So… money laundering and a tool for storing assets in non-liquid form, as usual with the high end art world.

except for flooding you with more ads between video recommendations

That’s literally it. The advertising and marketing teams within Google have politically maneuvered themselves into running the show, and the software/product engineering teams that want to maximize the quality of the system they work on (search, youtube) are overridden by insipid metrics that advertising needs more user interaction with ads.

They literally have been commanding that things be made more shitty to optimize their malformed metrics. You absolutely can get more people to click the sponsored search results… if you keep making them less distinct from the actual results. And advertising needs those good click through rates nooooow!

There are email chains documenting this sort of shit going on that have become part of the public record due to various court cases.

Wonderful article about it all here

If you’re talking about crowdstrike… They didn’t all blue screen. That was caused by third party software that caused the same sort of issue (kernel crash/panic) on Linux boxes not even 3 months earlier.

Man, he still isn’t over how Thiel snubbed him with Paypal and how his original “x.com” online bank idea failed, is he?

For a bit more context than “really old”: I had an Intel Core 2 Duo in 2009.

I’ve lost count of the amount of posts and comment threads on here about “all the horrible ads and spyware” where the solution was to flip literally a single switch in Settings, Personalization.

I’m sorry, what about their comment made you think they were asking for reccomendations?

Corporations are only publicly as right or left politically as helps their profits and PR, outside of some exceptions with CEOs that overestimate their importance (see Musk).

Disney repeatedly blames right wingers for the failure of their more diverse programming, yet removed/minimized John Boyega in the Chinese releases of the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy. They’re just one of the most obvious examples, not an exception or anything.

Create the metrics that show RTO reduces productivity. It’s the only thing they even pretend to care about.

So… most workplaces? Most companies have department wide goals and metrics that don’t change just because half of a department walks. Even in good workplaces, hiring to “right size” a team takes time, and most of the time the work still needs to be done, and there’s only so far management can stretch until it starts impacting external customers.

It sucks terribly. It’s not fair. Life isn’t.

Ugh. Righteous ideas about how things should work don’t change the fact that these network appliances doing it the wrong way still have years of time left before the bean counters consider them depreciated and let us replace them. Or that we’re locked into a multi-year contract with this business system that requires updating certs through a web UI.

Yes, there are almost always workarounds and ways to still automate it in the end, but then it’s a matter of effort vs stability vs time savings.

I love automating manual sysadmin actions, it’s my primary role on my team. Still, ignoring the complications that will unavoidably arise in trying automating this for every unique setup is incredibly foolish.

Any number of numerous appliances and hideously malformed business systems that don’t have ways to automate cert changes.

Not everyone gets to work in their simple little world of standards-following lab servers.

Scanning texts is OCR and has never needed modern LLMs integrated to achieve amazing results.

Automated tagging gets closer, but there is a metric shit ton that can be done in that regard using incredibly simple tools that don’t use an egregious amount of energy or hallucinate.

There is no way in hell that they aren’t already doing these things. The best use cases for LLMs for NARA are edge cases of things mostly covered by existing tech.

And you and I both know this is going to give Google exclusive access to National Archive data. New training data that isn’t tainted by potentially being LLM output is an insanely valuable commodity now that the hype is dying down and algorithmic advances are slowing.

Mullenweg, CEO of tumblr in addition to everything else, is harassing a trans woman for “reasons” (don’t know why, not diving deep enough to find out). Is publically connecting multiple of their disconnected sfw and nsfw identities by using internal tumblr data, and harrassing them across all of those identities apparently.

This buries the lede quite a bit.

Mullenweg effectively runs both the non-profit organization Wordpress.org and is the CEO of Automattic, a for profit conpany that sells support for Wordpress (and a direct competitor to WPEngine).

A large part of Wordpress functionality is kept behind an Automattic plugin that forces any Wordpress site using it to collect telemetry/data for Automattic.

The update servers for Wordpress plugins are hardcoded to use Automattic’s servers, and this is not configurable or changable unless you modify the Wordpress source code itself.

With Mullenweg’s position over both the non-profit org and Automattic, he has direct control over these choices. If he’s doing this for the sake of open source, why is he gating things that should be core functionality behind a data collection scheme? If there are problems with load on the update servers, why has no effort been made to allow the community to host update servers themselves that check update hashes against Automattic? That would significantly reduce the load on the for-profit resources (that you called APIs). At the very least, the setting needs to be something exposed to the user and configurable without modifying the source code. Otherwise he’s complaining about a problem he has created.

