### Issue 2181 - Tuesday 24th September, 2024

## In Today's Issue

- Automattic CEO kicks off drama in WordPress world
- OAIC looking into I-MED giving 800,000 x-rays to Harrison.ai
- VIC firefighters wanted payment for using their personal devices as MFA
- Three blog posts worth a read
- Cheap refurb iPad Mini, Nothing Phone, Fosi Audio mini amp, Boost Mobile, HP gaming PC, Lifepo4 battery

## The News

### Automattic CEO kicks off drama in WordPress world

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.

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### OAIC looking into I-MED giving 800,000 x-rays to Harrison.ai

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.

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### VIC firefighters wanted payment for using their personal devices as MFA

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.

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Three blog posts worth a read

- Oh fun, a new techbro manifesto, this time from Sam Altman about AI. It's a bit over 1,000 words that I can best summarise as smelling his own farts. I still don't think all the resources going into AI are worth what we get in return, even after this bong rip of a blog post.
- This is a far more insightful blog post explaining how CoreLogic, one of Australia's biggest data hoarders, manages to get away with selling personal contact info to real estate agents thanks to our pissweak privacy laws. Does the updated Privacy Act improve any of this??
- Andrew "bunnie" Huang writes about easy it is for anyone sufficiently motivated to turn batteries into weapons, then get those batteries into the vast electronics supply chain like we saw Israel do in Lebanon recently. Due to that ease it probably won't be the last time we see such horror.

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## Bargains

- Refurb Apple iPad Mini (2019) 64GB with 4G - $273.90 from SMG-AU's eBay store
- Nothing Phone (2a) - $468 from Phonex
- Fosi Audio BT20A PRO 300W amplifier with Bluetooth - $65.06 from Fosi Audio's eBay store
- Boost Mobile 365-day SIM with 170GB data, unlimited calls & SMS - $195 from Lucky Mobile
- HP OMEN 25L mini tower PC (i7-14700F, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, RTX4070 Super) - $1,759.20 from HP's eBay store
- VoltX 12V 100Ah LiFePO4 Battery with Bluetooth - $499 from Outbax

## Image Of The Day

Byte Magazine Volume 07 Number 08 - Logo (Internet Archive / Sketch the Cow)

## The End

📻 The Replacements - Bastards of Young - 2008 Remaster

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