Posts by Scotech

After Copilot trial, government staff rated Microsoft's AI less useful than expected

Re: So, it's a glorified, menial administrative organizer

I think you just discovered where the Treasury found their ROI here...

In all seriousness, though, I can well see that, in a workplace where every meeting must be minuted and every document, email and note taken on the back of a beer-mat must be retained for FOI purposes, an AI that specialises in these areas could be a game-changer for efficiency purposes. Of course, there's still training required... For instance, staff need to be trained that just because Copilot transcribed your last sixteen meetings and then generated accurate minutes from the transcripts, doesn't mean it'll do it fine for the seventeenth - so yes, Jeanette, you do still need to actually read the minutes before you sign them off!

Re: Treasury Security

I think (as the article alluded, but didn't explicitly state) that was mandarin for "It's a cloud service and we've got on-prem stuff that will stay on-prem, but we'd love to have it made accessible to Copilot for RAG please." Copilot agents can connect to a lot of data sources without needing much (if any) pro development, but to my knowledge those are mostly just cloud sources - if you have on-prem data, you're stuck. I know MS have on-prem gateways and other such tools specifically for this kind of low/no code integration, but I don't think any of the Copilot-branded tools can work with that yet. Or if they can, it's going to be extremely limited in scope. If you need to connect to on-prem data sources, especially ones with complex security requirements or exotic data formats, your best bet is still going to be going down the route of creating custom agents in Azure, which gets complicated and pricey. I think the idea here was to assess the usefulness of an off-the-shelf product, which obviously is going to be limited if it can't access the same context as the human user can.

US senator wants to slap prison term, $1M fine on anyone aiding Chinese AI with ... downloads?

Regards the UK...

Are we going to ban photoshop too, since it can be used to create CSAM? And don't forget the analogue hole - best ban cameras too, just to be on the safe side. And people can draw some pretty disgusting stuff too, so we'd better ban arts and crafts supplies too, right down to crayons!

We already have laws against the production of CSAM, real or simulated. The issue isn't that there are new tools capable of producing the stuff, it's that there is insufficient capacity to police the end results. As the article points out, these proposals are basically unenforceable anyway. Short of stationing a police officer beside every device in the country capable of running a text-to-image model to watch over the user's shoulder and cuff them the moment the model spits out anything naughty, there's no way to prevent someone from doing this in their own home. Unless they share the results, how would they ever know? And I know this is a heretical view in this age of pearl-clutching 'think of the children' arguments - but frankly, in those cases, I'd rather those resources be directed to tackling cases where actual, real-life kids are being harmed, than inconveniencing some weirdo generating completely fake images that result in no actual physical harm being done.

Let's get our priorities straight, and not let the new shiny distract us from what actually matters here, hmm? Unless this is all just a big song and dance to make it look like something is being done about a problem, without any real intent to actually DO anything about it... I mean, perish the thought that our parliamentarians might be more interested in appearances than outcomes!

Canvassing apps used by UK political parties riddled with privacy, security issues

Re: Is your Electoral roll data safe?

No idea about the rest of the exchange, but regarding the use of voter contact details from the unedited register, they are permitted to access this and use it for the purposes of official party-political campaign messaging, yes. It's either that, or we have an unequal system where whichever party is in government today effectively has all those details available by proxy, and all other parties are left to throw around as much money as they can gather, hoovering up whatever data they can from data-brokers, shady or otherwise. Personally, I'd rather our political parties were competing on as level a playing field as possible, and were given as few incentives as possible to cosy up with people who profit from selling my data. Getting the odd bit of junk mail that goes straight into the shredder on arrival is a small price to pay in my opinion, though I do make the effort to reach out whenever possible and advise them that it'd be better for their campaign budget and for the planet if they crossed me off their mailing list. Funnily enough, most parties have been fairly amenable to that - with the noticeable exception of the Scottish Greens...

So basically, it sounds like only Share2Win had any actual security issues found. The fact that Firebase is often misconfigured doesn't automatically mean that the MiniVan app is insecure. As for the Labour apps, it's been pretty well publicised that they use Experian Mosaic to map postcodes to socioeconomic groupings as a means to target their campaign messaging, so it's no surprise their apps make calls to Experian URLs. So long as no personal information is changing hands, it's not even subject to GDPR.

