11.01.20
Posted in Deception, Marketing at 5:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The bully known as Microsoft is faking what’s happening and shielding false narratives
Summary: The ‘new’ Microsoft is very sensitive about the way it’s publicly presented; it would go as far as censoring current and past employees writing in platforms well outside Microsoft’s reach (bar legal threats)
WELL before the Microsoft layoffs of 2020 (lots of them over the summer) there were many more/lots of dismissals disguised as an “end of contract” (Microsoft isn’t unique in that regard). Don’t be misled by what companies say about themselves. Last we saw (latest IRS filing), the Linux Foundation operates at a loss while being robbed by executives who don’t even use Linux. In Microsoft’s case, insiders keep telling us that the company is faking its financial performance. Just because some people amass personal wealth/gain does not mean the companies do too.
“In Microsoft’s case, insiders keep telling us that the company is faking its financial performance.”At Microsoft, lying is the norm (the management made that the normal; see the Bill Gates deposition for many examples) and cover-up is recommended, even when it is not legal.
Recently, as we already mentioned here a few months ago, we became aware that articles about “how to get fired by Microsoft” (with evidential bits) were being censored. Microsoft+Medium pressured the author to censor his own articles or face account termination. We hoped to maintain a highly available and uncensored version, but that’s still work on progress. Only months later the articles got (self-)censored and the evidence was removed from the Web.
As a little bit of background to this, even Microsoft’s CEO got involved (he's crushing people quite often, but Microsoft as a company covers for him).
“I also have a Yammer thread in the CEO Connection where Satya flat out ignored me and the fact that his HR department was caught conspiring with my management to retaliate against me after calling out a toxic work environment and idiotic management,” the author of the above articles noted. “I may even have a PST [E-mail archive] somewhere where I was accidentally included on an email chain involving straw man bids to help push a big data pipeline between Singapore and Australia… giving the illusion of diligence. Not to mention the intended recipients response to me asking me to keep quiet about it…”
“I truly hope for the day where journalists do their damn jobs and cover them appropriately. At best they want their money, at worst they’re afraid of legal retaliation.”
–AnonymousThis partly came to the attention of the media (e.g. here in The Guardian).
“Let’s see,” the author recalled, “I was initially tasked with the Deloitte exchange online migration but my team passed it off to a dude who had never handled a migration before for training purposes and asked me to supervise. I refused and wanted no part in it; this is my area of expertise and as an expert I don’t take a back seat to newbs when dealing with the likes of Deloitte. Turns out that they fucked up the deployment so bad that they didn’t even bother securing administrative accounts with MFA or password change windows, resulting in data breach of their entire mail system for 6+ months unnoticed. Ironically, the dude was a security moron… Literally them hitting the news over some newb shit had me cackling for days.”
Microsoft tried to cover it up (likely an illegal decision, where managers are directly accountable). It didn’t go well, did it? But nobody got punished, as usual. We still hope to get our paws on the raw evidence and publish it. In case it happens, stay tuned. As the author told us yesterday: “I truly hope for the day where journalists do their damn jobs and cover them appropriately. At best they want their money, at worst they’re afraid of legal retaliation.” █
“If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.”
–Bill Gates, Microsoft
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10.24.20
Posted in GNU/Linux, IBM, Marketing, Red Hat at 8:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The Chairman of the Board of Red Hat at the time
Summary: We take a difficult (albeit in-depth and perfectly factual) look at IBM’s past and present; considering this is the company that controls Red Hat (which in turn controls many key projects in GNU/Linux) we need a better understanding of the real context, not PR fluff and marketing
IT IS what some people would call an “open secret” that Red Hat has US military ties. It’s “open” because everything the “open org” (or “community” known as Red Hat) does is supposedly “open” (even the code it outsources to proprietary GitHub), but it’s still somewhat of a secret because Red Hat markets itself as opposing violence and rudeness. Military ties sort of ruin or spoil that false narrative. Posturing is convenient when one studies marketing and goes working for Red Hat. We know for a fact that Red Hat hired some of its external marketing people to work ‘in-house’… because we spoke to them many times, or rather they spoke to us. Red Hat still spams us every week despite our repeated requests for them to stop [1, 2].
