Notices by javi@goblin.band

Ok this may be the post that ends making me a paid supporter of 404 media

Let's say it again: the EU should pressure its members to grant asylum to trans people from countries with anti-trans legislation

My favorite bug I've ever produced was when I changed something about how Tumblr shortcuts worked and made it so if you used the reblog shortcut while browsing your timeline, it would repeatedly reblog things several times per second if you kept the key pressed.

We should have left the reblog railgun as a feature.

Ban 👏 threads 👏 from 👏 the 👏 fedi 👏 now

holy fuck. Zuck finally went full Elon in public.

Full text of

his threads' thread:

zuck: It's time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here's what we're going to do:

1/ Replace fact-checkers with Community Notes, starting in the US.

2/ Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.

3/ Change how we enforce our policies to remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.

4/ Bring back civic content. We're getting feedback that people want to see this content again, so we'll phase it back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.

5/ Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.

6/ Work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.

It'll take time to get this all right and these are complex systems so they'll never be perfect. But this is an important step forward and I'm looking forward to this next chapter!

My guess is that would be his first choice. But with Matt being against it, I don't see it being a feasible option: WordPress core is full of hardcoded references to the centralized repo, it's hard to change that without breaking compatibility.

Also, in the comments of the post MM himself tells Joost he is free to do it, but be better calls it something else. The moment the brand changes, if some of the big hosting companies decide to go with the new brand (and after WPE they have all the incentives), WordPress can find itself being the smaller part of the fork soon.

If you don't in the WordPress ecosystem, you may not understand how HUGE this post is



https://joost.blog/wordpress-leadership/



Joost is probably the second biggest figure in the entire WP ecosystem, only after Matt M himself. He is the biggest voice from the "Enterprise WordPress" world.

This is not anymore open source contributors complaining about governance. This is the Business WordPress demanding a leadership change and suggesting it either happens or a hard fork, backed by big business, is on the way.

After today, I'm going to start judging people who are still active on Twitter much harsher.



I'm sorry folks, but at this point everyone knows what it is. Musk is Goebbels, and Twitter is his megaphone. Him purchasing the site is a not small part of the foundation of what happened today, it's not a small part of the root of the bad things that are going to happen in the next few years.



I'm not buying any excuse anymore: being active in there makes one of the main tools of the fascists more effective. I know it. You know it. If you are there, please, close your account today.

Btw, something that pisses me off about the Tumblr migration announcement is how they paint it as win for open source.

Matt, it has been FIVE years since you bought it. I've personally asked you to open source Tumblr AT LEAST THREE TIMES I CAN REMEMBER. Others have done it too. The answer always had been that it wasn't a priority, even if we told you that some parts of Tumblr (like redpop) needed a negligible amount of work to open sourced.

Such a champion of the open source you are. Of course that's what matters to you and no anything el$e.

It looks Matt Mullenweg has ordered WordPress.org servers (managed by automattic) to block servers using the IP ranges owned by WP Engine.

That means that people trying to use wordpress servers installed in WP Engine servers can't no longer access to plugins, themes, or updates, for example

This is despicable.

This is breaking entirely with the principles of open source. It's ghoulish.

It happened at last. He went full Elon. It was a matter of time, honestly

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9yg4x5fkg4ll98hu

Look, I was writting a long post about what happened yesterday on the WordPress scene but... fuck it. I'm going to play Dwarf Fortress instead. Let me just say I hope the WordPress community realize that Matt Mullenweg using his keynote on WordCamp US to attack WPEngine for "caring more about profit than what they care about open source" is not about this heroic figure defending Open Source against corporate leechers.

WPEngine contributes to open source as much as most of other similar-sized hosting companies in the world (Actually, they were top-tier sponsors of the same conference Matt used to tell the thousands of attendees that they should all cancel their WPEngine accounts). Also, WPEngine and WordPress.com (Matt's company flagship) are the biggest players in their particular market niche (Managed WordPress hosting). And last year, for the first time ever, WPEngine made more money than wp.com, making them the biggest fish in their pond.

So no, this was not Matt being all sanctimonious about open source. It's just, once again, a businessman abusing his position of privilege on an open source community to slander the most direct competitor of his company, who has recently became the dominant player in the market.

Ok, photomatt posted his crazy rants against WPEngine to r/wordpress and ... the moderators have deleted his post :D

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9yg4x5fkg4ll98hu

And now, a day after being served a cease and desist and telling everyone on a twitter live that he can't really talk about the issue anymore because it's now a "very serious legal matter", Matt Mullenweg has edited the WordPress trademark policy page (https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/) to attack WP Engine once again (ON THE TRADEMARK USAGE PAGE NO LESS WTF) and explicitly (and I guess he's trying to make it retroactively too?) put them on violation of the trademark.

Old text:

The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.

New text:

The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.





