft are claiming.
“The above highlights a general problem across publishers (and endemic in a lot of the large media companies). They don’t do actual journalism; they cannot distinguish reporting from marketing.”The above deals with this new example from a dedicated Microsoft ‘journalist’ of IDG. Her job is to spread whatever Microsoft wants the general public to believe and now she says that “[i]nstead of tech gifts, give updates and support” (in other words, volunteer for Microsoft; do for free the work Microsoft ‘created’ by releasing shoddy products).
As an associate put it, “people should not provide Microsoft support over holidays at all, ever, and especially not for free; if support is provided it should only be in migration to Free Software.”
The above highlights a general problem across publishers (and endemic in a lot of the large media companies). They don’t do actual journalism; they cannot distinguish reporting from marketing. █
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11.27.22
Posted in Deception, Marketing at 9:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Context: New Lows: Linux Foundation Defrauding Clients
9 views since 13 Oct 2022. Seems like Clickfraud Spamnil forgot to send his bots to this one (clocking up the numbers in violation of YouTube’s policy).
“Self-made” imposter and opportunist (like Jim Zemlin except not rich).
Summary: Based on the past month, Spamnil seems to have stopped (at least temporarily) relying on bots to fake his alleged popularity; through the Linux Foundation he has done great damage since the destruction of Linux.com, now a defunct site
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Posted in Deception, Marketing at 9:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Background: Techrights Statement on Phoronix
This weekend:
With JavaScript turned on, this overlay appears universally (every page in the site):
Summary: To recover reputation Phoronix will need to quit the heavy, obtrusive, privacy-violating ads and the corporate 'gifts' that evidently and demonstrably changed the site's direction
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11.16.22
Posted in Deception, Marketing, Microsoft at 1:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
As part of the openwashing PR stunts so far this week (paid-for press releases and sponsored fluff disguised as “news”):
One might think it’s just some random project
But it is actually Microsoft and the Web site of the ‘Linux’ Foundation uses proprietary software
Of course it’s controlled by Microsoft and its proprietary prison (GitHub), i.e. not vendor-neutral
And Microsoft linked to a missing page
Summary: The Seattle puff pieces from the Linux Foundation include openwashing Microsoft PR for Microsoft, amplifying deceit; to make matters worse, it promotes proprietary GitHub, a repository that is missing, and the Linux Foundation recently moved from Free/Open Source software to a proprietary and outsourced CMS (so basically everything is proprietary here, even the announcements)
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11.10.22
Posted in Hardware, Marketing at 4:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Minutes ago:
Summary: AMD’s scheduled marketing onslaught (like Phoronix publishing 3 ‘articles’ at the same time; other “sponsored” writers do the same) is a wake-up call about Phoronix, an AMD-funded site
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11.01.22
Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, FUD, GNU/Linux, IBM, Marketing, Microsoft, Red Hat, Rumour, Security, Servers, Standard at 3:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 8de27c8022d55f728a4d1c5eb55026e0
Irresponsible Misinformation About OpenSSL
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Fuelling Microsoft-affiliated and sometimes Microsoft-funded “news” (noise) sites, Red Hat — and to a lesser extent Fedora — exaggerated the severity of bugs a week before their details’ release (long and purposeless suspense); it’s a case of a boy who cries “wolf!” to get “likes” in Twitter and media coverage that relies on nothing but lousy (inaccurate) "tweets", where fact-checking is impeded by NDAs/embargo
A few days ago we took note of the overhyped (mostly by Red Hat) impending patch for OpenSSL. Red Hat ended up slipping/changing the release date of Fedora, adding some more to the perceived danger, contributing to the scare, resulting in a week’s worth of media misinformation like calling it "zero day" (even in headlines!). This irresponsible hype turns out to be have been outright disinformation (or at best misinformation) about the severity and it’s worth noting that Red Hat is in no hurry to patch its most important products and there are no actively-exploited aspects; in other words, it is not “0-day” and there is no immediate rush to patch (in some cases there is no patch, either).
“We perceive this to be a bit of a media blunder, taking informal “tweets” at face value and trying to compete over who produces the most scary headline/s for about a week already.”The 8 URLs from the video are listed below in a logical order. To quote [4] below “Q: The 3.0.7 release was announced as fixing a CRITICAL vulnerability, but CVE-2022-3786 and CVE-2022-3602 are both HIGH. What happened to the CRITICAL vulnerability?”
We perceive this to be a bit of a media blunder, taking informal “tweets” at face value and trying to compete over who produces the most scary headline/s for about a week already. █
Links from the video above
- OpenSSL 3.0 Series Release Notes
- Vulnerabilities list
- OpenSSL Security Advisory [01 November 2022]
- CVE-2022-3786 and CVE-2022-3602: X.509 Email Address Buffer Overflows
- Comments: OpenSSL Outlines Two High Severity Vulnerabilities
- OpenSSL 3.0.7 released
- OpenSSL Releases Patch for 2 New High-Severity Vulnerabilities
- OpenSSL 3.0.7 Fixes Two High-CVEs with Buffer Overflow
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10.24.22
Posted in Deception, Marketing at 8:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: medevel.com has historically done coverage of Free software, but today (Monday) it published an unprecedented amount of spam instead; ironically, people who block ads are prevented from entering the site (unless JavaScript is turned off); welcome to the “modern” Web!
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