Misquoting as an art form to humiliate one's perceived 'enemies'

Summary: Classic propaganda model in action; "Linux" news is actually Microsoft news and when whole nations move to GNU/Linux you demoralise or mock them

THE news about "Linux" this week is bombarded by Microsoft spam. This isn't even unusual. It's a form of Googlebombing and Google News is full of Microsoft in the "Linux" section, thanks to the likes of ZDNet. They hardly even pretend to be news sites anymore. Since when is one bounty among so many bounties major "news"? Since Microsoft pays the publishers to say so? Even mainstream (general) media covered it yesterday. It never covers anything about GNU/Linux, not even an LTS release of Ubuntu or China's decision to adopt GNU/Linux.

"They hardly even pretend to be news sites anymore."But there's something even more sinister going on this morning.

The original article is entitled "China’s homegrown operating system could take years to rival Windows" and it was published not too long ago. The Web page is absolutely horrific; it's a program, not a Web page, so here's a screenshot.

How on Earth did that innocuous headline become this, from the very same person who spent many years repeatedly attacking Munich's use of GNU/Linux? He calls himself "Microsoft Editor" (job title) yet he totally controls, no less than 100% (!), the "Linux" section of Softpedia. This is what happened to the above article:

There are only two "hot" items, with sticky putting them at the top of the page. Is this what people are led to think "Linux" news is? A Microsoft bounty that paints Linux as a security threat and something about China never leaving Windows?

Check the original article, which is cited as Softpedia's sole source. The developer is being misquoted, or his words distorted, quite likely by intention, knowing the author's long-proven bias.

I asked the previous editor of the "Linux" section of Softpedia what he thinks about this shift. He used to say he loved Softpedia, where he wrote for many years. But months ago he vanished from it and suddenly reappeared in another site. We've just assessed Softpedia using a browser with no ad blocking and JavaScript blocking. Each page in the site now contains spyware and each article is full of ads, from top to middle to bottom...

I asked the previous editor, "why did you leave Softpedia (the backstory)? The Linux section there is used to promote anti-Linux propaganda now... (popa-ganda)" (reference to the new author's name).

If we receive a response, we shall update this story. We've just checked again, but no reply yet. ⬆

"I’ve killed at least two Mac conferences. [...] by injecting Microsoft content into the conference, the conference got shut down. The guy who ran it said, why am I doing this?"

--Microsoft's chief evangelist