04.20.15
Repeating Microsoft’s Lies Without Any Journalistic Assessment
Humans do lie, press should do better
Marion Jones lied repeatedly
Summary: Poor fact-checking by relatively large media/news sites results in Microsoft’s patently false claims being repeated uncritically
IT is widely known by now that Microsoft works closely with intelligence agencies that conduct mass surveillance and Microsoft's top privacy chief, Caspar Bowden, got fired by Microsoft for suggesting that Microsoft should protest itself and users of Microsoft software from such mass surveillance. Only a fool would actually believe that Microsoft is interested in privacy.
Nevertheless, some utterly poor reporting, if not complete nonsense, was published the other day, relaying a lie from Microsoft’s “chief security officer” (the fake one, not the one they fired). He tried to frame NSA leaks as a blessing to Microsoft despite the fact that Microsoft repeatedly said that it had hurt Microsoft’s business (and rightly so).
What kind of authors (or ‘journalists’) are they if all they do is quote officials and won’t do the most basic fact-checking?
The other day we wrote about Microsoft’s boosters (propagandists masquerading as journalists) framing the shutdown of Microsoft's defunct proxy "Open Tech" as something else, much like framing layoffs as “reorg”. Darryl K. Taft, another occasional Microsoft booster, repeated these talking points, but we were more surprised to see Michael Larabel doing more or less the same thing. He wrote: “The latest open-source play at Microsoft under Satya Nadella’s leadership is bringing the MS Open Tech subsidiary formally back within the organization, establish a Microsoft Open Technology Programs Office, and other efforts to make Microsoft more open and engage in open standards.”
Why is Phoronix acting like a marketing avenue or a parrot? Microsoft does not engage in open standards, it promotes OOXML and it was attacking ODF as recently as last year. It is adding spyware to Android, it is attacking GNU/Linux on many fronts and the list goes on and on. Here is a reminder of how Microsoft attacks GNU/Linux and Free software:
- Microsoft Hates Linux – Part I – The UEFI Attack on GNU/Linux
- Microsoft Hates Linux – Part II – Patent Lawsuits Against Android/Linux Still Going On, New Ones Filed
- Microsoft Hates Linux – Part III – Abducting the Competition (Android)
- Microsoft Hates Linux – Part IV – Deleting, Attacking Android/Linux From Within
- Microsoft Hates Linux – Part V – Dumping and Surveillance to Counter GNU/Linux Insurgence
- Microsoft Hates Linux – Part VI – Propaganda Wars Against Free Software Facilitated While Media Control is Secured and Abused
Some older posts about this ‘unit’ (malicious proxy and Trojan horse which Microsoft called “Open Tech” in an Orwellian fashion) include:
- Microsoft ‘Open’ Technologies Designed to Isolate Microsoft From FOSS Community, Claims OSI President; Microsoft’s Patent Extortion and Sabotage of FOSS Continue
- Apple and Microsoft Are Proprietary Software Companies and the Media Should Stop Openwashing Them
- Microsoft Coup D’état: After Paying the Apache Software Foundation and Paying Apache Man to Become Microsoft Employee He Immediately Becomes President
- Grooming Microsoft as the Voice of Free/Open Source Software
- Microsoft’s Mole Strategy Against Free Software Spreads OOXML, Surveillance, Other Malice to the Real, Potent Alternatives
- The Latest Microsoft Strategy: Embrace, Extend, Deceive, Abuse and Diffuse
- 1984 is Here: Microsoft Remotely Deletes Free/Open Source Software From Windows, Sells Malware Under Pretense of ‘Openness’ (Newspeak)
- OSI President Accuses Microsoft Proxy Black Duck of Spreading FUD
Writers should at least make an attempt to objectively assess Microsoft’s statements, not just reprint them as if Microsoft always says the truth. Such negligent writing leads to a lot of bad things, albeit some writers (like Microsoft’s boosters) make a career out of it. █
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