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VOICE ARCHIVE

Heather Burns

@webdevlaw
51 posts
2025-01-12
Woke up to a phone full of pings that @photomatt has...publicly announced he's deactivated an account I haven't logged into since February 2020, for an OSS project I haven't been involved with since then, and am not involved with now. Must have been a bad batch from his dealer. [image]
2025-01-12 View on X
TechCrunch

Matt Mullenweg deactivates the accounts of several WordPress.org members, some of whom have been leading a push to create a new fork of the open-source project

Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg has deactivated the accounts of several WordPress.org community members …

2024-10-14
For a project that told me to shut up about law, regulation, and project involvement in politics, they're certainly guaranteeing a future full of law, regulation, and political intervention in this project. I'll help write the casebook.
2024-10-14 View on X
TechCrunch

Matt Mullenweg says WordPress is “forking” Advanced Custom Fields, a plugin developed by WP Engine; ACF's team says the plugin was taken away “without consent”

It's super late at night on Thanksgiving weekend in Canada. Edward Targett / The Stack : Wordpress Wars: Forking crazy nuclear takeover triggers fury Luke Jones / WinBuzzer : WordP...

2024-10-13
For a project that told me to shut up about law, regulation, and project involvement in politics, they're certainly guaranteeing a future full of law, regulation, and political intervention in this project. I'll help write the casebook.
2024-10-13 View on X
TechCrunch

Matt Mullenweg says WordPress is “forking” Advanced Custom Fields, a plugin developed by WP Engine; ACF team says the plugin was taken away “without consent”

The dispute between WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and hosting provider WP Engine continues …

2024-08-08
I'd forgotten that this site's former UK head of public policy is now its global head of public policy, e.g. someone who really should be doing something other than retweeting that batshit Linda Y video. (No paywall on this piece)
2024-08-08 View on X
Politics.co.uk

In a now-deleted X post, Elon Musk reposted a fake Telegraph story shared by a far-right party about the UK opening “Detainment Camps”; the post had 1.8M views

Elon Musk has deleted a post on X, the social media platform he owns, in which he spread fake news about …

I'd forgotten that this site's former UK head of public policy is now its global head of public policy, e.g. someone who really should be doing something other than retweeting that batshit Linda Y video. (No paywall on this piece)
2024-08-08 View on X
Financial Times

UK officials say X has been less responsive to removing disinformation than Google, Meta, and TikTok, as Elon Musk launches a series of jibes at PM Keir Starmer

Financial Times :

Apropos of urgent discussions about ineffective online safety laws which were drafted as a license to print money for compliance $oftware vendor$, I hope everyone susses, as I've warned for years, that *this* is the heart of the UK's Online Safety Act: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
2024-08-08 View on X
Washington Post

A look at AI age scanners, which websites use to verify a person's age by analyzing their facial patterns via webcam to help safeguard kids online

Drew Harwell / Washington Post : Threads: @drewharwell . X: @webdevlaw , @eff , @notjessewalker , and @enbrown Threads: Drew Harwell / @drewharwell : New: Age-verification systems...

2024-06-07
I say this as half a joke, half not : at some point you'll be better off using a 15 year old laptop with 15 year old software, not connected to the internet, not updated, and not snitching on you to 1200 adtech partners via legitimate interest while scanning your content with AI.
2024-06-07 View on X
VentureBeat

Adobe faces a backlash over its terms of service that say Adobe may access user content via “automated and manual methods” to improve its services and software

Adobe has been one of the leading legacy enterprise software companies to embrace generative AI and make it accessible …

2024-04-16
“The proposed voluntary charter may involve tech firms agreeing to alert parents when their children are repeatedly looking up disturbing content” And what if the “disturbing content” the children are looking up concerns the way their parents are raising and treating them?
2024-04-16 View on X
Bloomberg

Sources: the UK plans talks this month with Apple, Meta, and others to push a voluntary charter granting parents more control of social media use by young teens

Ellen Milligan / Bloomberg : X: @arollingsloane , @jamesrbuk , @alecmuffett , and @webdevlaw X: @arollingsloane : they shouldn't agree too it bcos the ‘disturbing content’ is lite...

2024-03-29
From. the. rooftops. [image]
2024-03-29 View on X
LPE Project

Signal's president says the TikTok bill won't offer any meaningful privacy protection from China, but will further entrench the dominance of US social networks

Earlier this month, the United States House of Representatives passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act … Mastodon: @carnage4life@mas.to a...

2024-02-24
Am I enjoying seeing the karma police arrest a man who shut down my privacy work, caused me to be seriously threatened IRL, got his “community” team to harass anyone seen talking to me including personal friends, and covered it all with “can't you take a joke?” Yes, yes I am.
2024-02-24 View on X
TechCrunch

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg sparred with a trans Tumblr user over an account ban, revealing her side blog names, which are private, sparking community outcry

I wanna emphasise prev tags and ramble cuz it hits the nail on the head exactly.  Exactly!! elerium on Tumblr : moscovium enthusiast  —  it almost goes without saying but for poste...

