Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Last month I wrote about how GitHub spent eight years burning through the trust it borrowed when Microsoft bought it. The data training opt-out, the quiet absorption into CoreAI, the class system between enterprise customers and the individual developers who built the...

Microsoft's own terms say don't trust Copilot with anything important. They'd also like $30 a seat to put it in your spreadsheets. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Bonus drop — the ToS was too good to sit on. Microsoft's Terms of Use for Copilot recently attracted renewed attention from the internet,...

OpenAI just closed the biggest private funding round in Silicon Valley history. The agents are deleting people's inboxes. Your RAM costs three times what it did a year ago. These are not separate stories. Back in November, I wrote about OpenAI's bet to survive the bubble — $288 billion in infrastructure commitments to...

Back in Part 11, I wrote this: "If GitHub ever 'goes stupid' — account suspension, policy changes, acquisition drama — all my code is sitting on hardware I own, with backups being replicated by Syncthing. GitHub becomes the mirror, not the source of truth." I added a spoiler alert to that line recently. There's a...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech’s War on Users series. Earlier this past week, GitHub announced that starting April 24th, your Copilot interaction data will be used to train Microsoft’s AI models. By default. Unless you find the setting and turn it off. It’s worth pausing on that word — default. Because in 2018,...