Who Are the Communists?
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2010-06-19 00:56:00 UTC
- Modified: 2010-06-19 00:56:00 UTC
"Bill Gates cites copyright enforcement to justify Chinese censorship. Microsoft executives used to call us communists, but they are now clearly revealed as the ones who support communist-style dictatorship."
--Richard Stallman
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Extortion is a Crime, Even If You're Based in Another Continent and Work for Microsoft
- reported to British authorities
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- Slopwatch: LinuxTechLab, Planet Ubuntu, Anti-Linux FUD, and Microsoft SPAM
- It's not easy to altogether avoid take articles these days
- Gemini Links 06/06/2025: "MBA Tear" and Slop ('AI') as Plagiarism
- Links for the day
- Links 06/06/2025: "Convicted Felon and MElon Trade Insults" and Europe Snubbed by US Again
- Links for the day
- Links 06/06/2025: Microsoft XBox Bracing For More Mass Layoffs, Climate Disaster, Fake 'Money' Tokens From US President
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 06/06/2025: Vanishing Cultures and MElon Implosion
- Links for the day
- We're in 6/6 Now, Almost Halfway in 2025
- 2025 was probably the best year for us
- South Americans Are Saying Goodbye to Microsoft
- We're hardly even "Cherry-Picking" or conveniently singling out one South American nation
- Abuse Inside the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) - Part III: Data Protection Failures, Just Like at the European Patent Office (EPO)
- Just less than a decade ago we showed that the EPO had illegally shared staff data with third parties
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, June 05, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, June 05, 2025
- Pushing Microsoft's Proprietary Trash/Trap as "Open" and "Linux" (Windows is 'Linux' Now?)
- Maybe it's time to just stop saying "FOSS". The people who use that term are promoting Microsoft.
- Slopwatch: Comparing Linux to Vermin, Attacking BSD With LLM Slop, and Helping Microsoft Demonise Linux/OpenBSD/SSH Over Weak User Passwords
- Microsoft must be laughing its arse off, seeing how a bunch of Serial Sloppers (no skills, no comprehension, no integrity, no creativity) and slopfarms use Microsoft LLM to flood the Web with anti-Linux FUD
- Links 05/06/2025: US Poised for Another $2.4 Trillion to Debt, Cops Want GAFAM Kill Switches
- Links for the day
- Links 05/06/2025: First US Spacewalk 60 Years Ago, GNU Octave 10.2.0 is Out
- Links for the day
- Scandinavia Saying Goodbye to Microsoft
- The Danes have had enough of Microsoft
- GNU/Linux Measured at 6% in Bangladesh, According to statCounter
- Windows isn't growing, it's going away
- Nat Friedman Had Left Microsoft GitHub Exactly One Week Before Matthew Garrett Sent His First SLAPP (Which Was an Empty Threat, He Was Abusing the Legal System of Another Continent to Terrorise Critics Who Had Just Unearthed Major Microsoft Scandals)
- And it was likely talked about by his lawyers around the exact same time Nat Friedman was packing up
- Gemini Links 05/06/2025: Loop Earplugs Review and ANS Forth
- Links for the day
- Armenian Adoption of GNU/Linux
- Russian influence in Armenian must be worrying to Microsoft
- Abuse Inside the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) - Part II: Turning a Once-Respected Patent Office Into a Circus and Laughing Stock
- It's not legal, but administrators who don't care about the law and don't fear the law would just go ahead and turn things to junk
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, June 04, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, June 04, 2025
- Slopwatch: Mindless Slop Pieces, Fake Images and Text, Linux FUD on the Cheap
- spewed out by Microsoft-controlled LLMs
- Links 04/06/2025: Workers' Strikes, Sudan Exodus
- Links for the day
- Links 04/06/2025: Linux Foundation PR Spam and Lee Jae-myung Wins Election
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 04/06/2025: Future Leaders of the World and Platforming Jordan Peterson
- Links for the day
- Links 04/06/2025: WSL Backfiring on Microsoft and "Disney, Microsoft Announce Massive Layoffs"
- Links for the day
- Our Case is a Very Easy Win, the SLAPPs From Microsofters Were a Grave Error, and Censoring Information Won't Work (It'll Only Ever Backfire)
- Censoring is what people do when they lose the argument
- Say the Truth, the Rest Will Follow
- There's no guarantee that writing the truth will result in an audience (or readership), but over time - in the long run - people generally gravitate towards what they know or feel to be crude truth, not just what's comforting (albeit false or self-deluding, usually groupthink dictated from above)
- How to Expose High-Level Corruption Without Getting in (Too Much) Trouble
- Democracy depends on free press and freedom of the press depends on being able to safely publish (and keep available) material that bad people don't want to be known to anybody
