05.06.09
Posted in Deception, FUD, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Security, Windows at 9:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How would we feel had violent computer games and physical violence been blamed on “evil gaming console”?
TO MICROSOFT — or to any excessively paranoid company for that matter — it is hugely important to control how its products are covered and perceived, so it employs agencies like Waggener Edstrom [1, 2, 3, 4] which act as its PR department (even listed at Microsoft.com) and harass journalists who 'dare' to say Windows is not secure. Waggener Edstrom is particularly notorious for its compulsive spying on people [1, 2, 3, 4].
“It’s either intimidation or censorship by intimidation.”Given that previous example where Microsoft got exposed by a journalist whose work was crtiticised by Waggener Edstrom (Microsoft sent its spinners to refute claims that Vista was not secure), we are truly aware that Microsoft is causing trouble to those who are its critics. It’s either intimidation or censorship by intimidation.
Carla at LinuxToday frequently raises the issue that journalists are scared of attributing security issues to Microsoft and Maggie Shiels from the BBC has just published this article which stunningly enough talks about “computer” zombies and nowhere in the article are Windows or Microsoft even mentioned. Earlier today we gave an account of the very latest evidence which she conveniently ignores.
“Rory Cellan-Jones, who is friends with some people from Microsoft, has also just published this Google-hostile BBC piece.”This may or may not be related to Microsoft’s very strong relationship with the BBC. The BBC is strategic to Microsoft because it sets the trend to many other publications. Thus, Microsoft may have already pushed former employees into it, signed some technical partnerships, discriminated against non-Windows platforms, and even had Bill Gates publish columns there as though he is an unbiased reporter.
In summary, this is another major failure plaguiing the broadcaster which even George Orwell, back in the days when he worked for them, accused of spreading propaganda. The question is, whose propaganda? Rory Cellan-Jones, who is friends with some people from Microsoft, has also just published this Google-hostile BBC piece. It showed up this morning and it nicely relates to what we wrote yesterday. █
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Posted in Microsoft at 7:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s Massive sheds off about 75% of its people
YESTERDAY WE WROTE about Microsoft's additional layoffs and today we begin to see the inevitable fallout. Microsoft bought Massive just to lay off its employees, to pose this situation in one particular way. Ensemble Studios and Flight Simulator staff told a similar story.
Microsoft announced a new round of layoffs today as it struggles to right itself after reporting tepid results last month. We’ve learned that Massive, the company’s in-game advertising business, suffered something like 75 percent layoffs.
This is another massive blow [no pun intended] for the already-troubled XBox unit. Kotaku and Jo have some more things to say. █
“There is such an overvaluation of technology stocks that it is absurd. I would include our stock in that category. It is bad for the long-term worth of the economy.”
–Steve Ballmer
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Quote, Vista 7, Windows at 6:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Acer and Intel, for example, are already complaining that Windows 7 Starter Edition simply won’t sell.”
–Source
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Posted in GNOME, GNU/Linux, GPL, IBM, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Patents, SLES/SLED, TomTom, Ubuntu at 6:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“I saw that internally inside Microsoft many times when I was told to stay away from supporting Mono in public. They reserve the right to sue”
–Robert Scoble, former Microsoft evangelist
Summary: Preview of Microsoft Moonlight 2.0 is out and those covering it are mostly Microsoft fans
Information Week reminds readers that Microsoft is still attacking Linux by putting its patents inside it, e.g. FAT.
Although Microsoft asserted in a May 13, 2007, Fortune magazine article that it had concluded open source code violates 235 of its patents and the Linux kernel in particular, 42, it only claimed TomTom was infringing on three of its patents.
Raising of this issue in public may be valuable. After many years of letting FAT be absorbed everywhere Microsoft is attacking Linux using secret patents (some would maybe suggest that these are submarine patents). Technically, It’s a patent ambush.
“Novell is the owner and biggest promoter of Mono, for which it acquired exclusive protection from Microsoft (due to expire in January 2012).”As an optimistic note, it seems as though Mono’s grip on GNOME is being eroded. The project known as Gnote is a new GPLv3-licensed fork of Tomboy, which is the only GNOME application that brings with it a whole Mono stack to GNU/Linux distributions. Gnote is written in C++ by a gentleman whom Novell fired. Novell is the owner and biggest promoter of Mono, for which it acquired exclusive protection from Microsoft (due to expire in January 2012). As the TomTom case shows, not even “promise[s] not to sue” and de facto pseudo-standards make one safe from this aggressor’s lawsuits. FAT was the equivalent of bait for a submarine patent, which is now causing great trouble to some distributors of GNU/Linux; they need to provide access to FAT-formatted USB devices, among other media.
No Lessons Learned at Novell
Microsoft bloggers are currently promoting the new release of "Microsoft Moonlight" (that’s what they it), which tells us how Microsoft views the work of de Icaza. He helps Microsoft with this Mono- and Microsoft-dependent project. Gavin Clarke and his friend (partly colleague) Mary Jo Foley join others in the Microsoft crowd to celebrate the spreading of Microsoft formats on the World Wide Web. Prudent observers like Timothy who is Unix-oriented are not terribly excited. As he stated some days ago:
Microsoft challenges IBM to Websphere duel
[...]
