The News Vacuum
THE OVERALL VOLUME of news is dwindling as staff in newsrooms (or "remote workers" or "freelancers") faces cuts and budgets are systematically decreased. This means that there is very little regarding patents in the news (except promotional junk, as in ads for law firms disguised as "news"). We constantly moan about this in Daily Links (editorial comments, typically in-line) and back in 2021/2022 we did about 10 3-hour videos (yes, about 30 hours!) to show how severe the problem had become. It was a tipping point; news was rapidly dying after COVID-19 lockdowns.
Hours ago an associate asked: "What can be covered regarding software patents and their elimination?" (e.g. Alice [35 U.S.C. § 101] etc)
Sadly, not much.
The problem is worse than just an absence of reporting. There's a lot of mis-reporting or mis-information.
"There's also this one, which was commented on in [links] today," the associate said.
To quote: "The primary goal of this security advisory is to clarify that these are not zero-day vulnerabilities. It's important to note that this issue is specific to Windows and is not all that easy to exploit."
It was mentioned here some hours ago.
We have not seen that twisted as a "Linux" issue (yet), but we do see some Microsoft-friendly sites spinning it as a "win" for Microsoft (as a security champion) and a black eye for OpenVPN (even if it's a Windows problem).
There's also this one: standards.
How often do we see actual news coverage about open standards? Almost never. Well, openwashing is common, not open standards.
"Was there something about damage caused by proprietary formats lately in the news?"
So asked the associate, but the news typically blames EU regulators because that's what Microsoft tells (and pays) the media to see/say. "There's always stuff in the Windows TCO category," the associate said, "but I am hard press to think of a new angle on it."
We're far from regaining any real media that covers real issues based on real facts; we're not even remotely there. We're moving further away from that over time and there's mostly "news deserts", where the deserts aren't geographical localities but topics/themes; a lot of this "vacuum" issue exacerbates each time sites shut down or get converted into spamfarms. As the social control media thing is noise and the old media is dying, what will be left? In fact, there are no upsides here, as finding topics is hard and finding decent news is impossible in many areas (technical domains).
Citing this news article as an example, the associate said: "There is a growing awareness that there are problems, but not enough knowledge to know that the cause is Microsoft and that a return to FOSS is needed or even that FOSS and open standards exist Microsoft marketeers and the military industrial complex backing that spyware have moved the Edgerton Window that far in just two decades."
Right now we work on 4 series in tandem. Some of those involve working on very large documents and vast amounts of information. While we cannot promise it'll be amazing or super-interesting, we can at least be sure it'll be exclusive and independent. The coming year should be interesting. █