“Posturing is convenient when one studies marketing and goes working for Red Hat.”Compared to a lot of companies Red Hat isn’t sinister; in fact, it does a lot of perfectly ethical things. We’re not against ethics or against Red Hat, we’re just against lies, such as the lie that banning the word “master” would really resolve important issues.
Maybe after abolishing “master” they will also abolish “boss”? After all, many people are still mastered by their bosses and Boss (the brand) worked with and for the Nazis. It’s hardly even a secret. Here’s their ‘product line’ one century ago:
Should we replace the word “boss”? How about “primary” as a replacement? Or “leader”? Would that upset someone?
Anyway, nowadays Red Hat is owned and controlled by IBM, which is probably even more closely connected to the US military (and the literal Nazis) than Red Hat ever was.
“Compared to a lot of companies Red Hat isn’t sinister; in fact, it does a lot of perfectly ethical things.”This is where it gets even grimmer for Red Hat and its marketing slogans. Because under IBM the company once known as Red Hat lacks moral authority all across the board.
The “IBM Developer” site has just published this post entitled “Call for Code Daily: Fighting racial justice and climate change with tech” (part of the recent hogwash). Yes, IBM has the nerve to pretend to care about racial equality and the environment while working a lot for the Pentagon (the world’s largest polluter) and having started as a eugenics giant, helping crusaders for ethnic cleansing.
The founder of IBM was a racist. We know this based on associates of his. Has IBM improved a lot since? Maybe a bit, but not a lot.
Let’s start with IBM’s CEO who closed/sealed the Red Hat deal in 2018/2019 (depending on which milestone is counted in that very large financial transaction). That’s Ginni. Later reports attributed the decision of the takeover/acquisition to the current CEO, whose appointment came much later, with Red Hat’s CEO as president to his right (as in right-hand man).
“Should we replace the word “boss”? How about “primary”? Or “leader”? Would that upset someone?”Just to be clear, IBM’s legendary CEO Sam Palmisano said about Ginni’s (her nickname) selection as successor that it had “zero to do with progressive social policies.” We wonder if he’d say the same about Dr. Krishna. Nobody asked him. But Krishna’s technical skills are beyond doubt and we’ll come to that later.
The General who motors the war, GM, gave us Ginni, an Italian American (no connection to fascism) who came from a somewhat troubled family. She had a career in just two companies, GM and then IBM. Both were awarded/showered with medals from Nazi Germany for their collaboration and multitude of services (before the US entered the war). Later on she became the CEO of one.
GM’s connections to Nazi Germany is beyond the scope of this article, but it’s nothing extraordinarily Earth-shattering or new (by contrast, IBM just tried to evade responsibility and obstruct historians). There were press reports and books about it.
As CEO of IBM she managed to anger a lot of her staff (both past and present), which even prepared a massively-signed petition.
This kind of photo-ops isn’t helpful, is it?
These ones are not particularly helpful, either.
Forget about companies profiting from war.
It doesn’t matter.
Who cares anyway?
The important thing is that Git repositories don’t have a “master” branch…
“The important thing is that Git repositories don’t have a “master” branch…”Right?
What is being accomplished anyway?
If women or ‘brown people’ (or ‘brown women’) get bombed by the Pentagon it’s helpful neither to feminism nor tolerance.
