Video download link | md5sum 0759e712fb7708a8b71cbe9b23ac887f 2022 Starts With Microsoft-Connected Linux FUD Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: A psychopathic Microsoft, aided by operatives inside the mainstream and so-called 'tech' media, keeps spreading old and invalid stigma about "Linux" and Free software; few people still bother responding to these fact-free FUD campaigns, which boil down to ‘perception management’ PR/propaganda

THE smear campaigns against Free software are making a big comeback. As Sam Varghese put it just before Christmas, "Log4j attacks remain low-key compared to infosec industry hype" and yesterday we wrote about Microsoft operatives adding baseless stereotypes to the mix, exaggerating the severity of Log4j bugs compared to boundless breaches affecting Microsoft's products last year.

Well, "it does feel like these attempts at FUD have intensified recently," Psydroid said in IRC an hour or so ago, and "not a day seems to go by without some new FUD thrown our way..."

Psydroid and I share these concerns with countless others.

In the video above I present new examples (from the past couple of days alone), alluding along the way to Marcus Hutchins and under-reported NSA aspects (those are not outdated or "old news") while showing that shameless marketing by the Microsoft-connected [1, 2] CrowdStrike accompanies this new wave of Go(Lang)/Linux FUD [1, 2] in Microsoft-friendly sites, which are also happy to frame Windows/VMware problems as "Linux", probably for the second time in about a month. As if "ESXi servers" are the same as "Linux"... that's like calling Photoshop "Windows".

We should moreover note that lots of such FUD (as mentioned in the above video) could be found back when Microsoft was being clobbered by GNU/Linux on the server side and the rise of mobile (Android/iOS) was making Microsoft increasingly irrelevant on the client side too. We saw lots of FUD last year, including that same pattern of Go(lang) FUD, and it seems to be making a comeback as soon as this year starts. What's behind it? Mostly a PR or perception manipulation campaign, as the facts don't justify the alert/hype/panic. It's all about manipulation of opinion, as Mark Kent noted some hours ago. Profits first, facts never. ⬆