Bonum Certa Men Certa

Eye on Microsoft: Bigger Clouds and Worse Security

Yahoo Finds Google After Escaping a Villain



For Yahoo and Google, things appear to be working out pretty well despite Microsoft's disruption via lobbying arms and hypocritical accusations.

Google says its web advertising deal with Yahoo is on schedule and will not be derailed by US anti-trust scrutiny.


It is a tad amusing that Microsoft empowered the very same competitors it sought to harm when it first approached Yahoo! It's poetic justice. Just to reiterate, Microsoft may have used illegal proxies to weaken Yahoo and it also does, for a fact, use AstroTurfers, which it hires via the LawMedia Group (one proxy among others) to shoot down this Yahoo/Google collaboration.

Growing Pains on the Cloud and the Desktop



There are other reasons for Microsoft to fear Google. It's not just search and advertising, which are key ingredients of profitable cloud computing. Google employs the necessary skill set and assets which enabled it -- via an acquisition -- to dominate Web video and secure a good position in software as a service (SaaS). It also collaborates with Salesforce now. Here is a new article about this challenge to Microsoft's already-lost dominance.

Cloud computing about to rain on Microsoft parade



Work from home and get paid to log on to YouTube — that’s life in “the cloud”.

The cloud, or cloud computing, is the latest phrase on the lips of every IT geek, and they say it’s transforming our lives by quantum leaps and bounds.


Microsoft's appointment of Jerry Seinfeld was mentioned in [1, 2, 3, 4]. John Dvorak does not believe that this is going work.

So the question becomes not whether the campaign will stink, but how bad.

I have come up with three possibilities. The kindest one would be "just stinks." After that comes "stinks to high heaven," followed by the frightful "What are they thinking!?"

[...]

So we'll all await these new messages from Microsoft knowing that they will probably not stink to high heaven, but merely just stink.


Hammered by Non-Free Software



An interesting new case sheds some light on the legality of lock-in and its accompanying abuse of power. It could serve as precedence affecting Microsoft et al.

AN IT company is taking on Medicare, suing it for anti-competitive conduct and breaches of the Trade Practices Act.

Thelma Pty Ltd, a subsidiary of technology company ICS Global, has filed a statement of claim in the Federal Court, alleging Medicare has misused taxpayer funds by replicating its computer program and offering it free to those in the private health sector.

ICS Global is also suing Medicare for misusing its market power and for predatory pricing.


The War in Iraq



It's not what you think. A tradition of back doors and poor engineering at Microsoft is causing Iraqi authorities to lose control of their computer systems. This must be why armies across the world gradually migrate to GNU/Linux (e.g. Turkey, Germany, US DoD). It's just common sense

It is his unit's lone computer, highlighting the country's vulnerability to a community of Iraqi hackers defacing websites and attempting to hack into sensitive internal networks.

Iraq's government is engaged in a bloody struggle against al-Qaeda, and its computers make a prime target for global terror networks that have added hacking to their arsenal.

"We could have the most powerful anti-hacking force in the world, but we'd still have no computers, so we couldn't do anything," says Ali Hussein, one of 12 computer science graduates added to the cybercrime team last month. "The government thinks about guns, tanks and raiding houses. Hackers just aren't a priority."


Regarding this issue of poor security, the other day we wrote about editors who are messing with article headlines. A reader has just sent us this possible new example from the news ("Worm on NASA Space Station Underscores Spread of Online Gaming Threats").

The reader explains: "Here's another example of article titles getting fiddled, presumably by MSFTers. Online gaming gets the blame in the title, even though the body clearly points out that this is a Windows vulnerability.

"NASA has no business running Windows on any missions. It was on a notebook computer -- for now -- but even that's unacceptable: Space missions are not the place to decide that bad engineering is acceptable. That's fine for the corporate board rooms, where ideology trumps profit, but the Microsoft effect of apathy toward bad engineering needs to stay out of life-or-death environments. It's already killing patients, let's not start to kill healthy astronauts, too."

Request for Information



This is a kind request of behalf of a reader/researcher.

If any of our readers can find an article from a few years ago (2-5) defining the Microsoft effect, that would be helpful. The author even named the type of cognitive dissonance going on. Basically it's a form of sour grapes: the Windows people have sucks, so there for all other systems suck just as much.

