Elon Musk has used a reply on X to announce that blocked users will be able to view – but not interact with – the public posts of those users that have blocked them on the platform. There’s not a lot of detail on what else that will mean or when the change will happen, but it is no secret Musk doesn’t like the block button. Whatever else, it certainly makes X an even more hostile place for some users and take the platform even further down the free speech absolutism path Musk has it on.

Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, has published a no holds barred tear down of WP Engine, a for profit hosting provider offering a managed WordPress product. WP Engine is not affiliated with Automatic, the organisation behind the official open-source WordPress project, but builds on top of WordPress. Mullenweg calls them a “cancer to WordPress” adding that ”it’s important to remember that unchecked, cancer will spread.” WP Engine has fired back with a cease-and-desist and it looks like things are going to get ugly. I think I will write something more substantial on what’s going on here, as it emblematic of larger trends facing the open movement.

There is no question that the night-time economy around Australia and the world has been hit hard in recent years with the slow post-COVID-19 recovery coupled with changes in consumer behaviour and the dual cost of living and housing affordability crises. Queensland has joined other states and international cities by appointing a Night-Life Economy Commissioner. Our first ‘night-life tsar’ is John “JC” Collins. As the former Powderfinger bassist and co-owner and venue director of Fortitude Music Hall and the Triffid, Collins has the right kind of credentials. The Queensland Government’s $1.6 million cash splash on venues will help, but it’s a big job. Collins is tasked with working with live music venues, nightclubs, festival organisers, bars and restaurants, entertainment precincts, arts venues, and local pubs across the state to boost the night economy.

Despite announcing Instagram teen accounts just last week, Zuckerberg continues to claim there’s no link between social media and teen mental health. Even so, Zuckerberg sees platforms having a role, but prefers an approach where platforms create parental management tools so parents can decide themselves when to limit their child’s social media usage. Zuckerberg also thinks individual platforms should not be responsible for age verification, suggesting app stores should be responsible for that. ⟨  What a ridiculous notion though, since users can sign up and use lots of social media platforms on a computer. ⟩

It is a long read, but the excerpt from Jennifer Holt’s book Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data (2024) up on The MIT Press Reader is worth the read. There’s a lot in it, but the big takeaway for me is
Holt examines how the US Congress rallied against government surveillance and how computerised data collection could impact citizen’s privacy in response to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 proposal to create a federal data center to house consolidated federal databases called the National Data Bank. Ultimately the proposal was scrapped.

Interestingly, as Holt notes, the numerous government hearings on the proposal looked only at government control of data and the need to protect the public from it “without sufficient attention to the dangers lurking elsewhere.” Holt goes on to say:

“The focus on protecting public data from the perceived dangers of centralized state collection and storage blinded legislators to the problems created by the solution: putting data in the hands of private companies. Corporations ultimately filled the vacuum created by the National Data Bank’s failure, and became the chief custodians of U.S. citizens’ private data.”

All in all, Holt argues that “the same legal and cultural struggles will await the next critical infrastructural technology and the one after that …” Regulation of AIAI is tech and marketing speak for a range of technology that imitates human intellect. Learn more  → has definitely pushed these kinds of concerns back into public discourse, but it remains to be seen if this will go far enough to save us from our surveillance capitalist reality.

Services Australia – the agency managing Centrelink, child support, Medicare and other government payments and services – has seen a 440% increase in data breaches by scammers this year (so far) engaging in social engineering. If you aren’t sure what that is, it is where people call an agency pretending to be someone else using information harvested from previous breaches and using it to access customer accounts. For context, nine social engineering-related incidents were reported in 2023 and just a single report was made in the previous three years.