IBM has long been heavy(weight) on rhetoric and words, which rarely match the company’s actions, especially the more secret contracts all around the world. IBM is still helping autocrats oppress the population. Not secretively but the media doesn’t bother looking into these. Because it has been too busy preparing puff pieces in exchange for money. Like all those “Watson” marketing pieces thinly disguised as ‘journalism’…
Maybe one day Ginni too will earn a medal. Not for 24 consecutive quarters of revenue declines and increases in ties with ‘Orange Man’ (whom some compare to Hitler) but something about women’s accomplishments…
“IBM is still helping autocrats oppress the population.”For those who don’t know, there’s a military angle associated with Watson. The US military was to “adopt the Watson IoT services and a new Watson IoT Equipment Advisor solution. The latter analyses unstructured, structured and sensor data directly from military assets,” said this article. When “tech” companies view war as an opportunity to make even more money… or when a bomb falls (and then it explodes) and that means IBM can sell its clients more “Watson(TM)” — more money “from military assets…”
Remember that after IBM made a lot of money by helping Nazi Germany it made a lot of money selling the same to the US military (which had entered the war).
To the credit of IBM, its past two CEOs (former and current) were both technical geeks, unlike the criminal who ran Microsoft (whose arrests predate his Microsoft venture). At IBM one geek has been at the company for nearly 4 decades (with higher education sponsored by GM), whereas the latter has been there for 3 decades, having earned a doctoral degree outside his home country. The latter (latest) comes from a military background/family, but it would be rather unfair to attribute that to himself, also unfair from a privacy standpoint (his father, however, was a high-profile military officer, not merely a troop).
“Whether Red Hat can lecture us all on ethics depends on whether we view Red Hat as still separate (it’s not; not any more than ATI is still separate from AMD).”IBM’s CEO since April of this year is an “army kid”, said The Economic Times. “Krishna, 57, [is] son of an Indian army officer,” wrote Times of India. It’s not a secret. It would be nice to see the Ph.D. thesis and some of the patents/scholarly articles he authored or edited. We wish to see the ethical aspects of these; he worked for the unit named after Watson himself (a Nazi medal recipient) and that unit does things like surveillance and military-grade stuff. We know that IBM is hoping to profit from fascistic methods mastered and ‘normalised’ by Mr. Modi, who poses for duo photos (during pandemic it’s harder to meet in person like Ginni did) with Dr. Krishna. Remember that India has nukes.
In conclusion, today’s Red Hat is connected to all sorts of burdensome stories and a really harsh history. Morality is misplaced in that context. It’s all about money and power. Whether Red Hat can lecture us all on ethics depends on whether we view Red Hat as still separate (it’s not; not any more than ATI is still separate from AMD). █
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10.21.20
Posted in Deception, Google, Marketing, Microsoft at 8:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
As infographic:
Summary: The fake hype surrounding “Edge” is an inauthentic hype/buzz campaign made to coincide with anti-Google sentiments spread by Microsoft front/pressure groups [1, 2]
Why “Linux” sites should not cover (participate in Microsoft PR for) “Edge”:
- Proprietary software
- Spyware
- Controlled by anti-Linux company
- Only a “preview” (for GNU/Linux), despite being based on something that already supported GNU/Linux just fine
- Only a ripoff of someone else’s browser (which is likely better in every way)
- Being anti-competitively forced upon users (Windows)
- Comes from monopoly abuser (convicted)
- Comes from company that deliberately broke the Web with proprietary extensions (e.g. ActiveX)
- Will always prioritise Windows and push other proprietary software (for Windows mostly)
- Relies on heavy AstroTurfing rather than ingenuity
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09.29.20
Posted in IBM, Mail, Marketing, Red Hat at 5:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Here we go again, days after they said it would stop
Summary: Red Hat seems incapable of respecting people’s inboxes; it subscribes people to things which they never ever subscribed to and makes it impossible to unsubscribe; what has Red Hat become or succumbed to?
THAT Red Hat hired its external PR people to work directly for Red Hat (from inside Red Hat) is no secret. We could name some of the people in question because they mailed us, first from E-mail addresses outside Red Hat and later from redhat.com addresses (after Red Hat had hired them). With new leadership comes another culture and IBM is an aggressive marketer, as we noted a decade ago and again several weeks ago. Master liars. Deniers. World-class cheats.
