11.29.22
Posted in Deception, Microsoft, Novell at 8:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The con man who helped Microsoft promote .NET/C# (inside GNU/Linux) after he had worked at Microsoft, and who later helped Microsoft engage in mass plagiarism via GitHub, is not what the innocent face seemingly projects; Nat Friedman is a very dangerous and sinister person in pursuit of money
THE name Nat Friedman isn’t heard much anymore. He ‘left’ GitHub a year ago and some sites still list him as a corporate person inside Microsoft, though that’s likely out-of-date information. Meanwhile, GitHub faces this lawsuit and the official site says: “The Joseph Saveri Law Firm filed a class-action lawsuit against GitHub Copilot, Microsoft, and OpenAI on behalf of open-source programmers.” There’s more here.
Several years prior to this lawsuit Alex Graveley and his “bro” Nat Friedman (we recently noted that Friedman is apparently trying to hide the troublesome relationship) had conspired to do this, in effect defrauding shareholders like we explained a year ago. It is worth noting that Nat Friedman was an advisor to FTX, so fraud was never far off the radar. Same as the Zemlins [1, 2, 3]. “And he fundraised for Arc Institute from them,” a source has informed us.
What is the Arc Institute? Unlike the FTX scandals, especially after its collapse, the Arc Institute isn’t in the news much.
Friedman’s involvement with the Arc Institute is connected to patents (or monopolies). “You and I both know that he is a patent troll,” a source recently told us. “Very set on using AI to collect as much intellectual property as possible” (remember that Microsoft keeps using "AI" as an excuse for plagiarism or privatising the Commons).
“So the Arc Institute is working on CRISPR”, our source explained. “Human DNA is not patentable in the US unless it is modified. This “non-profit” is working on CRISPR gene editing [and] Nat is on the Board. Sometimes I feel like he’s literally trying to enslave humanity; Own all software, own all art, own human life. Hopefully the Supreme Court will step in once they start trying to charge royalty used to people with gene editing or inherited gene editing like the RoundUp soybeans.”
And when it comes to patents, we previously wrote about Friedman’s creepy software patents — patents on surveillance basically. As per this page, Microsoft treats whistleblowers like they’re criminals and among Nat Friedman’s software patents (remember that managers at Novell bragged they had the most software patents per employee) there’s this one which says: “During the course of a computer session, many actions may be performed on a computer. For several reasons, including increasing workforce productivity, it may be desirable to monitor these actions.”
Frankly, Friedman and his best known sidekick (Miguel de Icaza) have not been in the public eye lately, but they tend to come back, e.g. as Xamarin and other Microsoft proxies. We still have about 4,000 lines of material on GitHub. A lot of that will be published next year, so stay tuned. █
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09.14.22
Posted in Boycott Novell, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Novell, Patents at 8:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Jonas Bosson (FFII Sweden) is one among many who explained what Novell had done with Microsoft and why this site exists in the first place:
Summary: Reminder of why Techrights exists and what motivated us (the above petition has long been offline, but we have this local copy of it; 2,221 people added their signatures to this petition by Bruce Perens)
MORE than 7 weeks from now we’re turning 16. It all started in 2006, i.e. around the time of the above petition. We’re of course covering a lot more topics now; what’s more, we’re not limited to campaigning on a single issue. Just over 6 weeks from now the Microsoft-Novell deal turns 16. Then, we too turn 16.
It’s possible that by wintertime, i.e. before the anniversary, we’ll have already begun deploying the new CMS under Alpine Linux. It’s also probable we’ll keep on going for another decade, even if the World Wide Web can barely survive that long.