Static analysis... Sounds to me like someone went on a fishing expedition, hoping to make a big headline here, and instead found basically nothing beyond the one app that was already known to be problematic. There's definitely a debate to be had around how these databases are built, managed and regulated in order to keep them secure and compliant, but I don't think this study added anything of value to it beyond pointing out that only expert regulatory scrutiny of the whole end-to-end ecosystem these apps operate in will be sufficient to assess their performance in those areas. It's worth remembering that these party databases are already subject to additional oversight when compared to business and public-sector, as parties must comply with the conditions laid out by the Electoral Commission in order to work with data from the Unedited Register. If they screw up, they risk not only some very embarrassing headlines, but stiff financial penalties too, and in the worst cases, they could put election results in jeopardy or even end up being barred from standing candidates, so they're even more incentivised to handle things responsibly than most other orgs out there.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

I've said this before elsewhere, but I've personally been recommending Zorin as a replacement for Win 10 to my non-techy friends and relatives, because it has a similar learning curve to Mint for ex-Windows users, excellent support, and they've made Windows compatibility an absolute mission, to the point where most Windows apps can get up and running on a vanilla install just by launching the .exe file, just like on Windows. I've also been recommending the StarLabs range of Linux-first devices since getting a StarBook myself a few years ago - they're UK-based business with excellent tech-support. Lastly... While I get the point about Linux not falling victim to Windows viruses, they still run the risk of being asymptomatic carriers. I'd always recommend running clamAV and running regular scheduled scans, if only because it boosts the 'herd immunity', to somewhat torture the analogy.

The key to all of this has always been minimising the faff, making things at least appear consistent, and boosting the support for people who use Windows and expect every computer to work that way. Hell... I know what I'm doing in a terminal and how to use a package manager, write shell scripts, etc. and even I prefer a nice GUI to make things quick, easy and convenient from time to time. There's times where power and precision are required, and times where I just want to click a few icons and get on with other, more important stuff! For most people, the latter is all they care about in a PC.

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Forget ChatGPT - we're all going to have AI PC's in the future, remember? So kids will be able to spin up a local model - trained on the darkest corners of the pre-censorship Interne and download from a country with looser laws around this stuff via VPN - and nobody will be any the wiser. Good luck legislating against that!

The only way to regulate what kids see and do on their devices is for parents to do their jobs and pay attention. Tech isn't a nanny, and parents need to stop outsourcing their responsibilities to it instead of keeping an eye on their own children.

Re: I hope those VPN services have beefed up their capacity.

Indeed. If one were feeling especially cynical, you might suspect that the whole reason much of the responsibility for enforcement was pushed to Ofcom, an arms-length quango, was precisely so that the incoming Labour administration wouldn't be able to let it wither on the vine while getting on with stuff that actually protects kids, like implementing the recommendations from the child sex abuse scandal. I'm not saying that Labour don't do performative politics, but the stunt the Tories pulled on that Bill last week was particularly low, even by their recent standards. To then have the temerity to say that they're the real champions of children's safety because of crap like this beggars belief.

Re: Age verification

Most network operators block adult sites by default. However, removing that block is usually trivial for the account holder, as operators just assume all account holders are adults, since it says in their ToS that they must be. Simple to close that loophole - don't allow the block to be lifted on PAYG accounts that don't have a credit card associated, or some other form of strong age-verification.

It's not just Big Tech: The UK's Online Safety Act applies across the board

Connect to a VPN, or even directly to a website, by its raw IP address then, and bypass the whole DNS palaver. Or use DoH. Or a private proxy server running on a domain you control. All stuff I could do at 13 (except for DoH, which mercifully hadn't been invented then, and never should have been, IMO) and presumably many more teens could today.

There's no technical solution here that works for all cases, or that can't be circumvented somehow. The solution isn't to try to legislate or solutionise the problem away, but to apply the existing laws properly, fund police forces to run proper cyber-crime divisions, and tell parents to stop being lazy and pay more attention to what their kids are doing on the computer.

On that last note - I was 15 before I got a private computer in my own room. Prior to that, all my screen time was monitored because the family PC was in the living room, with the screen in full sight from there and the kitchen at all times. And I had a mobile, but I didn't get a smartphone until I was away on my own - prior to that, all I got was a dumb Sony Ericsson, and it did me just fine. If parents want to control their kids' access to the web, they don't need fancy technological solutions, they just need to pay attention and put in a little effort!

Is it really the plan to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal? It's been a weird week

Re: Rocks

You've just discovered why Musk switched to Trump's camp... He's hoping we'll all get so sick of him we'll all just pay him to take himself and the rest of his crowd off to Mars, and he'll get to live his dream of setting himself up as king of the Martians. Trump might well authorise the bill if its the quickest way to stop Musk hogging the limelight...

Microsoft tests 45% M365 price hikes in Asia-Pacific to see how much you enjoy AI

If they pull this in the UK, then it's a hard nope from me. Copilot has the occasional bout of usefulness, but it's a novelty that's definitely not worth £25 per annum for personal use. Same on the business front - Office 365 is expensive enough for what you actually get already, without adding in the cost of an additional Copilot license. I can find better places to spend that money. I've yet to see a killer app for any Copilot - most of the time, I just have to keep batting it out of the way. Like Clippy.