2024-01-03
The other day a dear friend asked me what sort of work I deal with these days, and let's just say this was hard to explain over a whisky cask IPA. https://www.politico.eu/...
2024-01-03 View on X
Politico

Critics and tech companies worry that the UK's Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Bill, a surveillance law whisking through parliament, undermines user privacy

Laurie Clarke / Politico :

2023-11-09
Today, in addition to reading the draft IPAA Bill, so you can strategise & reply, you also need to start on the 1700+ pages of Ofcom's draft consultation guidance https://www.ofcom.org.uk/... for round one of Online Safety Act enforcement, so you can strategise & reply. Yes you do.
2023-11-09 View on X
Financial Times

Ofcom's CEO on the regulator's new powers to police tech: kids are the first priority, companies must detect and remove CSAM, and working in harmony with the EU

Where the laws have different scope, it's important that implementing them does not create conflicts for companies

2023-10-26
The format of the as-delivered transcript of Rishi Sunak's speech on AI is inadvertently funny, because it presents as if it was a tech bro hyperventilating. https://www.gov.uk/...
2023-10-26 View on X
Politico

UK PM Rishi Sunak announces plans to set up a UK-based AI Safety Institute and an AI research network modeled on the IPCC, ahead of the UK AI Summit in November

2023-09-20
Srsly, it's getting quite funny how these “campaigns” repeat these same tired tactics and arguments from time to time not to budge the policy needle, but to spend down the campaign budget, get some KPIs, and impress the managers in the monthly meeting. https://www.bbc.com/...
2023-09-20 View on X
TechCrunch

The UK's parliament passes the Online Safety Bill, in the works since 2019, paving the way for Royal Assent and the bill becoming law in the coming days

Controversial UK legislation that brings in a new regime of content moderation rules for online platforms and services …

2023-09-10
The fascinating thing about being in the room where it happens, as I was in two of the meetings narrated here, is seeing how what went down gets filtered and spun outside the door to those who were not in the room (click boom). https://www.politico.eu/...
2023-09-10 View on X
Politico

How privacy campaigners and tech executives, like Signal president Meredith Whittaker, teamed up to challenge the UK's Online Safety Bill encryption crackdown

LONDON — Deep in the recesses of Britain's Hogwarts-like houses of parliament, a Facebook lobbyist-turned-lord is trying to foment a rebellion.

2023-05-19
The Postscript of my book was meant to be speculative. It's already happened. https://twitter.com/...
2023-05-19 View on X
Wall Street Journal

Sources and docs: Midwest nonprofit Veritas Society used geofenced data to serve abortion clinic visitors anti-abortion ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat

Wall Street Journal :

2022-11-26
...which, by the way, was banned here in Scotland way back in 2010, when you were all still typing on Blackberries and Twitter had 140 characters. It's almost as if playing the ball and not the man makes better public policy. https://twitter.com/...
2022-11-26 View on X
The Guardian

The UK government says its Online Safety Bill will return to the parliament in December and will be expanded to criminalize nonconsensual “deepfake” pornography

Nonconsensual explicit images to be tackled in bill returning to parliament next month

2022-11-03
That's one 🚨 of at least ten dealt with. Yay. But here are just four more 🚨s with the #OnlineSafetyBill that haven't even been touched: https://webdevlaw.uk/... and as a result are likely to be pushed into law in the name of “protecting children” or “getting it done”. https://twitter.com/...
2022-11-03 View on X
The i Paper

Source: the UK plans to remove the Online Safety Bill's controversial “legal but harmful” content rules, leaving them only for material targeted at children

EXCLUSIVEThe Bill is due to be brought back to Parliament later this month after it was delayed over the summer

2022-09-28
(Though they do occasionally say the quiet parts out loud.) https://twitter.com/...
2022-09-28 View on X
Financial Times

WhatsApp head Will Cathcart warns UK ministers against undermining encryption in the Online Safety Bill, arguing the move would embolden authoritarian regimes

Moves to undermine messaging encryption could embolden hostile nation states, Will Cathcart says Tweets: @webdevlaw , @mattnavarra , @webdevlaw , @webdevlaw , and @pt Tweets: Heath...

What this vg article doesn't convey is how genuinely unhinged UK gov is in its obsession with e2e encryption & specifically WhatsApp, its view of e2e as a tool of Zuck and Clegg, and how the whole concept of e2e itself is fair game in the goal of “getting” that one company, 1/2 https://twitter.com/...
2022-09-28 View on X
Financial Times

WhatsApp head Will Cathcart warns UK ministers against undermining encryption in the Online Safety Bill, arguing the move would embolden authoritarian regimes

Moves to undermine messaging encryption could embolden hostile nation states, Will Cathcart says Tweets: @webdevlaw , @mattnavarra , @webdevlaw , @webdevlaw , and @pt Tweets: Heath...