To get a taste of what the new CMS looks like, check this site or this Gemini capsule. It is worth remembering that this is still work in progress changelog here). █
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08.27.22
Posted in GNU/Linux, Mandriva, Novell at 3:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 9330cf26212d9aa4fb000e652d7a121c
Internet and Web Rot, the Mandriva and Novell Story
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The Web is vanishing rather fast along with facts and data contained in the Web (corporations and news sites going offline); to make matters worse, once-legitimate domains are being taken over by scammers
THIS morning I was told that years — maybe about a decade — after Mandriva had gone bankrupt “all the sites and pages under *.mandriva.com are long gone and the URLs redirected to domain squatters”. This is a familiar scenario. It happens a lot, but that rarely attracts any media attention. We’re meant to think the Web is just fine when things “age” this way… when in fact there are serious security ramifications. Once-thriving and busy sites can turn into scams and the domain registrars simply don’t care as long as they can bag some more money. What an awful system, a for-profit power grab.
“Unlike libraries with literature (that has references to other literature, with many copies in many libraries/homes), the Web has a very short memory. We should strive for something better.”The above video shows what happened to mandriva.com and then shows novell.com as well. A lot of history is gone and many articles we wrote in the distant past rely on some pages being online at both mandriva.com and Novell’s official site. Consider the time Microsoft bribed Nigerians to attack GNU/Linux and spurn a Mandriva deal. It was only 14 years ago and now one struggles to find a copy of what Mandriva’s chief executive, Francois Bancilhon, actually wrote. This benefits the corrupt ‘victors’, who got away with the bribery. Back in 2006 we wrote blog posts to show how shortly after Novell had signed the patent deal with Microsoft the Windows- or Microsoft-critical pages in novell.com were watered down or completely removed. With the Wayback Machine there’s some remote chance of recovering the evidence, but there are no guarantees, especially if one does not register the old (and long-deprecated) URLs.
Unlike libraries with literature (that has references to other literature, with many copies in many libraries/homes), the Web has a very short memory. We should strive for something better.
“One of the biggest differences between paper and Web is that Web is centralised and you never actually own or possess the copy you read,” an associate reminds us. “So there is only one single location where something bad has to happen, either through action or inaction, for access for the entire world to vanish.”
“Microsoft exploits that a lot to try to rewrite history in its favor, and replace facts with lies and innuendo.” █
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07.09.22
Posted in Free/Libre Software, FSF, Microsoft, Novell at 8:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Some “patrons” do not age well…
Summary: As recently noted here, bagging a lot of money from large corporations (not individual members) is a risky move; it’s what killed the OSI and made the so-called ‘Linux’ Foundation obsolete (habitual lobby against the interests of Linux)
WHILE looking back at the history of the FSF's Web site I stumbled upon lots of interesting things, such as “bkuhn” (later SFC) and “greve” (FSFE founder) editing the FSF’s front page/homepage more than two decades ago; prior to that it was “rms”.
The FSF’s corporate sponsorship program started more than a decade and a half ago. In retrospect, this page from 2006 is interesting (July 15th, 2006; months before the Novell/Microsoft deal or when they were already negotiating their patent collusion). From what we can gather, that was about a year after the programme had started. Up until then the FSF relied on awards (grants) received by the founder and then members. Wikipedia notes that: “On November 25, 2002, the FSF launched the FSF Associate Membership program for individuals.”
Novell was an FSF sponsor (“patron”) the year it was flirting with Microsoft and scheming to undermine the GPLv2 using software patents. Novell would later pay the EFF for “patent busting” to in a failed bid to appease critics of the “deal” (collusion). What’s interesting though is that Novell gave money to the FSF and yet the FSF immediately spoke out against Novell’s “deal”; but such conflicts of interest did occasionally cause trouble and, charting Linux Foundation territories/waters, this can lead to trouble. █
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12.13.21
Posted in Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Novell, Patents, Red Hat at 3:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Series parts:
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part I — Inside a Den of Corruption and Misogynists
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part II — The Campaign Against GPL Compliance and War on Copyleft Enforcement
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part III — A Story of Plagiarism and Likely Securities Fraud
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part IV — Mr. MobileCoin: From Mono to Plagiarism… and to Unprecedented GPL Violations at GitHub (Microsoft)
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part V — Why Nat Friedman is Leaving GitHub
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VI — The Media Has Mischaracterised Nat Friedman’s Departure (Effective Now)
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VII — Nat Friedman, as GitHub CEO, Had a Plan of Defrauding Microsoft Shareholders
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VIII — Mr. Graveley’s Long Career Serving Microsoft’s Agenda (Before Hiring by Microsoft to Work on GitHub’s GPL Violations Machine)
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part IX — Microsoft’s Chief Architect of GitHub Copilot Sought to be Arrested One Day After Techrights Article About Him
- YOU ARE HERE ☞ Connections to the Mass Surveillance Industry (and the Surveillance State)
Summary: Many people have long spoken about GitHub's ties to ICE; few have paid attention to intelligence ties, including the NSA and Nat Friedman’s proximity to people from Palantir
“I saw your article expressing concerns about Nat Friedman’s character on TechRights.org,” a source has has told us. “I’m sure you’re already aware of the various surveillance tech patents and his connections to Palantir.”