It’s also worth noting that at no point has Mullenweg tried to set up any sort of free vs paid tier of access to his update servers. This is a specifically targeted campaign. He has also not publically provided evidence of the increased load by WPEngine despite publically shooting off about a ton of other things that would be best saved for the courtroom.

Mullenweg has also publicly stated some very questionable things about how the resources of the non-profit and his for-profit are intermingled, which may have some legal repurcussions. But that’s more of a footnote.

Wordpress’s license makes explicit exception to copyright to allow anyone to use “WordPress” or “WP”.

The initial reasoning (and I believe the lawsuit) for Mullenweg’s attempt to claim 8% of all WPEngine profit, is explicitly based on the claim that they are breaching copyright due to their use of “WP”.

So while I agree that lack of upstream contribution and the amount of load on the upgrade servers are important and valid reasons to try and seek some contribution, that is not the angle he took to start this.

At one point during all of this, he switched off the WordPress plugin update servers for all users with no warning.

Now he’s done a direct hostile takeover of his competitor’s plugin. Of the two security issues, WPEngine disclosed both of them themselves and had already fixed one. There was no evidence that they were going to stop and not fix the other, and the issue is of questionable severity. The main change Automattic did to the plugin was to remove the code that checked for an upgraded/upsold license, effectively cracking the plugin to offer paid features for free.

With the long history of WordPress, I find it incredibly hard to believe that there are not a considerable number of other plugins containing upsells, so the implication that those somehow are in violation of terms is weak.

In my opinion, we have someone in the perfect position to make changes to ensure the upgrade server load (the only quantifiable reason for all this mess) never would have been able to be a problem in the first place. He has singled out the largest competitor to his own for-profit company and targeted them specifically instead of announcing blanket changes that would apply to anyone causing their level of load on his systems. He has taken incredibly poorly thought out and reactionary steps intended to spank his competitor that have had far larger negative effects for the rest of his users and customers. He has and continues to make very piblic statements that any sane lawyer would tell him to keep his fucking mouth shut about. Now he has once again singled out his largest competitor, taken one of their paid products, and modified it to be free rather than creating his own implementation with the problems fixed and no upsells.

Matt Mullenweg has not done anything explicitly evil, wrong, or super obviously illegal. But he’s doing a hell of a lot of very concerning and questionable things when he had every opportunity to prevent any of this from ever being a problem in the first place.

I have no love for WPEngine, but Matt isn’t a saint and is ridiculously mismanaging all of this.

Holy crap he is just continuing to build the case against him. His own for-profit automattic’s plugins have built in upsells and add additional data harvesting code that you can’t opt out of while you use them.

He just keeps treating the non-profit .org stuff and his Automattic for-profit as interchangable.

It’s time for the community to find a solution for distributed update servers that at most only rely on Mullenweg for hash checking to prevent tanpering. This is blatantly just a vendetta now.

The argument centering on server costs would be logical, but the actual legal battle going on, and Mullenweg’s stated justification behind asking for 8% of WPEngine profit, is claims of misuse of copyrighted names.

Meanwhile the WordPress license explicitly cedes copyright over the name WordPress and the initialism WP.

Unless you fork the WordPress source code, it is hard coded to use Mullenweg’s Automattic (his for-profit company) servers for plugin updates. This is not something you can tweak in a config somewhere.

So this isn’t charging for support services. The open source WordPress is hard coded to be reliant on the for-profit Automattic servers, because Mullenweg has been mixing his non-profit and for-profit business shit.

This has not been a problem ever before. But instead of handling this in any way that might make sense, Mullenweg turned off the update servers for everyone with no notice when WPEngine rightfully responded incredulously to his sudden demand for 8% of their profit based off some weird claims about copyright that are invalid due to Mullenweg’s own chosen license terms for WordPress.

He could set up free and paid tiers based off how much load on his servers people create. He could have the code adjusted to make the update server something that could be configured. He could engage the community to have a distributed volunteer network of update servers and reduce his server load by having his servers only provide proper update hashes to validate the updates were not tampered with.

But instead he’s having a very very public tantrum with absurd negative impact to the community of people reliant on this open source software.

So, some important context: you can disable Recall still. The only thing you can’t do is delete the files for it.

So it’s another potential attack surface for malware to target, something that Microsoft could enable in an update (so use Group Policy to disable it, they way they give companies with legal requirements to do so properly), and some space on your harddrive wasted.

This is NOT Microsoft requiring people to enable Recall for Explorer to work.

Still an egregious amount of bullshit, but not as much as the headline might lead you to believe.

How did you not know about the “Windows 7 mode” in 8 by the time of release? Wasn’t that sorted out in the preview builds?