Daily Tech News 13 October 2024

• After being sued by hosting company WP Engine for libel and extortion, it would appear that Automattic, the commercial arm of WordPress, has chosen to respond with outright theft. (MSN)
  
  One thing Automattic accused WP Engine of was not contributing back to the project. WP Engine developed and maintained the WordPress plugin ACF - Advanced Custom Fields, which has two million users.
  
  So Automattic stole it. (Twitter)
  
  They took the project, changed the name, and assigned themselves ownership, dragging all two million users along with it.
  
  They said they were forced to do that because WP Engine could not properly manage and maintain the project. WP Engine could not manage and maintain the project because Automattic blocked them.
  
  WP Engine's lawyers who were already looking at replacing their Porsches with Ferraris are now thinking maybe a Bugatti Chiron would be nice.

• California has rejected SpaceX's application to launch additional missions from the state, with some officials opening themselves up to a massive First Amendment lawsuit. (LA Times / MSN)
  
  Oops.
  
  Well, more business for Florida I guess.
  
  
  
• Boeing will lay off 10% of its employees, about 17,000 people. (MSN)
  
  This comes as no surprise to anyone, but is unlikely to affect the people who should be affected.
  
  
  
• Instagram and Threads moderation is out of control. (The Verge)
  
  Did your post get deleted? Too bad, so sad.

  Moderation is a perennial problem on social media, but based on social media posts and The Verge staff's own experiences, Meta is currently banning and restricting users on a hair trigger. One of my colleagues was locked out of her account briefly this week after joking that she "wanted to die" because of a heatwave.
  
  Others, like Jorge Caballero, say the automated system has added fact checks with mistakes to material it detects as political, as well as throttling posts with factual information for events like hurricanes. Some have dubbed their situation "crackergate," as recent posts mentioning saltines or the words "cracker jacks" have been instantly removed.

  Simple solution: Don't use Instagram or Threads. Twitter doesn't do this.
  
  
  
• The Verge is having yet another normal day. (The Verge)
  
  Geeze, lady. Take a couple of valium. Or down a fifth of bourbon. Not both, but one or the other.
  
  
  
• The San Francisco Chronicle has put in place an AI resource nobody asked for to answer questions nobody is asking about the political candidate nobody voted for. (San Francisco Chronicle) (archive site)
  
  It's unintentional self-parody all the way down.
  
  
  
• Do you need 384 cores and 3TB of RAM in a single 1U server? ASRock has a motherboard for you. (Serve the Home)
  
  No price attached but these are generally cheaper than you would think - much cheaper than the CPUs that plug into them.
  
  
  
• We keep pushing products that nobody wants, and for some reason people aren't buying them. (The Register)
  
  It's a meh year for desktop PCs, and a lousy year for Windows. There are a couple of bright spots in the laptop market, with AMD's Ryzen 370 and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X series, but not enough to lift PC sales out of the doldrums.
  
  Except for limited edition Hyte PC cases, which are reportedly doing gangbusters.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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