Zuck takes a page from Musk: Meta dumps fact-checkers, loosens speech restrictions

Re: We need more Bluesky thinking

Bluesky genuinely feels like it's been created specifically to address the issues that emerge from the centralisation of platform policies and control on earlier platforms...and that's because it basically was. Dorsey deserves a lot of credit for seeing the flaws in Twitter and its peers, what they might lead to, and doing something about it. Bluesky's emergence has been nothing if not timely!

How the OS/2 flop went on to shape modern software

Re: Developers! Developers! Developers!

The reason Linux businesses have survived is because it wasn't pushed as an alternative to run Windows apps via WINE. Native 'Free' software is what has driven Linux. People simply aren't running Windows apps there. But who knows, maybe 2025 is the year of the Linux Desktop.

That was probably true until the Steam Deck and other equivalent devices showed up. Remains to be seen if they'll trigger a long-term shift in the market (I doubt it) but the boost in compatibility that Valve's investment in Proton has made is already lowering the barriers to entry considerably in other areas too. What's really required for the shift, though, isn't just better compatibility, but more effort to reduce the friction Linux often still has for new users. This was Valve's biggest triumph, in my opinion - making the Deck's Linux underpinnings totally opaque to end-users - but they're far from the only ones working to make Linux more accessible to consumers.

What's been interesting to me of late is the way Microsoft's strategy with Windows 11 has been prompting the various non-techies in my life who are switched on enough to know about Win 10's arbitrary EoL deadline to ask about alternatives for perfectly serviceable kit that can't run Win 11, as an alternative to buying an overpriced new 'AI PC', and there's a few Linux distros out there that focus heavily on compatibility. I've personally been recommending Zorin OS to a few folks, as its got some of the best out of the box compatibility in terms of both the technical side and its 'look and feel', and the support from the company and community is excellent too. This reduction of the learning cliff for migrating to Linux is essential to making it succeed.

Microsoft will retain the business market for the foreseeable future, but if Linux can keep on maturing away from its elitist past and businesses like Valve and Zorin can keep on making it more accessible to people who don't care what their computer runs, so long as its familiar, easy, and just works - it could easily keep chipping away at Microsoft's consumer market with every little misstep they make.

We told Post Office about system problems at the highest level, Fujitsu tells Horizon Inquiry

Re: Time to produce the audit trail

That he did - I never said that they fulfilled their obligations, I was only pointing out how limited those obligations were. His failure to indicate that the system had known issues that could affect the accuracy of the evidence sourced from it was deeply dishonest, if not outright perjury. But the law never required him to actually determine if the outputs of the system actually were accurate, only that the system had been designed to output accurate data. Its the equivalent of asking an accountant to verify that accounting standards were followed, versus asking them to verify that to the best of their knowledge, a set of accounts are true and accurate. Those are completely different questions, and it doesn't follow that just because the answer to one is true, that the other one must also be true.

Re: Time to produce the audit trail

They definitely did know, because their staff were called as expert witnesses to testify to the workings of the system in a number of prosecutions. Note that it was just the workings though - the law only required them to demonstrate that the computer system was capable of providing the digital evidence submitted to the court, not to attest to the accuracy of that evidence. There was a presumption in favour of digital evidence that means the burden of proof was effectively reversed in these cases, and it's up to the accused party to prove the evidence is incorrect, rather than the other way around. To my knowledge, I think that might even still be the case in English criminal law.

Judge hands WP Engine a win in legal fight with Automattic

WPEngine 'likely to prevail'...

Just as Matt's lawyers should have been telling him all along. Meaning he's either willfully ignorant, or needs better lawyers.

Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports written by AI

But we've got AI to do our thinking for us now, right? That's the whole point of all these copilots, after all! Isn't it?

Wait... What's that about Microsoft's share price? Oh, I'm sure that's just because everyone's finding Co-Clippy so very useful! It's not like Microsoft would ever spend a fortune jumping on the latest bandwagon just to play the markets... I mean, just look at how popular HoloLens is!

Re: the usual state sponsored suspects

The amusing thing here is that most of the usual state-actor suspects when it comes to little acts of cyber-vandalism are probably the least likely to be involved in this kind of thing. Russia? China? Iran? North Korea? All huge fans of open-source. Its not in their interests to sabotage it, not when it provides their cheapest and easiest means of achieving parity with their rivals. As for the idea that western governments could be behind it, surely their efforts would be better spent infiltrating the project, than on stupid stuff like this? It makes no sense.

