August as Clickbait Month and Microsoft Googlebombing

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2019-08-09 19:20:58 UTC
Modified: 2019-08-09 19:20:58 UTC

It's the usual August 'shitshow'

August

Summary: Companies are expectedly (as scheduled) understaffed and there are those looking to take advantage of the calm, in effect provoking and misleading to divert traffic to unwanted and irrelevant things

August is a notoriously "slow news" or "low traffic" month because few companies actually announce anything. People are on extended leave. Some companies throw bad news under the bus (e.g. Slack getting cracked and breaking the law), whereas bloggers resort to provocation rather than facts (e.g. BetaNews calling GNU/Linux users bad names as recently as yesterday and Phoronix promoting an old stigma about desktop GNU/Linux).

The state of journalism, not just when it comes to GNU/Linux, is depressing. About half a dozen people who did a decent job at it got laid off by the Linux Foundation about 4 months ago. Somehow Jim Zemlin can find a million bucks to pay himself in annual salaries, but he cannot pay small salaries to a handful of low-paid technical writers. He also received a million bucks from Microsoft at a time his wife worked for a Gold Microsoft Partner, but that's another matter. The media is all rigged and media owners seem eager to bury media that's not favourable to them. It's a dirty, dirty business.

Welcome to August! Microsoft Tim was badmouthing LibreOffice (just a week before a major release) while many others badmouthed VLC and KDE based on lies or exaggerations. They also googlebomb "Linux" quite a lot to push WSL (Windows Vista 10, promoted using a misnomer, "Linux"). With Linux.com and Linux Journal officially defunct, it's even easier for Microsoft boosters to googlebomb "Ubuntu, "Linux" and so on (altering the narrative in Microsoft's favour and offering proprietary software).

Techrights will try to cover GNU/Linux matters more than in prior years. Our capacity is very limited, so guest posts would be appreciated. ⬆

Microsoft XBox Layoffs: Almost 2,000 Layoffs Became "Over 2,000"? (Over 20% of the Staff): over 20% of staff will be let go, not counting staff that leaves voluntarily
Summer Plans in Techrights and Elsewhere: massive layoffs at Microsoft
Our Desktops Are Not Your Experiments, X is Not an Experiment: Breaking what already worked
Microsoft's Big Lies Regarding This Week's Mass Layoffs Have Already Begun (and They're Already Being Spread by Slopfarms): Microsoft is the "market leader" in slop
They Made Technology Scary and Taught Us That It's Innocent, Friendly, Even "Social": Rejection of all this "apps" and "gadgets" and "Smart" (whatever that means!) status quo isn't a rejection of society
Gemini Links 30/06/2025: Backend Programs in Gemini and Dynamic Content Without The Scripting: Links for the day
Links 30/06/2025: Zuckerberg’s Tax-Evading Scheme Harms Kids, US Copyright Office Lacks Leadership: Links for the day
Microsoft Isn't Laying Off Tens of Thousands to 'Invest' in Slop ('Hey Hi'), It's Laying Off Tens of Thousands Because It's Running Out of Money (and Willing Lenders): the layoffs are a sign of the business failing, not "hey hi" (whatever that is) replacing staff
Intel Lays Off 20% of Its Workforce, Microsoft is Doing the Same This Year: Like a yoyo, whatever goes up will come back down
GNU/Linux Rises to New Highs in Angola, Africa in General is Abandoning Windows: Western media barely covers Microsoft layoffs in Africa, but in recent years Microsoft culled the workforce and even shut down entire operations
Destination Geminispace (in the Age of LLM Slop and Slop Images That Infest the Web and Social Control Media): Geminispace isn't vast, but at least it is - on average - a lot "cleaner"
GNU/Linux Growing in Sierra Leone This Year: Based on what statCounter is seeing, this year there are more and more people there who adopt GNU/Linux
Serial Sloppers Gonna Slop: More sites out there ought to call out the cheaters
Quartz (qz.com) is Spam and a Slopfarm: It used to be OK. Then they fired the staff.
Links 30/06/2025: US Economic Woes, Extreme Heat: Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...: GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 29, 2025: IRC logs for Sunday, June 29, 2025
Gemini Links 30/06/2025: "The AI Hype" and New AuraGem Ask: Links for the day
Explaining the Full Story of SLAPPs From Microsoft Staff: For every action there is a reaction, for every attack there will be proportionate consequences
The Openwashing Shills Initiative (OSI) - Part III: IRS and Status of OSI: "They lied to the US IRS and there’s a paper trail"
IBM Red Hat's Dogmatic Fanaticism Under a Thin Veil of "Modernism": IBM now has the audacity to paint people who don't agree as "nazis"
Microsoft's Share in Guatemala Fell From 97% to 14%: Eventually Microsoft will get stuck in a loop of layoffs, layoffs, and more layoffs
The Media is Under Attacks Partly Because There's Little Other (Remaining) Press to Speak in Its Defence: The biggest danger here is that when there's very little press or no "opposition media" left it becomes even easier to crush critics because there aren't many people left to speak about the matter
If Your Web Site is Run by Bots, Eventually Nobody Will 'Read' It Except Bots (People Don't Want to Read Slop): Eventually people learn from mistakes
Links 29/06/2025: Microsoft Releases False/Fake Benchmarks, "Google Wants You to Watch Ads or Take Surveys to Read Articles": Links for the day
Links 29/06/2025: Data Breaches and Online Censorship: Links for the day
Gemini Links 29/06/2025: "The Price Of Eggs" and Gemini 3D Tic Tac Toe: Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...: GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 28, 2025: IRC logs for Saturday, June 28, 2025
The "News" You Saw About Canonical is Misleading, It Made Only 18 Million Dollars Last Year and Barely Paid Any Taxes: Lies are the norm these days...
Pushing Wayland Using Straw Man Arguments: phoronix.com has long promoted the talking point of "Wayland people" (for at least a decade already)
Australia: Windows Fell to All-Time Low, Even Lower Than iOS: There's a good reason why next week there will be so many Microsoft layoffs
Slopwatch: Linuxsecurity, WebProNews, and Google News Boosting Slopfarms as 'News': People who don't recognise the slopfarms and don't know which sites are fake would struggle to understand what's really going on
Links 28/06/2025: Hardware/GPU Wars, GAFAM Throws Money (Borrowed Cash) at Hopeless Slop Pipe Dream: Links for the day
Gemini Links 28/06/2025: Shellshock and Network UPS Tools: Links for the day
Links 28/06/2025: The Age of Integrity and FreeBSD Foundation Added John Baldwin as Board Member: Links for the day
Fedora 44: IBM now does to Fedora what it did to RHEL
Microsoft Already Shaved Off Costs Anywhere It Could. It Was Not Enough.: Office and Windows aren't "selling" (licences) like they used to
Scheduled Maintenance Next Week: Our community is alive and well
BetaNews: We're Publishing LLM Slop About LLM Slop: Beta version of a slopfarm?
3-Month Updates on Our Complaint to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA): In short, the complaint remains open, updated, and is advancing
IBM Red States Hat (Project 2025): Our "New Thing" Replaces This "Old Thing": The new replaces the old. That's how IBM frames it.
Start X: Just because something is old does not mean it is bad
Slopwatch: Linuxsecurity, Google News Slopfarms, and Linux Journal (LJ): Today we take a quick look at 3 slopfarms
Over at Tux Machines...: GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 27, 2025: IRC logs for Friday, June 27, 2025
Links 28/06/2025: "CC Signals" Virtue-Signals to Slop Ponzi Schemes, North Korea Aims for Tourism: Links for the day

August as Clickbait Month and Microsoft Googlebombing

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