“Over the past few years we’ve casually mentioned that — putting programmes such as PRISM aside — Microsoft hired from the NSA for leadership positions at GitHub.”Those are software patents; some are connected to Novell. And there’s also some interesting stuff in here. To quote: “During the course of a computer session, many actions may be performed on a computer. For several reasons, including increasing workforce productivity, it may be desirable to monitor these actions. Known applications enable monitoring of actions performed on the computer through logging of events, such as keystrokes, web sites visited, emails sent/received, windows viewed, and passwords entered. Known applications further enable capturing of screen shots at scheduled time intervals. Known event monitoring applications are typically run in stealth mode to make them undetectable to users of the monitored computer.”
Spyware?
Well, purely moral objections aside, that one sounds like a software patent (which we oppose).
Over the past few years we’ve casually mentioned that — putting programmes such as PRISM aside — Microsoft hired from the NSA for leadership positions at GitHub. Moreover, GitHub introduced programmes wherein people’s code will be silently ‘fixed’, without the developers’ intervention. This exacerbated an already-worrying situation, as the NSA not only spies (through Microsoft) on everything in GitHub; it can control the supply chain and, in theory, can deliver specially-crafted downloads to people it wishes to spy on. Not an unprecedented strategy we might add…
As it turns out, there’s more to it than we previously knew. We’ll come to the ‘meat’ of it in just a moment.
“We remind readers that we wrote a great deal about Skype when Microsoft bought it, in effect taking a European company to the United States, then changing the network topology to make wiretapping easier.”When you speak to people who have worked for a variety of companies and saw things from within you get to discover unwritten (mostly verbal) information. Our informants casually dropped some pointers. “Also want to say I have other tech abuses unrelated to these guys I’ve been exposed to that I wish were more reported on like ElasticSearch being a basically a public sector wing of the NSA…”
Well, the ElasticSearch story is also interesting, especially if we have documents related to this, because at my job we use ElasticSearch sometimes. I didn’t know about connections to the NSA until those were shown to me. It’s not imaginary; it’s very real. “So I briefly worked with some former NSA people,” a source told us, and “one of them said that people working at the NSA get tired of being restricted by federal law so they go into the private sector and turn surveillance into a product…”
We remind readers that we wrote a great deal about Skype when Microsoft bought it, in effect taking a European company to the United States, then changing the network topology to make wiretapping easier. About a year later, owing to Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks, we saw that Microsoft had almost instantaneously added Skype to PRISM, a programmes in which Microsoft was the first (as if it was pioneered by Microsoft and the NSA).
“Another one [of the colleagues] said that ElasticSearch is significantly composed of ex-NSA.”
“Well, almost nobody checks the binaries.”So it’s the same as Cloudera or Hortonworks (the company they bought; Red Hat's current CEO is coming from their board).
It’s what some people call an “open secret”; a lot of companies in the US are connected to the military. A site called “Tech Inquiry” notes: “In the first of a two-part report, Easy as PAI (Publicly Available Information) dissects the subcontracting networks behind Project Maven, as well as its broader context in PAI aggregation within the Secure Unclassified Network (SUNet) and for US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). We also map out the subcontracting networks involving US Department of Defense procurement of location-tracking technologies, including how they involve well-known think tanks.”