“With new leadership comes another culture and IBM is an aggressive marketer…”Shame on you, Red Hat. Even after unsubscribing (see screenshot, unsbscribing from something never subscribed to in the first place) they still spam today (E-mail from the morning shown at the top), much as predicted last week. Marketing people have no financial incentive to decrease the scale of their spamming operations.
Shame on IBM and shame on Red Hat, too. Red Hat should have remained an independent company, but in this ‘G[I]AFAM’ era there consolidation in ‘tech’ (grand scale of Pentagon-connected and sometimes Pentagon-funded oligopoly, optimised to serve ‘Global Empire’). █
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09.24.20
Posted in IBM, Mail, Marketing, Red Hat at 6:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
In the name of “engagement” (newspeak like the Linux Foundation‘s E-mail “blasts”, in their own words!), Red Hat turns into a spammer, apparently Windows-powered too
Summary: “Engagements” from Red Hat; have the IBM-led marketing people gone overboard, subscribing lots of people to marketing spam without bothering to ask for consent?
SO-CALLED ‘engagements’ have made Red Hat a bit of a marketing/spam firm, looking to promote its self-promotional articles by sending unsolicited mail spam to a lot of people (who knows how many) starting earlier this week.
“Come on, Red Hat. You can do better than this!”I don’t have any real grudge/issue with Red Hat (their CEO did an interview with us); I’ve often linked to OpenSource.com (many thousands of times since the site’s birth more than a decade ago), but I have a serious grudge when it comes to spam, or mass-mailing people without any solicitation or consent. IBM has routinely done those sorts of things to us, even as recently as last month.
Days ago we received this:
How quaint. We never subscribed to this.
Never ever gave that E-mail address to anybody at Red Hat either, so they must have looked that up somehow. What. On. Earth…
Then again this morning:
Where does this come from and how does one unsubscribe (having never subscribed in the first place)?
OK, unsubscribed now. From something never subscribed/asked for in the first place! Time will tell if that took effect; maybe it’s as effective as attempting to remove systemd.
What’s behind this aggressive marketing operation?
Is that you, Windows? Hiding behind another layer (security by secrecy/obscurity)?
Come on, Red Hat. You can do better than this! Stop trying to become what you used to be against. █
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09.22.20
Posted in Deception, Marketing at 12:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2019-2020 (after all the staff was laid off): Linux.com acting as a SPAM site or a PR dumping ground for sponsors. This means that proprietary software is routinely being promoted under the cherished “Linux” brand (without approval from the venerable trademark holder).
From their very own marketing material (this is what they’ve reduced Linux.com to):
Last night (it’s still going on):
Summary: As per the Linux Foundation‘s very own brochure, scripted and fake ‘interviews’ are to be produced and then edited/negotiated (before publication) with the sponsor… in Linux.com as the platform. This is corruption (or marketing, one might call them de facto ads presented as fake ‘articles’).
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09.12.20
Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Marketing, Videos at 4:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A response to Torvalds- and Stallman-shaming videos from one year ago, this one by Chris Titus (Mr. Titus is a person who is quite new to GNU/Linux and cites Techrights sometimes)
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09.07.20
Posted in IBM, Marketing, Microsoft at 10:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Reference to IBM’s past, which it is still trying very hard to bury or distract from
Summary: The corporate media no longer speaks about a corporate-led (or oligarchs-oriented) PR push to ban “bad” or “offensive” words such as “whitelist” and “master” (mostly a zero-cost publicity stunt); what we really need is media that boldly speaks about bombings and the ethical concerns associated with corporate complicity in them (e.g. Microsoft with its notorious “JEDI” contract, subjected to injunction because of Trump intervention and nepotism/collusion/retaliation)
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