The article may be from pseudonym "Paul Murphy", but there's no certainty that it is the same person or people that now use the pseudonym.

Recent Techrights' Posts

EFF Celebrates Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office as "Digital Inclusion", Mocks GNU/Linux-Based ChromeOS
Yet another example/evidence that EFF has become a rotten pile of junk
 
[Meme] Years Have Passed and EPO Management Still Isn't Obeying a Ruling From a Court Regarding Communications Between Staff
Representatives talking to their staff is "privacy violation"?
Presentations of the Staff Union of the European Patent Office in Its Headquarters Tomorrow After Work
Annual General Meeting and reports
Gemini Links 06/10/2024: SSH Keys and Hobby Game Development
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, October 05, 2024
IRC logs for Saturday, October 05, 2024
[Meme] How to Keep Granting Hundreds of Thousands of Fake Patents (Without Upsetting Anybody in Politics and Media)
This is very Kremlin-like
EPO Examiners to Adopt Resolution Condemning EPO Management for Breaking the Law in Order to Grant Many Illegal Software Patents
Europe's second-largest institution (EPO) is a law-breaking institution hiding behind the veil of "law"
[Meme] Sup, Nazi?
"Come back, one year"
Calling "Nazi" and "Right Wing" Everyone Who Does Not Agree With You (Even Leftists Whose Views on Some Issues Slightly Differ From Yours)
Oil money has become exceptionally notorious for takeover of online platforms and institutions/NGOs (using them to incite society inwards, not upwards)
EFF Losing the Plot
Like the Linux Foundation and OSI, the EFF has succumbed to corporate influence and is derailing itself (along with its original mission)
Links 05/10/2024: Patents Being Squashed, EFF Insists on Children's Access to Porn
Links for the day
Gemini Links 05/10/2024: Multitudinous Agreeable Futures and Misfin Mail
Links for the day
Links 05/10/2024: Amazon Culling 14,000 Managers, About 160 People Resign From Automattic
Links for the day
Microsoft Moles in Nerdearla, Openwashing and Whitewashing Microsoft With Its Latest Ponzi Scheme and Storytelling
Also GPL violations en masse
The Danger of Outsourcing Your Platform to Social Control Media and Getting "Information" There
Stella is probably not aware of what she has just done
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 04, 2024
IRC logs for Friday, October 04, 2024
Links 05/10/2024: Shift to ARM, Microsoft XBox Crisis
Links for the day
[Meme] Who to Trust on Privacy... (Not Someone Who Boasts About Breaking Into Devices Without Authorisation)
You're not even a computer scientist...
When It Comes to Encryption, The Web (as in World Wide Web) Isn't Secure and Uses Weak Ciphers About as Often as Every Day, Even in 2024
Gemini Protocol does not
The GPL Does Not Prohibit Use of Code for Death
Windows kills even more people, but in other ways
Journalism in Europe on Life Support
Assange articulated some of the ordeals he went through
[Video] Stella Assange and Thórhildur Sunna Ævarsdóttir on Protecting Journalists Who Expose Injustice
Stella (the wife) says her husband received an invitation from the committee (PACE) while he still undergoes recovery
[Video] Thórhildur Sunna Ævarsdóttir (Iceland, SOC) Explains That Julian Assange Was Punished for Exposing Crimes (Instead of the Criminals Getting Published)
Thórhildur Sunna Ævarsdóttir speaks out...
Links 04/10/2024: Health, Asia, and Censorship
Links for the day
Links 04/10/2024: Ingrid's Back and Creative Mornings
Links for the day
[Video] The Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly on Julian Assange
The Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly has voted to confirm that Julian Assange was held as a political prisoner
Links 04/10/2024: Telegram Issues Deepen, Texas Sues TikTok
Links for the day
"The Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly has voted to confirm that Julian Assange was held as a political prisoner."
This stuff should not have been in Twitter (X)
Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) Do Not Run Windows
The projects that deal with ICBMs are extremely unlikely to involve Microsoft
"Microsoft is asking for a handout... yet again"
Just over a month after the last bailout fell through the cracks
One Step Closer to the End of Microsoft's XBox
XBox sales are down over 50% in the past year
GNU/Linux Flaring Up in ASEAN
We said we'd not post statCounter for a few months
Gemini Links 04/10/2024: Asteroid City and Retro Gaming
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 03, 2024
IRC logs for Thursday, October 03, 2024