No, this smacks more of either people chasing bug bounties for minimal effort, or trying to generate 'activity' to pad out a CV for a tech job, but again, with minimum effort. Or they're just trolling, which is motive enough, for some people.

WhatsApp finally fixes View Once flaw that allowed theft of supposedly vanishing pics

It's a Meta service...

Who on earth is seriously expecting a corporation who's whole business model is founded on over-sharing to give much of a crap about privacy? The way I see it, this is a downgrade in security, as it now means additional metadata is being hoovered up by Meta. All so... What? The user gets better protection against their recipient keeping a copy of something sent to them? Here's a bright idea... If you don't want someone to be able to keep a copy, maybe think twice about sending it to them in the first place? Or have Meta found a way to prevent me pointing a camera at my device's screen and making a copy the old-fashioned way?

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

Re: Warren's big mistake

BYOD is a terrible idea from both ends, full stop. It's in the employer's interests to ensure a strict separation of work from personal, it makes things far easier to administer, monitor and secure. It means a responsible employer can be 100% confident that their employees have everything required to do their job, without running the risk of the employee making perfectly legitimate claims for expenses if they're expected to use personal funds for work purposes without it being explicitly stated in their employment contract.

And from the employee's perspective, it keeps your employer's IT department out of your device, which in the worst cases, could require a factory reset to get their tendrils out if they're uncooperative. Not to mention the benefits of being able to switch off and put away your work phone and laptop when outside of office hours or on leave.

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

It's probably just a matter of time before they put a Copilot into Copilot.

They're already directing support tickets through Copilot, making experienced professionals who've already diagnosed an issue in their products go through interminable hoops before even reaching the human gatekeepers to their product teams. So the next big thing is going to be replacing all the help links sending you to a generic product help page in Microsoft Learn with Copilots that very authoritatively tell you to click buttons that don't exist, or serve up help for previous versions of products because that's the last time the official documentation got updated.

Which leads us to the inevitable conclusion... A Copilot that helps* you in using Copilot. What a time to be alive...

*hinders

Abstract, theoretical computing qualifications are turning teens off

Re: It’s not difficult

No idea what it's like now, but I can't see that having changed a bit. Especially when schools are often buying teaching materials alongside the qualifications they're offering - all of them do this but AQA in particular are egregious for selling bundled textbooks, course materials and sample lesson plans - that I'm sure a time-pressed teacher would never just use verbatim in a class whose average ability is off-base. Teachers who have record class sizes, no time during work hours to plan lessons, and who've been beaten down and demoralised by the stress of the job and the relative lack of support available, can't be expected to tailor every lesson to reach every student in every class they teach.

Ironically, this is a place where greater use of technology could actually be useful. I remember seeing an excellent interview a few years back looking at how Khan Academy tried to do just this - by digitising the learning materials, and adopting continuous assessment, it's possible to track course progress more closely and accurately, and flex the pace and complexity of learning to fit student aptitude. This should (in theory at least, I'm not aware of any hard numbers on this) result in better learning outcomes, reduce student boredom and frustration, and help to ensure grades are more closely aligned to measured ability, rather than being artificially limited by 'banding' strategies like foundation / intermediate / higher exam papers.

Re: WYF!

Yes, schools should definitely have switched to teaching cryptocurrency. NFTs and blockchains, which have turned out to be so important.

If students don't study it, how are they supposed to understand why they're not?

Re: WYF!

Snap! I did a L2 BTEC Certificate in Digital Applications course in Y10 & 11, and my school's head of IT also sneakily signed me up to do the GCSE alongside it, as my school offered both options. That BTEC was still the more useful of my two courses - although we used Dreamweaver for our Web design unit, I still got exposed to HTML, CSS, and crucially, JavaScript. Also, while yes, we were using MS Access for the unit on databases, the fundamentals were all there - keys, relationships, normalisation, queries, etc. And as a learning tool, access wasn't that bad, certainly better than either of Microsoft's modern 'alternatives' they're pushing (Lists and Dataverse for Teams). The GCSE, on the other hand, opened with an essay comparing the features available in Google versus Windows Live Search, then moved on to an essay about how to use a spreadsheet to handle personal finances. I dropped it halfway through that exercise. I later tried to take an A-level course in IT too, and dropped that after it immediately started heading the same direction. And our IT teachers were at least dedicated members of the IT department... shame they just weren't dedicated teachers too, besides a few good ones who left the faculty between my Y11 & 12.

