How Microsoft Attacks Critics and Competition
THIS coming weekend we plan to cover what Microsoft did in the UK some days ago. We've thus far found some useful bits or nuggets of information during our still-ongoing research.
Microsoft has been attacking me, my family, and this Web site quite a lot in recent years. It attacked it in all sorts of ways. But that sort of brings me back to 20 (or 19) years ago when I was a postgraduate student and they tried to take me offline (disconnected from the Net) because I was advocating GNU/Linux, mostly in USENET*. I also saw how, in my department ("ISBE", where I did my Ph.D.), Microsoft moles were working to dismantle existing deployments of GNU/Linux, both on the server side and HPC; they didn't pay much attention (back then) to fellow Ph.D. students dual-booting S.u.S.E., but they were eager to replace GNU/Linux with Windows on the server side; some of the I.T. staff at "ISBE" (it's no longer called that) resigned over it and I too couldn't help but feel deeply disgusted.
This was not the last time I saw that at universities. I worked in several universities (about 4 different roles) and I kept seeing the 'Windowsheads' doing their damage, sometimes with "special guests" from Microsoft UK.
"I recall from the incidents in [redacted]," someone has told us, "and other cities that it always took Microsoft about 2 months to effect a counter attack. Projects which could get on their feet before that had a better time, but Microsoft had minions get in the way and delay as much as they could until the counter attack arrived. one of the few exceptions was the Microsoft attack against the [redacted] hospitals where they reacted within hours and prevented a migration from self-hosted services (including e-mail) over to Google."
Google is another issue and Google hires more Microsofters than any other company/companies, so the methods are likely inherited. Google too played a role in attacking this site and yours truly.
GAFAM will never leave us alone, especially because it is "windy at the top" and as sites critical of them perish there remain fewer "last copies" of things or fewer critics online. They want them to stop talking and to also censor past material (even perfectly factual information). █
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* This new blog post reminds us that the USENET era or 'webforum' era isn't over yet. As an associate notes, this concerns "(re-)decentralizatiion, albeit the web is itself centralized compared to P2P systems like Usenet." Maybe abundance of bandwidth and reduced cost of "trans-Atlantic" transmissions played a role.