Notices by javi@goblin.band, page 2

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 😂)

There is this show on Netflix where an USian visits areas of the world where there is a higher-than-average centenarians density and try to dig into their customs to see why in X country "people live 8 years more than in the US on average".

But then they never address the fact that in every single case the people they talk with have lived in countries with socialized health care and strong labour rights. It's kind of hilarious.

There is this moment where they are talking with this Japanese woman about the fact she is part of some kind of social club, trying to suggest this may be a factor in her longevity, and she casually mentions how she has been retired for over 40 years... And I DON'T KNOW MAYBE THE COUNTRY WITHOUT ANY PUBLIC PENSION PROGRAM NOR MANDATORY RETIREMENT AGE HAVING A SHORTER LIFE SPAN MAY NOT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH HOW OFTEN JAPANESE 80-SOMETHINGS MET WITH THEIR FRIENDS TO SING TRADITIONAL TUNES TOGETHER.

Elon musk: Brazil demanding we ban nazi accounts posting racist shit is against free speech and puts democracy at risk

Random Twitter user: ... Cisgender.

Elon musk: this cannot be tolerated! You are permabanned !!!

Oh look at this

So automattic/Tumblr's CEO is making the company email servers to redirect all mail from teamblind.com to his own personal address instead of the actual person who registered to Blind, so he can know who signed up using their corporate email (the only way to sign up).

Not only that, but by doing this, he could just go through the company email address list, hit the "forgot your password" link, and find out who already has an account, and even steal it.

Update: it looks like blind doesn't allow recovering your password via email, so at least he couldn't do this to existing accounts.

Very sane, not creepy, absolutely not sociopath move, sire. Absolutely normal and not crazy maniac behavior.

‡ If you don't know blind, it's a platform that let employees of a company to anonymously talk between them about their employer

The AI industry is a grift so big that it's really hard to explain it to people not familiar with the tech industry.

Yes, Google is perfectly aware their AI-powered search is way worse than their "classic" mode.

Yes, Apple knows their integration with chatGPT is flaky and ads nothing useful to their products. And

They.

Don't.

Care.

Because the goal is not making their products better, the goal is to ride the hype wave so the investors are happy and their stock price keeps growing.

That's almost entirely what's powering the AI industry.

It's a multibillon dollar grift. One so big and so obvious that most people think they have to be missing something, that they don't understand something that makes everything to make it makes sense as a business.

No. That's everything. It's pure snake oil selling.

The automattic alumni slack server is experiencing a spike of new people joining these days.

The rumour mill says that the CEO, Matt Mullenweg, has set a hard goal of the headcount reduction this year and since he came back from sabbatical last month, things are getting ugly inside the company.

But you know, it's not another round of layoffs, it's just "performance management" (with an associated goal of how many people must be underperforming that must be reached, because MM is the kwisatz haderach of Wordpress and he can see the future and one know how many people will fail performance checks).

Once again, big hug for my friends still inside.

Also, there is a very gloomy vibe on Tumblr right now. In the last few days, a bunch of very popular trans accounts have been purged without being given any reason about it. Mind you, we are talking about accounts with thousands of followers and years of backlog, that never got into trouble with mods before... Suddenly banned without any explanation.

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9u9rya58eamp06g8

People cheering for the release of 4 hostages achieved by killing 210 random people in a refugee camp is the perfect gist of the entire Palestinian recent history. Somehow those 4 hostages are fellow humans who serve a happy life (they are), but the 210 palestinians just disposable vermin that don't even get mentioned in the news.

Oh: and two reminders:


Israel keeps broadcasting their war crimes full of pride about them (soldiers entering combat zones disguised as non-combatants is EXPLICITLY forbidden by the Geneva convections)


Israel still kept about 2000 palestinian hostages themselves (people abducted without any formal accusation nor giving their loved ones any news of their demise) and no one ever talks about their release

Honestly, this (Biden pushing for a plan, trying to give credit to the Israel on top of it) is the only thing that would explain the last days. That or a operation by Israel to further discredit Biden.

Oh the news here called it the Biden peace plan, and for what it looks, Hamas was willing to accept it and Israel rejected it entirely.

Somehow I'm sure the US will spin this failure to be Hamas' fault

Fuck, this may very well be the end of Eurovision as a cultural force in Europe.

What's going on:


The Dutch artist have been showing some mild unease at the Israel presence there this year during the past week. The Irish ones have been forced to change their looks because it included the words "ceasefire" and "freedom for Palestine" in ancient gaelic script.


Yesterday, someone from the Israel delegation staff joked about the dutch artist's father death (the Dutch song is dedicated to him) and there was "an incident" (undisclosed, but the rumor-mill says the Dutch guy may have punched the jokester it looks it was only a verbal confrontation)


Eurovision have disqualified the Netherlands from today's final.


The Dutch broadcaster association (those who pick who to send to EV) posted this a few hours ago:


There has been protest within the Finnish public broadcaster asking for Finland withdrawal


The head of the political party who is the junior partner in the government of Spain is also calling for our withdrawal.


The Israeli delegation seem to have spent the week literally harassing anyone they perceive as critical, with several complains about their behavior already being published.


The Israeli song is one of the favorites to win, and if they do, next year Eurovision would be organized by them. If that happen, there is no way several countries wouldn't just refuse to take part.



So yeah, there is a chance this may be it for the festival. Good job, Eurovision. Great fucking job.