Daily Tech News 30 August 2025

• The UK's demands for all your private Apple data are pining for the fjords, not dead. (Engadget)
  
  The US government rightly shot them down, but officially the UK government has not given up on any of it. And they want all your private information, from passwords on up. And they don't care what anyone else says, except for the small problem that the US could easily crush them like bugs.
  
  
  
• France and Germany have rejected US warning on their own attempts to loot American tech companies like a pinata farm. (Reuters) (archive site)

  Trump on Monday threatened to slap additional tariffs on all countries with digital taxes, legislation or regulations, saying they were designed to harm or discriminate against American technology, in an escalation of his criticism of EU rules on digital services.

  As would be only right and proper.

  Speaking at a joint news conference with the German leader, French President Emmanuel Macron rejected the threats, and said any move by the United States to challenge the bloc's regulations would be met with retaliation from the EU.
  
  "Tax and regulation issues are the preserve of our national parliaments and the European parliament," Macron said. "We won't let anyone else decide for us," he said.

  America is not saying it will set your tax policies, you whiny French git. America is going to set America's tax policies, and you ain't gonna like it.

• How Broadcomm's acquisition of VMWare is killing open source one project at a time. (Fastcode)
  
  It is?
  
  The article talks about Bitnami and its abandonment of its free services, which is an item I ran into last week but didn't write up because I have never used Bitnami and also my feet hurt that day:

  The announcement landed in our inboxes like a bomb. After 18 years of providing free, production-ready container images to millions of developers worldwide, Bitnami was effectively ending its free tier. On August 28, 2025, the repository would process over 4 billion downloads annually. It would transform into something unrecognizable. The change is a premium service starting at $72,000 per year, according to AWS Marketplace listings and Arrow Electronics pricing sheets.

  Okay, fair enough. I have never trusted nor used packaging services like this for a variety of reasons, but if you did, and the free tier you depended on was suddenly $72,000 per year, I can see how that would be a problem.
  
  (A problem that was obvious all along, which is just one of the many reasons I never used these services.)
  
  So... So what?
  
  So the Bitnami service was sponsored by a company called Bitrock since 2003.
  
  VMWare acquired Bitrock and Bitnami in 2019, at a time it was owned by Dell.
  
  Then Dell spun off VMWare as a separate company.
  
  And then Broadcom bought the newly independent VMWare.
  
  And Broadcom are rent-seekers par excellence. This is standard practice for them; they do not care in the least that they just killed a service that has been around for more than twenty years. They want your money right now, and they know you will pay.
  
  And they're not going to stop. Broadcom has reached a market cap of $1 trillion on the guiding philosophy of bitch better have my money.
  
  
  
• If you have a previous model Framework 16 with a dedicated Radeon 7700S graphics card and want to update it to the latest Nvidia RTX 5070 card... You can do that. (The Verge) (archive site)
  
  Takes all of three minutes.
  
  
  
• The team behind the Vivaldi browser has heard you and will not be adding AI slop. (The Register)
  
  You can access all the usual slop but they have agreed that it has no place inside the browser itself.
  
  
  
• Mastodon says it literally cannot comply with Mississippi's age verification law - or anyone else's. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Mastodon is distributed. It's open source software and each node in the network is run by a different owner with different interests.
  
  And Mastodon itself has no control over what users a particular node accepts.
  
  
  
• Some men just want to watch a dumpster burn. (Cloudfire)

  That's why we decided to build something revolutionary that will eliminate the burden of customer support for years to come. DumpsterFire is a customer support avoidance system, built entirely on automated deflection and community outsourcing, that employs a range of techniques to maximize ticket abandonment, minimize human interaction, and eliminate support costs. It can avoid more support requests with fewer resources and significantly lower customer expectations, saving time, money, and management attention across our organization.

  To quote a wise man - not the author himself but the character:

  The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout: 'Save us!' - and I'll whisper 'no.'

  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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