- In-Depth EPO Coverage at Techrights Turns Eleven
- 11 years is a very long time
- Windows Measured Below 10% in Afghanistan, GNU/Linux Gaining a Lot
- about 80% are Android (Linux) users, compared to only about 10% for Windows
- Poland's Political Predicament and Social Control Media
- Democracy and fake "tech" don't mix well; the latter tends to interfere with the former and that's why we get more "Putins" out there
- EPO: Taking Away From the Staff to Give More to the Rich
- The Central Staff Committee (CSC) wrote to EPO staff earlier this week
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, June 03, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, June 03, 2025
- Abuse Inside the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) - Part I: It's a Lot Like the EPO
- we can commence a series soon
- Gemini Links 04/06/2025: Inescapable Questions and Quitting All "Oligarch Tech"
- Links for the day
Comments
twitter
2010-06-19 13:18:38
The results of the lack of freedom are nowhere more apparent than on the desktop. After ten years of free software on my desktop, using Windows for any extended time is like moving into an East German apartment block. The system is restricted, confining, drab, featureless, and bare of utilities and luxuries I'm used to. The owners are intrusive and the place is filled with their propaganda. My neighbors often suffer dissaster and perform many paranoid but futile rituals. The owners watch the tenant's every move and communications in a way that's surpasses the Stasi's wildest dreams and George Orwell's worst nightmares. All that I can think while I'm using Windows is how nice freedom is and how sad it is that my neighbors are so mislead and abused. It's creepy to me that I can't escape non free software propaganda by simply avoiding Windows because it is carried by the increasingly consolidated and partially owned by Microsoft media, even on state owned public TV.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2010-06-19 17:35:39
"Before he installed Windows 95, John Dodge connected to the Internet using software from a Microsoft competitor, CompuServe's Internet in a Box. Not anymore—Windows 95 silently disabled a key piece of his setup and made it too difficult for him to reinstall it. € "Dodge is no novice. He is senior executive editor of the trade journal PC Week and so had access to the highest-level support engineers. But life is short and even software professionals learn to take the path of least resistance—in this case, the path leading to Microsoft. He has become a regular user of the new Microsoft Network, though he has trouble with its Internet features.
"Still, he believes Microsoft executives when they deny trying to gain market share by sabotaging competitors' software. He just wonders whether Microsoft "has a full appreciation of its actions in the market place." € "There is reason to believe that Microsoft does." € [...] € "Accusations that Microsoft's people lie, cheat and steal information are as much a part of the company's lore as its cadre of millionaires with FYIFV (". . . I'm fully vested") buttons. Microsoft knows it has clout, and it uses what it has: to pressure small competitors, trade-show operators, journalists, retailers (shelf space for non-Microsoft software will be at a premium this Christmas) and everyone else. € ""Can you name anybody that's happy about being in the same industry with Microsoft?" Mitchell Kapor asks. € "Microsoft lives according to a "thin ethics," as he sees it: "Anything not a direct lie or clearly illegal is O.K. to do and should be done if it advances Microsoft's tribal cause. This licenses the worst sorts of manipulations, lies, tortured self-justification and so on." Microsoft is hardly alone, of course; plenty of its competitors would play as rough, if they only could. Others in the industry suggest that Microsoft's small-company scrappiness has kept it from facing the issue of corporate ethics: behavior that people will forgive, or at least understand, in a start-up looks considerably less attractive when David grows into Goliath."
Needs Sunlight
2010-06-19 18:26:34
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2010-06-19 18:52:36
--Steve Ballmer
"Thanks to Mr. Gates, we now know that an open Internet with protocols anyone can implement is communism; it was set up by that famous communist agent, the US Department of Defense."
--Richard Stallman
"A common danger tends to concord. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In Communism, inequality comes from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence."
--Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
"Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is exploitation of the strong by the weak."
--Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
twitter
2010-06-19 21:51:17
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2010-06-19 22:08:10