Emeritus Prof Christopher MayApr 27, 2024

The GMB is right - Amazon is out of control in its ongoing & extensive campaign to fight unionisation here & elsewhere.

When a firm (here Amazon or elsewhere such as in the gig economy), fears unionisation so much, you know that whatever their claims around technology, really their business model is built on exploiting & under-paying labour.

This isn't innovation its exploitation!

#unions #workers #Amazon
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/26/gmb-launches-legal-action-against-out-of-control-amazon-at-coventry-warehouse

GMB launches legal action against ‘out of control’ Amazon at Coventry warehouse

Employment tribunal sought over claims firm tried to induce workers to leave union in long-running row

The Guardian
Show threadBlock BigTech, AdelaideApr 28, 2024

@ChrisMayLA6 Yes I agree the Amazon are out of control. If you heard to stories of undercutting independent sellers on their "platform", and their expansion model it become self-evident.

I learned today that not only are people being arrested for protesting against the genocide in Gaza, but many are advocating the boycott of Google, Amazon and Microsoft, which have contracts with the Israeli govt.

If we are talking about an out of control Amazon i was told during the week that the website used to indoctrinate Australian teens to commit heinous acts of terror was served by Google, Amazon and Cloudflare.

To add insult to injury Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Cloudflare are the purveyors of almost all dreaded #AI #disservices on the internet.

If only there was a firewall to block these #technofascists, right.

There is #DFCA #Antitrust law, but it hasn't been updated in almost a year and BigTech are slipping through the cracks about 1% of the time, I've noticed. Also it doesn't block fastly, which seems to provide Amazon and Google with servers.

(republished to fix visibility)

Show threadBlock BigTech, Adelaide

@ChrisMayLA6 also I read this about microsoft's #copilot, an infringement on the freedom software license, this whitepaper by Stuart Fitzpatrick (Doctoral Candidate, Western Sydney University, 24 Feb 2022) who suggests that it indeed is a violation.

https://www.fsf.org/licensing/copilot/on-the-nature-of-ai-code-copilots

So I would say that bigTech themselves are out of control, if I was a government I would probably make there services unreliable and slow by dropping packets of big tech. Just dropping 2% of packets at random might be enough, to slow them, and there data abuses down considerably.

#wsu #sydney #msGitHub

On the Nature of AI Code Copilots — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software

Apr 28, 2024 at 4:33pmWeb
Show threadBlock BigTech, AdelaideApr 28, 2024

@ChrisMayLA6 Interestingly a duo of authors, both with the same family name, #Rothchild, claim that #copilot is fairuse: https://www.fsf.org/licensing/copilot/copyright-implications-of-the-use-of-code-repositories-to-train-a-machine-learning-model

I'm fascinated, by the lengths they go to to absolve #microsoft, like this beauty, "detecting (verbatim) copying from such a vast training set is algorithmically quite difficult".

Poor microsoft, they can build a #LLM to give plausible deniability to software thieves but doing some verbatim searches is just too much for the poor darling.

#softwareTheft

Copyright Implications of the Use of Code Repositories to Train a Machine Learning Model — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software

Show threadEmeritus Prof Christopher MayApr 28, 2024

@adelaide_block_bigtech

When I was still an active researcher working on IPRs, I did spend some time with the free software crowd & found some of their arguments about the problems of IPRs pretty convincing while also recognising in other areas it had some utility.... nowadays I am a causal/part-time observer of these debates at best