Re: Another "R" - suggestions @Scotech

I completely understand the concern about people not understanding the fundamentals or underpinnings before moving on to abstractions. I came into an IT career the long way round - after becoming disillusioned in school due to the terrible way it was taught at the time, I went towards engineering, then fell out of love with that too, and took up a career in the voluntary sector, where my skills saw me slowly drifting back towards IT again, specifically Power Platform, MS's low-code stuff. I regularly encounter people who struggle to understand that these tools aren't built on thin air, there are logical underpinnings that you have to dig into and engage with in order to solve real problems, and if you don't understand them, you'll never understand the capabilities and limitations of the tools you're using.

One thing I've been glad to see in my own area of specialism is that Microsoft are finally putting in the work to bridge the gap between the people they call 'Makers' (people who know how to push buttons in the low-code interface to make stuff happen, without any real understanding of how it works) and their 'Developers' (people who work in code and infrastructure and don't, or barely, touch low-code tools at all). This is a vital niche I've been glad to see them working to fill, but it's just one product area in one company, and I think we need to see more effort being put in across the board by companies to peel back the veneer and let people see underneath to what their products are actually made of if they really want quality candidates coming into their recruitment pipelines.

Regarding the pace of changes, that's where I feel the role for coursework comes in. Part and parcel of IT as a field is keeping up with the constant changes coming at breakneck pace. Students should be expected to do an independent research assignment where they choose an emerging technology and discuss it in detail, or better yet, do a comparative analysis assignment where they discuss emerging technologies at the start of a course, then produce another analysis at the end in the context of the original, discussing how those technologies have evolved. In most fields, that wouldn't work, but in IT, 18 months is a long time - sufficient for something of note to have changed.

Re: taught to get the best out of tools like ChatGPT so they can succeed in life and modern careers

To be fair, I think BCS have some of the best materials out there for teaching the fundamentals of AI, with a strong focus on the importance of understanding how it works under the hood, how to determine if its an effective approach to solving a particular problem (and by extension, what kinds of problems it's a bad or unnecessary solution for) and the ethical considerations involved. They approach the subject with nuance, and don't shy away from the pitfalls. They also don't make the mistake of conflating AI and LLMs, and recognise that the field is broader than just a limited set of GPT models. I recommend checking them out: https://www.bcs.org/qualifications-and-certifications/certifications-for-professionals/artificial-intelligence-ai-certifications/

Re: Another "R" - suggestions

I'd actually expect it to be incorporated to a degree into all of those other subjects:

Reading - this is an obvious candidate, as one of the best things about computers is their ability to help us organise, search, parse and reference vast amounts of information. When I was in school, we were taught to do things like scan a text for key terms to find relevant information quickly, use the table of contents, index, glossary and references, etc. All of these tasks can be done more quickly and efficiently with the aid of computers, and it could even be extended to include one of the very few things LLMs are actually good for - extracting and summarising relevant portions of text from a larger body - plus, you then get to teach the importance of critical reading and checking your sources...

Writing - Typing skills and word processors, 'nuff said. Who writes anything by hand anymore? I regularly go for weeks at a time between hand-writing things, and I appreciate I might be an extreme case, and that its still a vital skill to teach, but even when I was in school, the majority of writing was done on a PC, and that was two decades ago. And then there's the plethora of digital writing aids out there, including (whisper it, so we don't upset the cranks like me!) AI. Writing, these days, is an IT skill.

Arithmetic - Do I even need to argue this one? We already had calculator exams well before I was in school, and perhaps there's space here for a segment looking specifically at the use of more advanced stuff like python scripting to solve maths problems? Would seem a good avenue to expose kids to coding, at least.

The key thing here is that, digital skills aren't a thing. We need to teach kids to approach things and think about everyday tasks and problems in a digital-first context, not keep treating them as a separate class of skills on top of classical approaches to things

Re: WYF!

Ridiculous that this is still an issue. When I was in school 20 years ago, we had the opposite problem - tons of qualifications that amounted to little more than a certificate of competence in using MS Office and Google, but very little of substance for those wanting to pursue a proper career in IT. Now it seems the pendulum has swung back in the opposite direction. How hard is it to grasp that both approaches have their place? We need qualifications that are focused on practical applications of digital technology, with separate skills pathways that can support people to become end-users, administrators or developers.

And our education system needs to stop treating studying emerging technologies as optional! Today's novelties quickly become tomorrow's essential tools in tech, the field moves at a pace few other school subjects can match, save perhaps for 'modern studies'. I get that it can be hard to figure out which things are fads, and which will catch on, but it's surely possible to allow some space in the curriculum to let teachers lead a study on this stuff... Or is lab-based coursework no longer a thing?

