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

SoylentNews Grows Up, Registers as a Business, Site Traffic Reportedly Grows
More people realise that social control media may in fact be a passing fad
 
Garden Season Starts Today
Outdoor time, officially...
More Information About Public Talks That Richard Stallman Gave This Week in Europe
Two talks in Switzerland
Engadget is Still a Spamfarm, It's Just an Amazon Catalogue (SPAM/SEO), a Sea of Junk Disguised as "Articles" With Few 'Fillers' (Real Articles) in Between
Engadget writes for bots now, not for humans
Richard Stallman's Talks in Switzerland This Week
We need to put an end to 'cancer culture'; it's trying to kill people and it is even swatting people
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, March 28, 2024
IRC logs for Thursday, March 28, 2024
[Meme] EPO's New Ways of Working (NWoW), a.k.a. You Don't Even Get a Desk at Work and Cannot be Near Known Colleagues
Seems more like union-busting (divide and rule)
Hiding Microsoft's Culpability in Security Breaches and Other Major Blunders (in the United Kingdom, This May Mean You Can't Get Food)
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is vast
Giving back to the community
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 28/03/2024: Sega, Nintendo, and Bell Layoffs
Links for the day
Open letter to the ACM regarding Codes of Conduct impersonating the Code of Ethics
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
With 9 Mentions of Azure In Its Latest Blog Post, Canonical is Again Promoting Microsoft and Intel Vendor Lock-in, Surveillance, Back Doors, Considerable Power Waste, and Defects That Cannot be Fixed
Microsoft did not even have to buy Canonical (for Canonical to act like it happened)
Links 28/03/2024: GAFAM Replacing Full-Time Workers With Interns Now
Links for the day
Consent & Debian's illegitimate constitution
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
The Time Our Server Host Died in a Car Accident
If Debian has internal problems, then they need to be illuminated and then tackled, at the very least in order to ensure we do not end up with "Deadian"
China's New 'IT' Rules Are a Massive Headache for Microsoft
On the issue of China we're neutral except when it comes to human rights issues
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, March 27, 2024
IRC logs for Wednesday, March 27, 2024
WeMakeFedora.org: harassment decision, victory for volunteers and Fedora Foundations
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 27/03/2024: Terrorism Grows in Africa, Unemployment in Finland Rose Sharply in a Year, Chinese Aggression Escalates
Links for the day
Links 27/03/2024: Ericsson and Tencent Layoffs
Links for the day
Amid Online Reports of XBox Sales Collapsing, Mass Layoffs in More Teams, and Windows Making Things Worse (Admission of Losses, Rumours About XBox Canceled as a Hardware Unit)...
Windows has loads of issues, also as a gaming platform
Links 27/03/2024: BBC Resorts to CG Cruft, Akamai Blocking Blunders in Piracy Shield
Links for the day
Android Approaches 90% of the Operating Systems Market in Chad (Windows Down From 99.5% 15 Years Ago to Just 2.5% Right Now)
Windows is down to about 2% on the Web-connected client side as measured by statCounter
Sainsbury's: Let Them Eat Yoghurts (and Microsoft Downtimes When They Need Proper Food)
a social control media 'scandal' this week
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, March 26, 2024
IRC logs for Tuesday, March 26, 2024
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
Windows/Client at Microsoft Falling Sharply (Well Over 10% Decline Every Quarter), So For His Next Trick the Ponzi in Chief Merges Units, Spices Everything Up With "AI"
Hiding the steep decline of Windows/Client at Microsoft?
Free technology in housing and construction
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
We Need Open Standards With Free Software Implementations, Not "Interoperability" Alone
Sadly we're confronting misguided managers and a bunch of clowns trying to herd us all - sometimes without consent - into "clown computing"
Microsoft's Collapse in the Web Server Space Continued This Month
Microsoft is the "2%", just like Windows in some countries