Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Yesterday I wrote about the internal Microsoft document that labeled Phase 1 of their Scout AI rollout "Make people addicted." The document was written by Omar Shahine — Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Scout — whose name is on the document, on Microsoft's own...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Microsoft just announced Scout at Build 2026 — their new "always-on personal agent" built on OpenClaw and baked into Microsoft 365. Another AI assistant, another keynote. Normally I'd file it and move on, but then 404 Media got hold of the internal documents. The...

So Jensen Huang walked on stage at Computex 2026 in Taipei today — same leather jacket, same big energy — and announced something nobody quite saw coming from the guy who's been busy cornering the AI datacenter market: Nvidia's first ARM-based PC chip. The RTX Spark superchip — also referred to as the N1X (not the...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. The FBI issued a warning last week about a phishing-as-a-service platform called Kali365 that can completely bypass multi-factor authentication on Microsoft 365 accounts. Not by breaking MFA. By going around it entirely — using a legitimate Microsoft feature against...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. I've spent two posts documenting how GitHub went from beloved developer platform to a Phase 3 extraction engine under Microsoft's roof. Phase 3: Profit covered the trust erosion — the data training opt-out nobody told you about, the absorption into CoreAI, the quiet...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. I asked a question back in March: can a user-hostile leopard change its spots? I was cautiously, skeptically willing to entertain the possibility. Microsoft had made noises about pulling Copilot back from its most obnoxious outposts. Pavan Davuluri said some words. I...

Week three of the Musk v. Altman trial opened Monday with something nobody in that Oakland courtroom had experienced in three weeks of testimony: a tech CEO who answered questions. Completely. Without philosophical objections to the nature of yes or no. Satya Nadella walked in wearing a navy suit and a blue tie. He had...

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...