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 rebuilt Windows Recall from scratch. A researcher broke it again in a few weeks. Microsoft's response: that's not a vulnerability. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. You remember Recall. Microsoft announced it in May 2024 as the flagship feature of their new Copilot+ AI PCs. It would take...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. There's a thing called the Global Privacy Control. GPC. It's a signal your browser can send that tells websites, in plain technical terms: do not sell or share my data. The California Attorney General endorses it. It's legally required to be honored under CCPA. It's...

LinkedIn used to be useful. Job listings you could actually apply to, professional connections that occasionally meant something, a search that surfaced real opportunities. That era is mostly gone — buried under inspirational fluff posts, obscure humble-brags from people who can't say what they actually did because it...

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,...

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,...

Microsoft just had what might be their biggest "we hear you" moment in years. On March 20th, Windows president Pavan Davuluri published a landmark blog post promising to fix Windows 11—for real this time. Faster File Explorer. Movable taskbar. Less Copilot everywhere. Fewer ads. The ability to pause updates for as long...

OpenAI has announced a $38 billion deal with Amazon Web Services, securing immediate access to AWS EC2 UltraServers, hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips, and the ability to scale to tens of millions of CPUs. This seven-year commitment comes on the heels of a $250 billion agreement with Microsoft Azure that also...