Now Online Safety Act is law, UK has 'priorities' – but still won't explain 'spy clause'

Re: His Majesty's Stationary Office

Don't go there... I went to a high school that installed CCTV in all the bathrooms one summer due to vandalism, then disconnected them all before the start of term after someone finally pointed out that it might be a Very Bad Idea to record schoolkids in the bathroom, even if they couldn't see into the stalls. Even with the cut wire dangling limply from them, they were creepy.

Re: About Enforcement And Verification And Safety....

The kind of organisations that think on that level when it comes to breaking cryptography aren't the ones this law is aiming to help. It's less for MI5&6's benefit than it is for the likes of Essex constabulary, or other forces whose forensic data specialists do the job on Sundays as a nice break from their 9-5 job installing McAfee on little old ladies' PCs. The plod in this country seem to only have about five actual experts who they share around the various forces, and the rest are folks who took a course on how to use Excel, which immediately makes them head and shoulders more qualified than everyone else in their forensics team. Under those circumstances, I'm not all that surprised that these forces are begging for laws like this, however unrealistic its ambitions are. They're in for a rude awakening though, when they realise that it'll have bugger-all impact on their backlogs.

Re: But...HOW?

If they had a sufficient method to reliably crack E2E encryption (classified or not) there'd be no need for this law, because the pre-existing setup for 'lawful intercept' via ISPs and network operators would be all they need to obtain the data in-transit. The specific issue this law is attempting (and utterly failing) to address is that proper E2E services can't be intercepted, even by the platform operator, especially if the comms are P2P and don't run through any form of centralised server. The only way this can possibly be addressed is to in some way compromise the encryption, either by breaking the E2E by effectively forcing providers to route all comms through their own servers where they can selectively MITM any and all of the messages, or else by breaking the encryption itself by adding in some kind of backdoor, which would likely be spotted by some bad actor and used to compromise all messages sent on that service. There is no secret 'decrypt this instantly' button or technology that works on properly encrypted data - this law's existence is proof of that.

Trump appoints Musk associate Brendan Carr as FCC chair

Re: "At the begining of his first term he promised to 'drain the swamp'"

The first openly elected in a democracy on an open platform of fascism, at any rate. But I'm not sure if Trump is even conscious that Reagan ran on that slogan, nevermind someone who died before he was born. After all, so far as he seems to care, anything that happens outside his sphere of influence isn't all that important to him.

WP Engine revs Automattic lawsuit with antitrust claim

Re: Did you sign a contract?

Precisely this. Their marketing may not be enforceable, but rights under the GPLv2 license are. WP Engine are well within their rights to commercialise the hosting of the software under the terms of that license, and calling it by its official name is clearly fair use, especially given that Automattic have never (to my knowledge, happy to be corrected on this point!) enforced their 'exclusive commercial rights' to the WordPress brand, despite having been very aware of WP Engine's existence pretty much since its inception. I disagree strongly with the idea that WP Engine are somehow automatically in the wrong, just because they disproportionately profit from the work others do on the project while putting proportionately less in themselves. That's just sensible business, and if Automattic were to become insolvent as a result of it, the end result would simply be that companies like WPE would just be forced to step up or fall behind to other competitors. FOSS doesn't get a free pass from market forces just by virtue of there being some other motive beyond profit. Just like any other part of the voluntary sector, it has to compete, and if it can't, it folds. If Matt doesn't like that, he can change the license terms accordingly.

Ultimately, the fix here is for government to wake up to the fact that FOSS is a societal necessity like many other services provided by the third sector, and to start funding it on similar terms, out of general taxation. Hell, they should probably be adopting some projects outright, on the basis that they're effectively infrastructure vital to national security interests (log4j, anyone?) but that would require legislators to have a clue what they're doing when it comes to tech, so... Yeah, see the icon.

But then he'd be no better than the likes of HashiCorp and RedHat!

If there's one thing Matt loves, it's pretending he's a White Knight. Admitting this is all just about money would feel too grubby for him to contemplate, hence this fudge.

Yeah, it's not the first time they've said that in a response, and it had me scratching my head too. I don't understand on what possible interpretation of the facts they can base that assertion. All I can conclude is that Automattic has joined the post-truth brigade, rendering any statement of theirs immediately dismissable. They can go deny reality with the other fruitcakes and the cheeto's mob, I've lost interest in anything they have to say on the matter at this point. WPE have them bang to rights, and Matt's expensive lawyers are milking him for all they can - feeding his delusions, when the most he can hope to achieve here is damage limitation.

WordPress forces user conf organizers to share social media credentials, arousing suspicions

Re: Maybe I didn't read it right

One of the reasons I ditched it in the end. The amount of time I was having to dedicate to keeping it up to date and secured wasn't proportionate to the utility of it. The killer was when I realised I didn't need a back-end dashboard, server-side rendering, the ability to log in, edit online or any of the other stuff PHP is used for, thanks to the maturity of modern frameworks like Gatsby and Astro.

