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:
Some older posts about this 'unit' (malicious proxy and Trojan horse which Microsoft called "Open Tech" in an Orwellian fashion) include:
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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