“Elastic has Endgame now,” our source noted, as “there’s lots of stuff about them working with the NSA on their website; I don’t know if there’s any backdoors in their open source stuff but probably.”
Well, almost nobody checks the binaries. It’s just one among other issues and sadly a lot of people trust that anything they download from GitHub is 1) benign 2) received at the downloader’s end with full integrity. In the age of ‘Clown Computing’ or ‘SaaS’ [sic] we’re meant to just trust programs we have no control of and not even any real understanding of.
“In the age of ‘Clown Computing’ or ‘SaaS’ [sic] we’re meant to just trust programs we have no control of and not even any real understanding of.”On the subject of GitHub more specifically, “Nat Friedman has an executive assistant that worked at Palantir as Chief of Staff.” Title is Chief of Staff to Global Head of Business Development at Palantir.
A close friend of Friedman has “also mentioned some friend of theirs that was an early employee at Palantir,” according to the source, which “never got a name… told me he lives in Tarrytown and gave his wife a million dollars and she left him and he was selling his house…”
In the next part we’ll continues to explore privacy/surveillance aspects. Also, there’s a trial due one week from now.
If you know more, please get in touch with us. This is one of several parts about the “intelligence” ties of GitHub and other Microsoft tentacles. █
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11.29.21
Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Novell at 7:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Series parts:
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part I — Inside a Den of Corruption and Misogynists
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part II — The Campaign Against GPL Compliance and War on Copyleft Enforcement
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part III — A Story of Plagiarism and Likely Securities Fraud
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part IV — Mr. MobileCoin: From Mono to Plagiarism… and to Unprecedented GPL Violations at GitHub (Microsoft)
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part V — Why Nat Friedman is Leaving GitHub
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VI — The Media Has Mischaracterised Nat Friedman’s Departure (Effective Now)
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VII — Nat Friedman, as GitHub CEO, Had a Plan of Defrauding Microsoft Shareholders
- YOU ARE HERE ☞ Mr. Graveley’s Long Career Serving Microsoft’s Agenda (Before Hiring by Microsoft to Work on GitHub’s GPL Violations Machine)
Summary: Balabhadra (Alex) Graveley was promoting .NET (or Mono) since his young days; his current job at Microsoft is consistent with past harms to GNU/Linux, basically pushing undesirable (except to Microsoft) things to GNU/Linux users; Tomboy used to be the main reason for distro ISOs to include Mono
THE LAST part took note of Nat Friedman and Alex Graveley (“best friends” in Graveley’s eyes; Miguel de Icaza said they go back 20 years). Today we look more closely at what Mr. Graveley had done before Microsoft/GitHub enlisted him to promote a GPL violations tool (a tool for encouraging — not detecting — copyleft violations).
“All this stuff needs daylight, as the media completely failed to report about what had actually happened earlier this year.”Based on long conversations with a source, “on LinkedIn [he makes] claim to Copilot,” but that goes further back to things we covered over a decade ago. “It sounds like you might know more about that than me,” the source said, as “the timeline starts with the Tomboy stuff.” (We called them “Team Mono”)
That was ages ago, but many of the same people are still involved and they are officially under Microsoft’s umbrella, with a salary from Microsoft as well. “From my understanding,” the source noted, “Alex wasn’t even 18 when this stuff started” because he “dropped out of high school at 15″ and later met “Nat [Friedman] through an IRC[-based] Linux channel or something…”
They also did some podcasts together (Friedman and Graveley), as we noted here before. Friedman had worked for Microsoft as an intern (mid 90s, seems to be when he met Miguel de Icaza). It took many years before he worked directly for Microsoft once again. A lot of the time was spent hooking up companies like Novell with Microsoft and then promoting .NET through Xamarin, which also led to a “payday” from Microsoft.