I can't say for sure, of course, but Matt has edit access to everything in that site, so I'm willing to bet he edited that himself last night without going through either the legal, community or PR teams. No way a legal team is ok with singling out a company in the trademark documentation. No way anyone who works writing copy went over that slurred paragraph.

Ok, I should be sleeping right now, but what's happening is SO FUCKING CRAZY.

Long story short: WPEngine is suing Matt Mullenweg, Automattic and the WordPress foundation for slandering them. In return, Matt is suing them for trademark violation.

But, BUT, WPEngine has fired their first shot. And what a shot it is, friends:



Link to the full letter

Some extracts:Stunningly, Automattic’s CEO Matthew Mullenweg threatened that if WP Engine did not agree to pay Automattic – his for-profit entity – a very large sum of money before his September 20th keynote address at the WordCamp US Convention, he was going to embark on a self-described “scorched earth nuclear approach” toward WP Engine within the WordPress community and beyond. When his outrageous financial demands were not met, Mr. Mullenweg carried out his threats by making repeated false claims disparaging WP Engine to its employees, its customers, and the world. Mr. Mullenweg has carried out this wrongful campaign against WP Engine in multiple outlets, including via his keynote address, across several public platforms like X,YouTube, and even on the Wordpress.org site, and through the WordPress Admin panel for all WordPress users, including directly targeting WP Engine customers in their own private WordPress instances used to run their online businessesDuring calls on September 17th and 19th, for instance, Automattic CFO Mark Davies told a WP Engine board member that Automattic would “go to war” if WP Engine did not agree to pay its competitor Automattic a significant percentage of its gross revenues – tens of millions of dollars in fact – on an ongoing basis. Mr. Davies suggested the payment ostensibly would be for a “license” to use certain trademarks like WordPress, even though WP Engine needs no such license. WP Engine’s uses of those marks to describe its services – as all companies in this space do – are fair uses under settled trademark law and consistent with WordPress’ own guidelines. Automattic’s CFO insisted that WP Engine provide its response to this demand immediately and later, on the day of the keynote, followed up with an email reiterating a claimed need for WP Engine to concede to the demands “before Matt makes his WCUS keynote at 3:45 p.m. PDT today.”In parallel and throughout September 19 and 20, Mr. Mullenweg embarked on a series of harassing text messages and calls to WP Engine’s board member and also its CEO, threatening that if WP Engine did not agree to pay up prior to the start of Mr. Mullenweg’s livestreamed keynote address at 3:45pm on September 20, he would go “nuclear” on WP Engine, including by smearing its name, disparaging its directors and corporate officers, and banning WP Engine from WordPress community events.They... they have text message captures. In the pdf. Matt Mullenweg was trying to extort them ... by text messages. They seem to have the entire thing in the writting.
In the final minutes leading up to his keynote address, Mr. Mullenweg sent one last missive: a photo of the WordCamp audience waiting to hear his speech, with the message that he could shift gears and turn his talk into “just a Q&A” if WP Engine agreed to pay upThey finish requesting Automattic to "preserve, and not destroy, any and all documents or information in their possession, custody, or control that may be relevant to any dispute between WP Engine and Automattic". They are going to war, big time.

All this crap is just because they refuse to pay his protection money. And the guy has been stupid enough to put everything in writting.



Holy. Fucking. Shit.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT.

They are going to toast him alive

An interesting question to ask nowadays is how many shitholes a CEO can willingly walk into within a single year before the adults in the room (the board) actually do something to put him in place, even if he has the majority of voting rights

Oh dear



https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/09/10/apple-ireland-taxes



@daringfireball@mastodon.social whether Ireland wants the money or not is irrelevant. The issue is lots of companies have been running a con within the EU for decades, using Ireland as their accomplice to evade tax everywhere else. Apple is just the biggest offender, so they start with them.

Basically, apple Spain, apple France, etc etc have been declaring zero profits for years. Even if they sell literal billions in the EU every year. And that do so having every single nation level subsidiary have apple Ireland as a supplier, so they "purchase" from them stuff for the same value they are getting as profits, so their profits are zero in the entire EU but in Ireland, where their profits are astronomical, and also barely taxed.

So basically apple sells things and instead of pay their taxes, they buy stuff from themselves in Ireland and just evade taxes. They are just criminals, using the EU common market to commit their crimes.

The fact that Ireland profits or not from enabling a crime, honestly, couldn't matter less. It's about time the EU stops the con. I just wish they could criminally charge the CEO of every company that is involved in this kind of fraud and jail them as it would happen if they were EU nationals committing tax evasion in the billions, as they do.

The fact you frame this as the EU being hostile to successful companies says a lot about you. I guess you are ok with tax evasion. But as an EU citizen, I'm glad they are finally acting against these criminals who are stealing our money.

Let me just say that I love that the buttondown "corporate" account is very clearly handled by someone who has their hands very deeply inside the actual product work 😁

(I mean I swear I have this exact conversation with almost the exact same works being used at least once per week 😂)