Matt Mullenweg & Automattic sued by WP Engine

WP Engine sued Automattic and Matt Mullenweg earlier this week. Tedium has a good summary of what's happened so far and what's contained in the lawsuit. The core argument seems to be that Matt tried to buy WP Engine and when they couldn't agree on a figure, Matt went on a months long campaign of shitting on WP Engine in the background and lately, in public, to lower its value and pick it up cheap. What started off as a genuine beef around a company taking an open source project, making heaps of cash off it and giving very little back to the project, then about the misuse of trademarks, now seems to now be simply extortion and greed from yet another tech bro.

Canvas is OpenAI's latest attempt to make ChatGPT useful

OpenAI's got a new feature for ChatGPT called Canvas. From the blog post - "With canvas, ChatGPT can better understand the context of what you're trying to accomplish. You can highlight specific sections to indicate exactly what you want ChatGPT to focus on. Like a copy editor or code reviewer, it can give inline feedback and suggestions with the entire project in mind". Sounds cool. While we're on the topic of OpenAI, Ed Zitron has a great blog post dissecting OpenAI as a business. If you've read Ed's stuff before, you won't be surprised to learn that OpenAI is losing money at a rapid rate, has huge capital requirements and is struggling to find paying customers for its products.

Cyber security workers in Australia aren't getting the resources they need

The State of Cybersecurity 2024 report produced by ISACA, surveyed 1,868 cyber security professionals from 102 countries and found that "compared to cyber workers around the world, Australians reported lower budgets, higher hiring and retention challenges, and a more significant lack of prioritisation of cyber security risks". They also discovered that "nearly half of all respondents thought their company's cyber security budget was underfunded, and only a third expecting these budgets to increase in the coming 12 months". The result? "Of those who had recently left their job, 60% of Australians reported high stress levels as the main reason, compared with 46% globally".

Bop Spotter is the kind of mass surveillance I can get behind

Riley Walz went to the Mission district in San Francisco, chucked an "Android phone in a box on a pole, rigged it to be solar powered, and has set it to record audio and periodically sends it to Shazam's API to determine which songs people are playing in public". The results of that listening are posted to Bop Spotter - a cheeky play on the controversial ShotSpotter software that claims to be able to detect gunshots via a city-wide network of surveillance microphones. It's a fine line between creepy spying and a fun little project like we saw with those Meta & Pimeyes glasses, but Bop Spotter doesn't upset me at all and I'm thinking of places in Melbourne that would have enough musical traffic to do something similar.