Our source said, “he hides that and I wonder why?”
He would then attack Free software through shells and proxies, the latest of which was GitHub. We’ve already covered a number of scandals related to this. “I know almost nothing about his personal life,” our source noted, but Richard “Stallman [said] that his dad was a stock broker though…”
“I just thought that was super weird,” the source said, “saw on some email to Richard” [Stallman] that said: “It seems that your efforts to build resistance to Amazon’s ludicrous one-click patent are really paying off! My father is a stock broker, and tonight he showed me a news item which came over his company’s internal wire service describing (fairly accurately) the boycott and your roll in it. Apparently it has been widely distributed among the brokerage firms, and AMZN was down 7 points today on the news (at least, there was no other readily-apparent reason for the downturn). Perhaps now that Amazon is getting hit in the pocketbook, they’ll pay more attention.”
Mr. stock market…
But this series isn’t so much about Friedman but about the issues, notably Copilot (connected to GitHub and proprietary spyware for desktops, Visual Studio). We’re going to focus on GPL violations they enable and who’s promoting this practice; that’s the role of Alex Graveley. Visual Studio ‘Code’ is proprietary spyware (the so-called ‘telemetry’ has become notorious enough) and a certain “Nathaniel Dourif Friedman” has a software patent on spyware. Spyware like this: “During the course of a computer session, many actions may be performed on a computer. For several reasons, including increasing workforce productivity, it may be desirable to monitor these actions.”
If it sounds like a SOFTWARE patent, bear in mind it is with Novell, which openly bragged about its software patents and tried to leverage them to attack rival GNU/Linux vendors in collusion with Microsoft. Our moral objections aside (those are patents which we oppose), Mr. Graveley too has such patents. All the Hackpad patents are listed there. “For clarification, Alex’s legal name is Balabhadra Graveley,” our source noted, and “to further clarify he is a white man and not Indian despite the sound of his name” because of his “hippie Hare Khrishna parents…”
His LinkedIn (Microsoft) account suggests he still works for Microsoft:
“Team Mono or whatever you want to call it,” our source noted, is “alive and well…”
Except Friedman is gone, likely forced to resign to save face.
All this stuff needs daylight, as the media completely failed to report about what had actually happened earlier this year.
One less important aspect of it all is, Alex Graveley was inadvertently the subject of many old posts of ours. Because of Mono and Tomboy. Readers might want to get some context, assuming they never heard about this controversy before. Here’s an article from 2013:
And half a dozen (among more) from 2009:
“I do have this message where Alex calls Tomboy his life’s work,” our source said. The above articles spoke about technical issues, not just legal issues. And sure, those are old… as the site was a lot younger back then (about 2.5 years old) and nowadays we do deeper investigations. It certainly seems like Friedman and others set him up for richness; by sucking up to Microsoft, with Mono, he was swimming close to the sharks.
Tomboy as a piece of software is junk. That’s why someone else from Novell (alumnus) rewrote it in C++; there’s just nothing special about it, which makes sense considering he wrote it as a high school dropout with little experience in software engineering.
“I’ve seen his code,” the source said, calling it “very procedural”.
Gnote’s developer rewrote the whole thing in a better language, not controlled by Microsoft. Yes, his whole program was re-written as a hobby in C++ — a process which didn’t take long — and then it run much faster (details in the above links).
The original implementation (Tomboy) was technically weak. Among the quotes we heard about Graveley: “He is so insecure”; “Full of doubts and strong opinions”; “Fun to be around, but also very self destructive” (attributed to Miguel de Icaza, speaking on experiences with Alex Graveley).
“Based on his code,” our source added, “Alex is the kind of engineer that doesn’t understand easy to read doesn’t mean it’s simple…”
“I write easy to read code that is well organized and get underestimated for it…”
Tomboy was apparently so bad that someone simply rewrote the whole program in another language, C++, and did so very quickly; the technical improvements were vast.
So is Graveley even good at software development? He didn’t finish school.
