Helpful
The Fediverse
I have gotten asked what exactly Mastodon is and I always give the very simple answer of “it’s like the old Twitter but not owned by any one company”. For most the answer is fine and the questioner goes on about their day. A few ask for more details and that is where I run into trouble, trying to explain the Fediverse in more detail can be hard for someone who has only ever use social media from the big tech companies like Meta. Recently, someone I follow on Mastodon, Elena Rossini made a video that perfectly sums up exactly what the Fediverse is and why someone should consider using it instead of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, etc. Take a look and see if it might be right for you, like it is for me.
Adobe and their latest trickery.
So, like many large tech companies, Adobe has been adding on various artificial intelligence features across most of their applications. Many of them are quite useful, such as the photo cleanup tools added to Photoshop, as well as the auto generation background for InDesign. I don’t begrudge any company for wanting to continue to make profits from the software services they provide. However, Adobe is doing something that is down right scummy. If you subscribe to their Creative Cloud plan choice, you will be automatically enrolled into their higher priced Creative Cloud Pro plan, this new plan is $120 more a year when billed yearly. Again, I have no problem with the addition of a “Pro” tier plan option, if you have a use and find value in the options available there, then that is the plan for you. My problem is Adobe not notifying the plan switch in any way or at least I can not find any notification with my account. There will be 1,000’s (100’s of thousands?) of accounts that get upgraded and those users may not even know. Users have the option to resume their non “Pro” plan but you have to log in to your account page at adobe.com and manually switch to the now Creative Cloud Standard plan.
I am a Graphics Manager for a small printing company and have use Adobe applications going on 35 years, hell I was even a beta tester for InDesign. My biggest complaint with Adobe is their lack of an à la carte choice for those users who don’t need all 20+ applications that are part of the Creative Cloud plans. I really only ever use the four Acrobat, InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop in our production workflows and have absolutely no need for the Audio and Video applications, as nice as they may be. Now they have given me a new complaint and this is pretty scummy on their part.
Adobe is switching some Creative Cloud users to a pricier AI plan article at The Verge has more details.
Breaking News… There Are Shady Companies on the Internet!
Shameless. This is an example people who are concerned with AI will point to has why we need to slow down.
So, I read a fair number off technology websites and blogs, some big like Macworld and others smaller like TechRadar. I am a regular reader of John Gruber’s long running blog DaringFireball and Jason Kottke’s Kottke Like a lot of things on the Internet, some sites get published, are read a good bit, but for whatever reason fade away. One such site I read regularly was The Unofficial Apple Weblog but a few years ago, it went away from my regular bookmarks. Originally owned by AOL, they let the site go to Yahoo, recently the domain (and all of its many years of articles and reviews) was sold by Yahoo to a company based out of Hong Kong called Web Orange Limited. I am not going to link to them because I find them despicable.
Instead of maybe restoring TUAW to a legitimate news source with curated reporters, they took a different route. They are basically using AI to scrape articles from other sites such as MacRumours and engadget and then publish them on TUAW. Now many sites will do similar things but the reputable ones will attribute the source of the original articles. TUAW is not doing this, worse, they are giving the author of such articles to people on their staff…. except most of these people don’t exist.
The following tech writer, Christina Warren, discovered this because she was one off the original TUAW contributing writers, they even were still using her picture, name, and bio on their about page! You can find her X post about it here. When confronted, all TUAW did was change the name on the about page but as of now kept her picture. Horrible.
Adam Engst at TidBits has a very nice summary article with screen shots showing the thefts and explaining it further.
I know there are a lot of more important news happening in the world but things like this really irritate me because it wont get a lot of main stream reporting. Just trying to do my part, however small, to share and call out the offender.
Special Place in Hell
Public Service Announcement.
I have a pretty decent spam filtering process, but no process is 100% and I will still get the occasional BAD email, as follows.
The first screen shot shows the message as it appears in my inbox and is pretty legit looking…. although the use of French in the fine print is a clue. The second screen shot shows the senders full email…. “noreply@pphoki.me” is probably not an actual Disney email server. The last screen shot is what the website looks like and shows the full address in the address bar, yes I used a private browser to access the site. There is a special place in hell for these kinds of criminals.
A very special place.
