Who would have ever said that I would have sided with #OpenAI on some issues? What the NYT is demanding is quite outrageous. In order to prove or falsify the hypothesis that the ChatGPT bot purposefully circumvented the NYT paywall in order to scrape articles, the NYT is demanding OpenAI to hand them the logs of 120M conversations. That’s 120M complete conversations, with all kind of of sensitive information and PII inside, handed out to a major news outlet just to verify a case of copyright violation. To be clear, most of these LLM bots are quite aggressive. I’ve had to block whole subnets on my servers because their scrapers were frying my CPU by scraping whole git blames from my Forgejo instance. With no throttling nor proper handling of 429 errors, without respecting the robots.txt, and without even setting proper user agents. And the gravity of the issue is compounded when these bots scrape copyrighted content. But the solution is to prompt regulation for AI bots and push for deals between AI companies and content creators. Not getting carte blanche to compromise the privacy of millions to verify your copyright claims.

Ars Technica

OpenAI slams court order that lets NYT read 20 million complete user chats

OpenAI: NYT wants evidence of ChatGPT users trying to get around news paywall.

Imagine being one of the most valuable companies on earth, making billions thanks to open-source software like #ffmpeg, without contributing financially to it, without contributing to its codebase, and even expecting those unpaid volunteers to fix bugs for you in a timely fashion as if they were your own employees. Imagine contributing to a huge piece of software like ffmpeg that works behind the scenes on literally any device that can either play, record or transform media, a project that has become a critical piece of our digital infrastructure, and doing so unpaid, uncredited and stressed out by companies that make billions thanks to your work. This is the current state of open-source today. A bunch of burned out, unpaid and uncredited volunteers building free stuff in their spare time that trillion-dollar freeriders feel entitled to use without contributing back. ffmpeg developers are right. Either #Google contributes back, or they won’t even look at their bugs anymore. And, in an ideal world where free software licenses weren’t written by good Samaritans, either trillion-dollar companies contribute back, or they shouldn’t be allowed to use free software for profit. 20 years ago I used to have discussions with fellow engineers whether open-source would have won over commercial software. Now I can firmly say that open-source won. There’s no doubt about it. Linux, Apache products, Python, ffmpeg, curl etc. power all of today’s technological stack. But it’s not the win that I expected. It’s the kind of win that happened because corporations realized that open-source is just a way for them to cut on internal engineering costs. https://thenewstack.io/ffmpeg-to-google-fund-us-or-stop-sending-bugs/

The #ICC joins a growing list of EU-based institutions that has abandoned or is abandoning US-based FascTech and move towards EU-based open-source solutions instead. The reason in this case isn’t only saved budget. Karim Khan, chief prosecutor for the ICC, lost access to his Outlook mailbox in May 2025 after delivering the arrest warrant against Netanyahu - on top of getting his bank account frozen. Imagine a world where UN officers for the highest criminal court can’t do their job because a single American company can coerce their decisions by simply cutting access to their digital lives. The ICC is therefore switching from #Microsoft 365 to #OpenDesk, a FOSS solution mostly developed in Germany. The fall of American Big Tech will happen one step at the time, one revoked license at the time, one lost user at the time. After 15 years spent evangelizing that there’s no technology outside of their clouds, people are finally realizing that solutions are possible - and those solutions both save them money and restore their sovereignty and ownership over their digital lives. The same tipping points that led to their success can also lead to their demise. There’s an eternal technological pendulum between centralization and decentralization that keeps swinging whenever the disadvantages of one end start outweighing the disadvantages of the other end. And it will keep swinging, no matter how big the American FascTech has become.

Binnenlands Bestuur

Internationaal Strafhof neemt afscheid van Microsoft 365

Het Internationaal Strafhof (International Criminal Court, ICC) ruilt Microsoft 365 in voor Open Desk, een Europees open source alternatief. Dat sc...

The #fundraising campaign tracker for gaza-verified has just been released. The campaign tracker periodically scrapes donation data for the verified accounts from their official GoFundMe and Chuffed campaigns and provides a unified view over the amount raised by each campaign. The default view is on the funds raised in the past week, but the date range can be easily customized from the date selectors - and flexible sorting is also supported. The accounts that have raised the least amount in the past week will automatically be shown at the top, so donation efforts can focus on those who need them the most - not on those who reach out to donors more often. Note that all donor names have been hidden. The campaign data is also available over REST API. Also keep in mind that this may not give the full picture of the campaign, as some people from #Gaza also receive donations on non-public channels (PayPal, crypto etc.). @npub1qg48...augv @npub1n33c...fu06 @npub1uc0x...3krp

Imagine being a NYC billionaire who, rather than paying more taxes to help your city, prefers to spend more money to fund the campaign of a convicted sex criminal, just because he will guarantee that your wealth will never be touched by taxes. I literally can’t find any more fitting definition of sociopathy. #Mamdani