Now I use front-end frameworks or fully hand-code my own sites, and it's way faster for me, as well as being only as hackable as my hosting provider. I'd hope they're way more on top of security than me, but it's hard to be sure with most providers - would be nice if providers were required to be more transparent around security, but I digress.

The point is, for commercial or tech-savvy users, there's really no reason to still be using WordPress today, and I'd argue there's solutions out there that are just as good or better for novices too. The disadvantages of sticking with WordPress already outweighed the advantages in my book, and that was before all this drama.

This is a man who puts his blog on the homepage of the dashboard of his product (and gets pissy if anyone ever removes it) and who embedded his own name into the name of his company. He's been an egotistical narcissist all along, but usually he's confined that to relatively harmless spats. This time, I guess he's just off his meds or something?

Re: The Community Team...

They can just call it the 'WordPress Users Sydney' conference, or something similar. Automattic can scream 'til they're blue in the face about their commercial rights to the trademark, but this would be a fairly clear-cut case of fair use, since there's no other way of referring to the primary subject-matter of the conference. So long as the name doesn't use the official 'WordCamp' brand, and so long as it doesn't use the WordPress logo or branding in any way that might imply it's directly affiliated with Automattic or the WordPress Foundation, it's fair game. Taking a stand is the only way Matt's going to be reined in here. Unfortunately I don't think most volunteer organisers would have the stomach for a fight like that, and I don't blame them.

Is Microsoft's AI Copilot? CoPilot? Co-pilot? MVP creates site to help get it right

Re: Exactly what we need

Wow. I couldn't figure out a word of that. Do you work for Microsoft's product documentation team?

Think of the naming trends of Microsoft products as the flags of great houses in Game of Thrones...

...and suddenly it all makes sense. Names rise and fall as the 'house' members fortunes change within the sprawling behemoth of Microsoft. Teams are openly pit against each other in winner-takes-all contests where the winning team get to be flavour of the month, while the losing department gets a shrunken portfolio and so faces the brunt of the latest round of redundancies.

The House of Power was on the ascendent for most of the past decade, but the House of Copilot (a cadet branch of the House of Cortana which itself traces its heritage back to the now extinct house of Office via King Clippy) has recently blindsided everyone with its secret invasion fleet that seized control of the entire Kingdom of 365, and is now working to annex Azuria too. Many great and minor houses in both kingdoms have been forced to pledge fealty and accept Copilot agents within their ranks. Will Xboxia survive unscathed? Will Copilot's tyranny be ended? Will whatever comes next be worse? Find out next season...

In all seriousness, this kind of naming and renaming tomfoolery is very much the fault of a handful of people using it to secure their MBAs then move on up the ranks. Any sensible business would put a single team in charge of naming and organising their product catalog and leave it at that, but Microsoft has never figured out how to do that - and likely never will.

WordPress bans WP Engine from sponsoring or participating in user groups

I've said it before, but if Matt doesn't back down fast, this could easily kill his business, and/or split the community, with the bulk joining the breakaway group. Or the bulk of those who remain at that point, given they're already haemorrhaging commercial customers afraid of Matt's next decree on commercial licensing terms.

To anyone who is shopping for a new commercial website solution that's powerful but user-friendly, I'd recommend looking into a headless CMS like Strapi or Cockpit, paired with a static site generator or server-side generator like Gatsby or Next.js. Decoupling the front and back ends is a useful trick for making your site easier to overhaul when necessary, and getting away from the awful mess that is WordPress themes will greatly expand your Web design options and the pool of talent available to build and implement them, given the relative popularity of Javascript/Typescript compared to PHP.

Someone needs to remind Matt that when you scorch the earth, everyone starves, not just your enemies.

For a trademark to be enforceable, it must be actively defended. The "WordPress" trademark has been minimally defended since its inception, and the WP trademark is basically non-existent. Sure, WordPress has a logomark featuring those letters, but my understanding is that those two concepts aren't cognate in IP law - the logomark doesn't equate to the letters it bears any more than the McDonald's 'golden arches' logomark grants them exclusive rights to the letter "M" in the fast food industry. The law here is clear - unless WordPress a) actively used the 'WP' letters as an integral part of its branding, b) used them as such prior to any other claims being made over their use in a trade context, and c) actively defended their exclusive rights to use said trademark against infringement by other parties; there simply isn't a legal trademark to be defended. Again, the same could probably be argued regarding the rest of the WordPress brand as a whole, given how freely it's been bandied around for the past decade and a half, with little to no enforcement of any rights (commercial or otherwise) until very recently. Matt is an idiot for trying this tactic, as it's very likely to blow up in his face. Add to that the mess of potential tortious interference claims he's racking up, all with measurable monetary damages, and he's created a legal minefield for himself, his business, and the WordPress foundation he effectively owns.

