Microsoft and Plagiarism (in Your Face)
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Joey Hess ☛ the vulture in the coal mine
Turns out that VPS provider Vultr's terms of service were quietly changed some time ago to give them a "perpetual, irrevocable" license to use content hosted there in any way, including modifying it and commercializing it "for purposes of providing the Services to you."
This is very similar to changes that Github made to their TOS in 2017. Since then, Github has been rebranded as "The world's leading AI-powered developer platform". The language in their TOS now clearly lets them use content stored in Github for training AI. (Probably this is their second line of defense if the current attempt to legitimise copyright laundering via generative AI fails.)
Vultr is currently in damage control mode, accusing their concerned customers of spreading "conspiracy theories" (-- founder David Aninowsky) and updating the TOS to remove some of the problem language. Although it still allows them to "make derivative works", so could still allow their AI division to scrape VPS images for training data.
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TechSpot ☛ Microsoft is quietly installing the Copilot app on Windows PCs [Ed: To FAKE usage levels]
The big picture: Microsoft launched a dedicated Copilot app for Android last December that offers chatbot-like capabilities, similar to what you would get from ChatGPT. While the company has yet to launch an official Copilot app for Windows, latest developments suggest that Redmond is working on bringing its AI software to the desktop sooner rather than later.