The gauntlet was thrown down by Steven Martin, senior director of developer platform marketing at Microsoft, who launched a site called WebSphereLovesWindows to show off the results from some intricate benchmark tests that the nerds at Microsoft’s labs have done to show how WebSphere on AIX iron stacks up to WebSphere running on Windows or the same application ported to C# and not using WebSphere at all, but the Windows stack.
(This site requires you to install the Microsoft equivalent to Flash, Silverlight, and I have managed thus far to avoid installing it. Because I’ll give you a direct link to the PDF, which is here. Now you don’t have to install Silverlight, either).
Readers also ought to watch the latest addition to this Rhythmbox/Banshee debate. The Mono team is still trying to push Banshee, which is a Mono application, into the core of Ubuntu.
2009.05.05 mrooney: I think it would be great to come into this session with a list of bug reports corresponding to any regressions of switching to Banshee, as a result of features Rhythmbox has that Banshee doesn’t. It should be easier to weigh the pros and cons then, and give the Banshee developers a heads up of what would need to be implemented. Shall I create a wiki page for this spec and add this as a section?
This is part of an ongoing problem. Mono only belongs in Novell’s SLE.█
“There is a substantive effort in open source to bring such an implementation of .Net to market, known as Mono and being driven by Novell, and one of the attributes of the agreement we made with Novell is that the intellectual property associated with that is available to Novell customers.”
–Bob Muglia, Microsoft President
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Posted in Europe, GNU/Linux, Law, Microsoft, Patents, Red Hat at 6:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“The European Patent Office is an executive organisation, it deals especially with patent applicants, as such, its view of the world may be biased. As an executive organisation, its interpretative powers are very limited. The European Patent Convention excludes computer programs, it is outside the EPO’s power to change this.”
–Ante Wessels
MS and GE (Microsoft and General Electric) have jointly filed their case in favour of software patents in Europe (de facto banning of Free software) and FFII has made their mockery available as HTML, but what we also have is the submission from Red Hat, which only Glyn Moody appears to have analysed. As he put it:
My reasoning was that this was an extremely technical consideration of the issue of software patents, and that the people pondering the matter would not be interested in vague philosophical waffle about why software patents were a bad thing. They would be looking for keenly-argued, legalistic comments of the kind I was manifestly unable to provide.
Instead, I thought it better to leave this one to those better able to obtain some heavy legal advice on what should be written, and how.
Steve Stites, a regular at LinuxToday, writes:
I think that a more appropriate title for the article would be “Red Hat speaks for us all on software patents”.
Thank you, Red Hat.
Red Hat presents the Open Source argument against software patents very well. I would also like to see a commercial software company such as Microsoft present the commercial argument against software patents. Software patents are less than a zero sum game among the commercial software companies. They create a net drag on the commercial software industry. Microsoft has the largest loses of any company in the software patent wars and they are the logical commercial candidate to lobby for the abolition of software patents.
Despite some uncertainty, Red Hat makes it clear that it is against software patents. So now is the right time for Red Hat to stop filing for some. Hypocrisy is not a good advocacy tool. █
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Posted in Apple, Deception, FUD, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument at 5:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The Mouth of Truth is a stone mask
inside the portico of Santa Maria in
Cosmedin, Rome. It is said to bite the hand off
of any liar who places his hand inside.
Summary: A quick look at some of the latest lies which are floating
A FEW DAYS ago, evidence was used to show that Microsoft strives to marginalise 'dissent' such as GNU/Linux. The GPL, unlike anything Apple would ever adapt to, is too disruptive for Microsoft’s business to tolerate. There is a perceptual level at which GNU/Linux can be suppressed, by creating the illusion that GNU/Linux is scarcely adopted and then working hard to make it so. As background, see for example:
Press introspection is desperately needed. GreyGeek from LinuxToday had something to say about Net Applications’ latest lies, which are spinning out of control (widely propagated despite being funded by Microsoft and Apple, at least in part). He wrote about the desktop market share of GNU/Linux:
A year ago Matt Assay said it was at 2.02%
ZDNet reported on Feb 24th, 2004 that the 2003 Linux desktop market share hit 3.2% and expected it to hit 6% by 2007.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=5334
In 2005 they reported that the 2004 saw the Linux desktop at 4%.
I believe that the all the ZDNet figures were spot on. If anything, the Linux desktop market share has continued to increase and is probably currently at 8-10% and rising. Dell and the other PC OEMs wouldn’t have invested in selling Linux pre-installed if it appealed only to less than 1% of the desktop market.
It is quite obvious that NetApplications latest “report” is merely Microsoft’s continuing attempt to control the news about Linux’s success in replacing Windows on the desktop. It’s not working… No one with half an ounce of brain would take the bait on a “free” Win7 (a dumbed down version that can run only 3 apps at a time) that will deactivate after one year unless the user PAYS Microsoft to activate it. Win7 is NOT free.
