Bonum Certa Men Certa

MSBBC Finally Calls Out... Android (to Scare People)

The BBC does not call out Windows but it sure calls out Google when there is something wrong. Techrights nails the BBC for a pattern of disinformation.

Bills



Summary: Another fine set of examples of BBC bias in this week's news, favouring Microsoft and spreading lies about Microsoft's competition, as usual

TECHRIGHTS has given so many examples where the MSBBC, which is partly run by former Microsoft UK executives, ignores or omits vital details about Microsoft flaws. These examples can easily be found by searching the archives.



This week we are seeing more of the same. It's expected, but it ought to be pointed out. Microsoft veterans and their colleagues seem to be messing with the media and with people's perceptions; the BBC is a lucrative tool for achieving this because there is belief that the BBC is objective because it is funded by taxpayers. Watch the BBC creating Gmail distrust [1, 2] because of isolated incidents where people temporarily missed some of their mail. Did they forget what happened in Hotmail (far worse)? Microsoft is a death sentence to E-mail and there is a new blog post/article about it (titled "The Problem Isn't Email, It's Microsoft Exchange").

I care about email. In fact, a large part of how I have made a living over the years has depended on a reliable email service. I get a lot of email, and I send my fair share of it too - some of it is correspondence directly related to whatever I'm working on at the moment, some of it is personal, quite a bit comes from topic-oriented mailing lists such as openbsd-misc, and a large chunk of my mail archive consists of automatically generated mail sent by systems in my care. I've also been known to treat email much the same as other correspondence, rarely if ever deleting messages. When the mailboxes became too unwieldy I would transfer some of the contents to archive storage.

I've become convinced that a large part of the reason I don't mind dealing with large volumes of email is that I started doing it before Microsoft became an actor in the Internet email market. Way back in the late eighties and early nineties, email of the Internet, TCP/IP, kind would be handled by some sort of Unix box (a BSD or, by the mid-nineties, a Linux variant, perhaps) that would frequently offer shell command line access, but more likely than not also email reading via POP or IMAP interfaces.


Microsoft does not even implement IMAP correctly and this burns users.

A better example of the BBC's cheeky deception, however, is this article titled "Android hit by rogue app viruses". As we pointed out before, the BBC names and shames platforms (when they are hit) only if these platforms are not Windows. More importantly, in this case there are no "viruses". Viruses spread between computers, whereas in this case it is malware that the user must willingly install. That's not a virus. But the main point is that when the BBC writes about Microsoft Windows viruses these are typically called "viruses" or "computer viruses"; the BBC defends the Windows brand by not telling readers whose fault it probably is. The exception occurs when the fault lies with companies other than Microsoft (if at all, as in this case the malware comes from third parties, not Google, and it also relies on user intervention). Earlier this week we showed that the MSBBC also blames Google -- Not Microsoft -- for London Stock Exchange site malware. Isn't it amazing that they get away with this spin? The progressive and investigative writer Mark Ballard (who never writes for the BBC, thankfully) has a new article titled "Ban the Microsoft "virus", government told"; to quote:

Microsoft web software is like a computer virus in government computer systems and must be banned, a meeting of the British Computer Society's Open Source Specialist Group heard last week.

Called by Home Office lead architect Tariq Rashid, the meeting formed part of an investigation into why government open source policy has floundered. Rashid got a clutch of executives from the systems integrators who control 80 per cent of the UK's €£16-24bn public sector IT industry, sat them before a room full of open source advocates, and asked them to explain why the computer industry had become so stagnant under their watch.

Why for example, asked Rashid, had proprietary Microsoft technologies become entrenched in government systems? The audience seemed more sure of the answer than the panel of executives. The problem was proprietary Microsoft software. Rashid agreed.

Chris Kenyon, vice president of global OEM sales at Linux publisher Canonical, said some technologies had such a malignant effect they should be "banned" from government systems.


There is weird stuff going on behind closed doors in the UK and this week we saw the BSA, which is a Microsoft front group, lobbying against UK policy favouring real standards [1, 2].

To suggest that we single out Microsoft or make people "hate" it would simply be incorrect; Microsoft is the one doing all of those things which no other company seems to be doing. If people hate Microsoft for taking away their freedom and bribing parts of the system/process, who can blame them? And for those who missed it, the BBC got 'poisoned' with Microsoft UK executives mostly around 2007-2009 (we gave a lot of examples).

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

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
 
Gemini Links 01/07/2025: Mid Year and a Tour of Old Languages
Links for the day
EPO Presentation Bemoans Misuse of Slop in Decision-Making on Patents and in Classification (Which is Likely Illegal Too)
We habitually mention failed use cases of LLMs on the Web
Mass Layoffs at Microsoft Confirmed, "XBox Hardware Is Dead"
It's possible that over 20% of the staff will be laid off
Links 30/06/2025: Kyrgyzstan vs Media Freedom, Dalai Lama Succession
Links for the day
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
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
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
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
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