He is insecure but (now) well connected, so he’ll try to use the current status to compensate for a weak background. “I suspect that Alex and Nat share darker secrets,” our source added. “I don’t even understand why Alex is working. [...] In regards to Github, the Github hate community has already been in touch on Twitter, mostly in regard to the ICE stuff…”
GitHub does worse than ICE, but the media seldom talks about that. The media suppressed that and more, whereas it actively helped ‘pacify’ the ICE protesters by shoveling up “Arctic Vault” puff pieces. We wrote about it back then. █
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07.19.21
Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Novell at 5:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Monopolies will run out of money trying to kill off (or privatise) the movement
Summary: Despite the ‘theft’ or the mass plunder of projects (e.g. GitHub takeover), even at the expense of billions of dollars (with ongoing losses, both financial and logistical), we keep coming back again and again like a hydra
“Microsoft is not a question of technology, since it is a cult backed by politics,” an associate of ours asserted this morning. “Decisions to deploy Microsoft are not technological decisions. See Munich as one of many large examples, but the same thing happens on a smaller scale, too. In Munich, Microsoft was able to override technological factors with politics and cult loyalty.”
“15 years ago we wrote a lot about how Microsoft was infiltrating everything, including Novell/SUSE.”Alas, and in spite of all these setbacks, we’ve been making a lot of measurable progress over the years.
15 years ago we wrote a lot about how Microsoft was infiltrating everything, including Novell/SUSE. Microsoft had been doing this for about 20 years, so it’s nothing new! Half a decade ago it planted a flag inside the Linux Foundation.
Over 10 years ago Apple joined the litigation club, in effect resorting to many lawsuits on several fronts. Oracle did the same.
In 2014 we began focusing on the EPO (up until that time we mostly focused on the US) and a few years ago we explored the state of Free software amid corporate coups, including the 2018 announcement from IBM (taking over the largest GNU/Linux company).
“Over 10 years ago Apple joined the litigation club, in effect resorting to many lawsuits on several fronts.”Last week Valve shook things up a bit and we’re cautiously optimistic about the future, seeing that some steps are made towards sharing, whereas reactionary steps are taken by dying companies that defraud their shareholders, violate the GPL, and try to own everything by unbridled aggression. It is a losing strategy. The community is a lot more agile and can endure these attacks, just like it endured SCO.
There are some exciting projects and initiatives in the making. Some of them we’ve partly or fully embraced. Some we advocate regularly, Gemini for instance…
The best weapon we have is patience and perseverance. We don’t have misled shareholders to appease every quarter; we don’t need to beg for government subsidies/bailouts, either. Keep morale high and keep coding. But still… know the enemy to understand the attacks. █
“Mind Control: To control mental output you have to control mental input. Take control of the channels by which developers receive information, then they can only think about the things you tell them. Thus, you control mindshare!”
–Microsoft, internal document [PDF]
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07.13.21
Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, Ubuntu at 11:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 691de53cdee744adb0447b3d0f8f83bc
Summary: GNU/Linux ought not be reduced to merely another brand; if the goal is software freedom, then we won’t get there by relying on bigger corporations that make alliances with Microsoft and strive to ‘monetise’ everything
The Free software community is in a tough spot at the moment. Even though GNU/Linux is used more than ever before, rarely does freedom follow this trend. There’s actually entrenchment of ‘Linux-powered’ (e.g. Android) surveillance and GNU/Linux-based (e.g. Facebook, Google disservices) espionage.
The video deals with this new (this morning’s) example of Red Hat pushing (promoting but with drug-dealing slant) Microsoft’s proprietary software (check the licence, as it’s legally and technically proprietary software). It’s malicious software, a potential keylogger, which is also monopolistic and a piece of spyware in the “telemetry” sense. The sad thing is, Red Hat under IBM’s leadership is becoming barely better than SUSE. Meanwhile, Canonical too bends and jumps all over itself to appease Microsoft.
We need to change the flag bearer of GNU/Linux to something else if we want to promote (or preserve) software freedom. █
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