Over the last week, Matt Mullenweg, one of the WordPress co-founders and the CEO of Automattic, the main contributor to the WordPress and operator of WordPress.com (a commercially hosted version of WordPress), cracked the shits with WP Engine (a very popular WordPreess host) all of a sudden. He posted a rant to the WordPress blog about how WP Engine is selling an inferior version of WordPress due to a single feature being turned off. Matt also gave a talk at the WordCamp conference a few days ago shitting on WP Engine's private equity owners. Today WP Engine's lawyers sent Mullenweg a cease and desist letter, claiming he threatened to ruin WP Engine's reputation in the WordPress community if they did not pay Automattic "a very large sum of money". If the C&D is accurate, Automattic doesn't come out of this looking good IMHO.
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) told Crikey that it is "making preliminary inquiries with I-MED Radiology Network to ensure it is meeting its obligations under the Australian privacy principles in relation to reports it has provided private medical scans to a third-party entity for the purpose of training an artificial intelligence model", adding that "it may be difficult to establish that such a secondary use was within reasonable expectations". I-MED claims the data is anonymised, but the OAIC says "entities should be aware that de-identification is context dependent and may be difficult to achieve". It's good that the OAIC is looking into this, but I doubt I-MED or Harrison.ai are shaking in their boots about it.
Victorian firefighters took their employer to the Fair Work Commission because they wanted to be paid a penalty rate for using their personal devices for the multi-factor authentication required to log in to Fire Rescue Victoria's systems. Fair Work said "I am unable to find employees are required to use their personal mobile phones in the course of their employment. While employees may use their phones in this way, it is not required" - as there were other options available now that weren't initially after the FRV's major cyber security incident, like physical tokens that are supplied for free. Kudos on the firies for trying, distribution of tokens should have been the first thing FRV offered.
Byte Magazine Volume 07 Number 08 - Logo (Internet Archive / Sketch the Cow)
📻 The Replacements - Bastards of Young - 2008 Remaster
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