[Humour/Meme] Don’t Let a COVID Crisis Go to Waste When You’re Eager to Find Excuses for Many Layoffs and Shutdowns

Microsoft business units that were defunct (long-failing, well before COVID-19) are being thrown out and Microsoft exploits a virus to rationalise these decisions while spicing up media coverage with “Hey Hi” (AI) and “virtual” experience or Facebook (to give the false impression that nothing really goes away)

Divide-and-rule tactics seem to have been exploited to weaken collaborative work on Free/libre software; the response to these tactics needs to start with realisation that this is going on (even if it’s done in a somewhat clandestine nature)

o those in positions of power and privilege (financial) you are controllable by guilt; dividing us and causing us to feel guilt and fear (over potential offence) is a powerful social control mechanism and pretext for dismissal, censorship, humiliation

Links for the day

Patents that aren’t valid in the eyes of courts would best serve patent trolls that settle out of courts, en masse

Microsoft’s share as measured at Netcraft (de facto authority in this area) is rapidly declining; expect IIS to go the way of the dodo some time in the coming years

The appalling state of journalism in Europe (and to some extent in the world at large) means that the EPO’s management can get away with all sorts of horrible crimes and fraud; the silencing of the media is, in its own right, quite scandalous

IRC logs for Thursday, July 02, 2020

Full credit goes to PCLOS Magazine for publishing this good piece, which we’re reproducing

Links for the day

DuckDuckGo is another privacy abuser in disguise; the above forum thread enumerates key reasons

EPO corruption persists, but this time the corruption enjoys better marketing/PR and complicit (or at best silent) media

The mentality of monopoly or the mindset of patent maximalism has been quick to exploit the deaths of half a million

IRC logs for Wednesday, July 01, 2020

Donald Robertson’s article bemoaning and openly condemning the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) over software patents, which it illegally grants in some cases, was modified a week later; and why? One can only guess… (but remember that the FSF’s foremost sponsor is lobbying against 35 U.S.C. § 101 and for software patents)

There’s no ‘new Microsoft’ except a (better at) lying Microsoft; its covert actions tell us a lot about its ongoing hatred of GNU/Linux, which it is assaulting in new and more sophisticated ways

Free software can leverage the superficial and bland boardroom lingo/slang to promote itself; it would definitely harm or dilute/weaken the terms which proprietary software giants like to leverage against us

Digital obsolescence and Internet bitrot — that’s what Social Control Media is really good for; as many Google+ ‘users’ (useds) found out, they’re just being ‘farmed’ for their ‘content’, which is neither valuable nor resilient (definitely of no value to Google)

Liberty or libre (freedom) is about more than brands or personalities, as names or institutions or individuals can change or completely perish; but concepts outlast superficialities

We’re supposed to believe that because “Linux” is dominant we finally have freedom; but almost all the very big companies that are using GNU/Linux leverage it for freedom-hostile purposes and keep about 99% of their code secret from us, so the fight for software freedom must go on

‘Red Scare’ tactics are being used to divert attention away from Microsoft’s incompetence and conspiracy with the NSA (to put back doors in everything, essentially making all software inherently vulnerable, by design)

In the European Union, the United States and just about everywhere else in the world one can find Microsoft officials replacing public officials, as if the decision-making too has been outsourced to the “Good Folks” from Microsoft

Links for the day

IRC logs for Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Europe’s most autocratic institution continues to cheat and lie to everybody; even twice in one day, together with… the Communist Party of China (through CNIPA)

Links for the day

The referral from European Patent Office (EPO) President António Campinos leaves the door open to patents on life, provided one paints those as uniquely clever, e.g. GMO (same tricks for software patents in Europe with “Hey Hi” — an overblown buzz wave)

Greenwashing, pinkwashing, openwashing and abduction of various authentic civil rights movements (centered around gender, race, and sometimes economic issues) is very easy and cheap relative to the depths of corporate pockets; the problem is, those things help distract the ‘masses’ from objectively immoral and universally unacceptable acts

he idea that history can just totally eliminate particular people and particular views overlooks the very nature of historical studies; banning words impedes the telling of history itself and society cannot tackle the underlying issues without talking about them

Free speech may be the main casualty of the recent flamewars, which were initially rationalised as ethics-driven and nowadays boil down to speech police