03.02.22
Gemini version available ♊︎Reviewing Gifts and Coverage of News About Companies That Supply These Gifts
Video download link | md5sum 1d6128929eacf526a5644833c2795a8f
Michael and the x86 Box
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: There’s a severe Web crisis that more people ought to talk about; sites are being increasingly compromised or ‘bought’ (looking to ‘cash in’ on their audiences) and as a result we have a deeply misinformed public; today we revisit Phoronix
A MONTH ago we caught Phoronix violating ethical standards and called the site out on it (only after we had given it about a day to respond) [1, 2]. We since then haven’t linked to Phoronix anymore and things have hardly improved, as noted in the video above. The companies which send very expensive gifts receive a disproportionate amount of coverage in Phoronix and gifts are still being sent to the Phoronix estate (from Microsoft also), as shown above based on this morning’s very latest post.
“Companies work overtime to shape perceptions around them and their products; heck, they have whole business units devoted to this task.”Michael finally/belatedly responded more than a fortnight later and weakly (not disputing what we had actually said but dancing around the questions). This rant isn’t limited to Phoronix but to the state of the Web at large, including social control media. We recently mentioned GulagTube/YouTube "influencers" selling fake endorsements/reviews (“The Linux Experiment”, which worked hard to cancel Richard Stallman, got banned for it last year) and Phoronix is doing the same, albeit not in the form of video (but benchmarks and photos as a medium).
It is quite frankly frustrating that the Web has become a source of propaganda not just from governments but also corporations and their ‘foot soldiers’, with sites that masquerade as independent but are in fact receiving loads of very expensive gifts.
With all sorts of sockpuppets and fake reviews overwhelming the Web (or fake awards/endorsements) it has become hard to know who to trust online; it’s a lot worse on the Web because the platform is heavily targeted, including Wikipedia. Companies work overtime to shape perceptions around them and their products; heck, they have whole business units devoted to this task.
Over in our IRC channels there has been some discussion about this other post from Phoronix, once again going soft on Microsoft. As one person immediately responded, “we don’t need directx, we have opengl and vulkan [...] it’s another one of their tricks… the headline has little information… it’s a linux kernel module for WSL that implements directx… in that case, it’s another microsoft way to locking in GNU/Linux programs to windows by implementing a directx shim in the virtualized linux kernel… so WSL is EEE and we’re now at the extend part… they extend it with proprietary API and hope that the programs rely on it.”
“Maybe it’s just Software-defined Silicon,” Ryan said.
About another crate of CPUs, there was even more commotion. “Every time you pay Intel more, it does things that it could already do and locked you out of intentionally,” Ryan said. “Like Windows.”
“The electric company moved everything over to Microsoft Azure. Now I get a spinney beachball of death instead of being able to pay my electric bill with Firefox.”
Psydroid said: “Intel couldn’t stay behind so that’s another crate of CPUs for Michael Intelarabel and the Moronix”
Ryan responded: “When all else fails, bribe. Here’s an entire shipping container of CPUs. We don’t want them back, so if you put them on ebay that’s fine. Be sure to run Clear Linux and use the Intel Compiler when comparing us to AMD. It’s not so much that the Intel Compiler optimizes that well for Intel processors. It’s that it makes AMD processors take the slowest code it generates to make Intel’s CPUs look better in comparison between the two. Intel provides all sorts of kickbacks for third party developers to use ICC so that it ruins the performance of the largest amount of software possible for AMD. Then they can just go “Aww shucks, well, we have no way of knowing whether AMD’s CPUs meet these feature sets, so we just sniff to see what it is and fail safe.”. No investigations afaik.”
Going back to that other article, it shows that Phoronix isn’t changing its ways. It works for interests orthogonal to ours when it suits it. “WSL as everyone knows,” our associate noted moments ago, “is toxic waste to prevent the use of GNU/Linux and keep people fiddling pointlessly with Windows.” █
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