Silicon Angle (SiliconANGLE) Overrun by Sponsored SPAM of Microsoft and Others
Related: SiliconANGLE is Selling Coverage (Fake 'Journalism') | SiliconANGLE: Sponsored by Microsoft and Red Hat to Conduct the Marriage Ceremony
THIS may seem like a recurring theme, but it is instigated by further deterioration and concerns. Marketing companies like the one which controls ZDNet and CNET do not view news as anything but a community to be sold, or "monetised" by whatever means, even deception or deletion (of the news). It's a reckless, unethical (meta-)industry and it is gradually taking over former news sites.
This morning we saw Silicon Angle (SiliconANGLE) speaking of some "reports from Microsoft and eSentir" in relation to "sophisticated phishing", but Microsoft puts back doors in everything, gets everything out there breached, sometimes due to patches it has failed to issue for months/years. But now it blames "phishing" and the Microsoft-funded Silicon Angle relays these talking points as if Microsoft is a security authority.
But it gets yet worse; having assessed dozens of items per day from this site, including this morning, it's safe to say they do not write for humans but for bots like search engines. Yesterday they touched on "AI’s future impact", sponsored/led by Microsoft. The way we see it, "IT" has become a laughing stock, leveraged by speculators to sell nothing but promises and fraud. The buzzword spam in the site above is spinning out of control, with headlines like "AI for next-gen cloud" and "Navigating the data arms race: Challenges and opportunities for AI in the modern era" (two of almost a dozen examples from yesterday regarding "AI"). It's not a secret that they get paid to produce this spammy churn*. They get paid by the companies which sell these buzzwords - to basically popularise such buzzwords based on little substance. When they pick a spammy new headline like "data arms race" and "AI" in the "modern era" they help Microsoft pursue more bailouts in the form of "defence" contracts, using the alarmist illusion of "AI arms race" (as if it's a matter of national security).
Just to be clear, there are other sites that do the same thing, including SPAMnil's TFiR and IT Jungle. The latter does not even deny taking bribes from IBM to produce 100% IBM propaganda disguised as news. There's no effective regulation against such AstroTurfing, so they get away with it. Here we have a Microsoft site (Microsoft-funded and Microsoft-connected) that belittles the scale of Microsoft layoffs. The title says "New numbers show Microsoft shed more than 16,000 jobs in nine months", but it is actually vastly worse. As the editorial comment there says, "wait till you add up subsidiaries, temps, contractors..."
Doing a subtraction of numbers does not yield the net number of layoffs. It's far more complicated than this. We estimate that Microsoft laid off 20,000-30,000 workers this year. And it's not even over and they lay off more. █
______* Those spammy 'articles' are tagged "supercloud4", which means they are not articles but sponsored SPAM, SEO, and worse. This is their business model!