So no, it's nothing like the situation with Microsoft and its trademarks, all of which have been vigorously defended from the very beginning. Oh, and they also do allow others to brand themselves using the letters 'MS', which they don't consider to be a trademark, and don't use officially for that reason. See 'MSCRM-ADDONS' for a real-life example.

159 Automattic staff take severance offer and walk out over WP Engine feud

Mullenweg has form on this. He has regular tantrums regarding other companies making a profit off his products - take his feud with James Farmer's biz 'WPMU Dev' a few years back. This is just the first case of one of them actually fighting back with lawyers, and it's quickly escalated out of control.

Re: People have many conflicting loyalties in life.

+1 for explaining the many legal issues Matt's facing so clearly and succinctly. These are the legal merits I was referring to in my comment above, but my buzzy head at 1am couldn't pin down into words. One of Matt's lawyers needs to gag him, fast. Or one of his PR people. But then, every time he opens his mouth, they get a nice fat pay bump, so what incentive do they really have to try and stop him?

Anyway, have a beer!

Re: Well...

According to the article, ~80% of the people who took the deal were from the WordPress/ecosystem division, it doesn't necessarily translate that 80% of the staff in that division left. I believe its a significant chunk of the staff, but nowhere near four-fifths of them.

Scorched earth indeed...

Smart people. There'll be more to come, of course, as the legal battle plays out. I'm struggling to see how Matt/Automattic have a leg to stand on here. Sure, they'll get some of the complaints thrown out, but others have some very clear merits. At best, they'll be forced to pay some more minor damages, and probably lose what little control they had over the 'WP' initials. At worst, they're facing serious financial penalties for WP Engine's lost income, a severe weakening of trademark protections for the WordPress brand across the board, and forced breakup of the weird monopoly Matt's constructed that gives him control over both wordpress.com (Automattic) and wordpress.org (WordPress foundation).

Matt's problem here is that it doesn't matter if he's morally right or wrong, or whether community opinion is on his side (both of which are questionable right now). What matters is the law, and it's difficult to see how WordPress can win this on the legal merits, regardless of any other arguments. Whether you're a fan of WP Engine or not, they're almost certainly legally in the right here, and if Matt objected to them making a profit off his work product, he should've just joined the same club so many FOSS software makers have been flocking to of late and made WordPress a 'source-available' proprietary product instead. Of course, WP Engine would likely just fork it, but hey, at least then they might put more dev time in, right? I mean, that was the whole point of this thing, wasn't it? To encourage them to support the community a little more? It's not like Matt saw Silver Lake's oodles of cash and started salivating at the thought of getting a nice cut of it for himself, right?

Icon for the likely end result of all this on the WordPress ecosystem and community. Well played, Matt.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 called out for 'worker surveillance'

Just because it CAN be used this way...

...doesn't mean it SHOULD. As plenty of others here have pointed out, it's not like other technologies haven’t been abused for managerial overreach in the past too. Microsoft themselves clearly state that these tools shouldn't be used in the way described, and as someone who works in this field, both as a user and a supplier of this product, I can say with confidence that they have valid applications that are useful without being used intrusively. Bad management is bad management - and bad managers have always found ways to intimidate, coerce and micromanage their employees. The fact that this technology is giving them new ways to do that isn't the problem. The problem is the persistence of these bad management styles and attitudes in the workplace, and the 'us vs them' attitude of management towards their staff in many businesses. Tech doesn't shape a company's culture and practices, it only reflects what's there anyway. If you're working for a company that doesn't respect your autonomy, you need a better job - I know that's not often easy, but changing the technology isn't going to fix the rot in a business that thinks that sort of thing is OK.

Majority of Americans now use ad blockers

Re: I wouldn't mind reasonable ads

I'd assume by 'relevant' here, they meant relevant to the content and the context in which it's being viewed, not to them personally. Funnily enough, I can remember a time when most interest-based advertising was targeted this way, and when publishers spent a lot of time and energy in analysing and understanding their audiences in order to attract the right kinds of advertisers to their platform. All the modern Stasi form of interest-based advertising has done is centralise all the power and profit in the hands of the big online ad-brokers, at the expense of publishers, advertisers and consumers. Its unsustainable, and there's already signs that regulators are waking up to all this at long last. But until the Internet ad-slingers' lobbying and litigation funds run dry, there's ad-blockers to save us from the worst excesses of it all.

Your brother will be faster?

I only have a sister, does this sibling speed enhancement from my ad-blocking apply to her too?