There is a lot of venom out there. See the first comment here for example. It seems like off-topic AstroTurfing, which we know does exist.
A Microsoft pseudo-journalist who publicly humiliated GNU/Linux in the past and has just been laid off simply keeps up the same habit with the nonsensical heading “Where Office Beats Linux”. Well, Joe Wilcox should know pretty well that Linux is not an office suite; it’s an operating system kernel. So comparing Linux to an office suite that is the market loser in the sense that it can't harness the very basics of the international standard is just plain silly and inappropriate.
Speaking of Microsoft Office 2007 SP2, here is a good new comment from Luc Bollen (found in Rob Weir’s blog):
I also found back a funny discussion about spreadsheet formulas between Doug Mahugh and Jesper Lund Stocholm in the comments of the following blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/…
Doug explains there why Microsoft does not intent to be compatible with the OOo formulas:
# dmahugh said on February 20, 2009 12:13 PM:
[...] One interesting area is spreadsheet formula syntax — since ODF has never had such a syntax in any published version of the spec, implementers have used other standardized formula languages such as the one in IS29500 (as is allowed in the current ODF spec). [...]
Doug then reacts to a comment by Jesper:
# dmahugh said on February 21, 2009 2:38 PM:
[...] Jesper, if I understand your point correctly, you’re saying that you don’t mind if documents containing IS29500 formula markup are unable to ever be conformant to “pure ODF 1.2″ [...] My view is that this would needlessly punish users of ODF who currently save formulas in the only ISO-standard formula markup language available for this purpose. [...]
This triggers the following response from Jesper:
# Jesper Lund Stocholm said on February 23, 2009 3:10 AM:
[...] Seriously, Doug … please don’t play the “reuse exisiting ISO-standards or users will be punished”-card.
So Microsoft and cheerleaders like Jesper Lund Stocholm are still working in tandem to daemonise ODF and to make it look incapable. It’s not surprising that pseudo-journalists join them. It must be part of what Microsoft calls “the Slog”. █
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Windows at 4:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Dogs and some developers not allowed in the Apple store
Summary: Apple and Microsoft come to show why GNU/Linux is the platform for any developer to target
IT’S NOT SO often that we write critically about Apple, but for developers who think that they would rather serve Apple and Mac OS X than serve GNU/Linux and BSDs, here’s food for thought from yesterday’s news:
• Apple’s Arbitrary Rejects Hit Nine Inch Nails App
We’ve covered plenty of examples of Apple’s rather arbitrary decision/approval process for putting apps in the iPhone App Store — demonstrating a huge opportunity for other phone providers to be more open and less ridiculous. We’ve also talked plenty about Trent Reznor and how Nine Inch Nails is doing all sorts of unique things to connect with fans — including a fantastically well thought out iPhone app that got lots of well-deserved attention.
• Apple bans Page 3 from iPhone app
An iPhone newspaper browsing application that saw The Sun banned by Apple because of its Page 3 content could be granted a reprisal – thanks to the impending release of firmware version 3.0.
Microsoft loves developers as long as they develop for Windows. Apple loves developers as long as they align with Apple’s view of the world. █
“Every line of code that is written to our standards is a small victory; every line of code that is written to any other standard, is a small defeat. Total victory [...] is the universal adoption of our standards by developers, as this is an important step towards total victory for Microsoft itself: “A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software.”
–Microsoft, internal document [PDF]
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Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 4:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The last thing the world needs right now is Windows botnets, but it keeps getting worse
• 12 million new IP addresses have been hijacked by botnets
Today the McAfee first quarter threat report revealed that cybercriminals have taken control of almost 12 million new IP addresses since January, a 50 percent increase since 2008.
• Researchers hijack botnet, score 56,000 passwords in an hour
The Torpig botnet was hijacked by the good guys for ten days earlier this year before its controllers issued an update and took the botnet back. During that time, however, researchers were able to gain a glimpse into the kind of information the botnet gathers as well as the behavior of Internet users who are prone to malware infections.
• Botnet hijacking reveals 70GB of stolen data
Security researchers have managed to infiltrate the Torpig botnet, a feat that allowed them to gain important new insights into one of the world’s most notorious zombie networks by collecting an astounding 70 GB worth of data stolen in just 10 days.
During that time, Torpig bots stole more than 8,300 credentials used to login to 410 different financial institutions, according to the research team from the University of California at Santa Barbara. More than 21 percent of the accounts belonged to PayPal users. Overall, a total of almost 298,000 unique credentials were intercepted from more than 52,000 infected machines.
• China hardest hit as malware attacks increase
China received the brunt of a rise in malware attacks around the world in April, doubling its share of attacks from the previous month as the lucrative online gaming market attracted hits from cybercriminals.
• US needs ‘digital warfare force’
The head of America’s National Security Agency says that America needs to build a digital warfare force for the future, according to reports.
Lt Gen Keith Alexander, who also heads the Pentagon’s new Cyber Command, outlined his views in a report for the House Armed Services subcommittee.
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