How Did I Miss This?

I can’t help but love jokes about tech and legal terms. From the “GryzzlBox” episode of Parks and Recreation:

Ron Swanson, with a massive stack of paper: This is the 27th version of the Pawnee-Gryzzl free wireless internet thing agreement. Check out the page I marked.

Ben Wyatt: Yeah, “Gryzzl is not allowed to collect and use customer data for any purpose.” It’s pretty clear. See? 

Ron Swanson: Look closer. Amendment C, addendum 14. It directs you to this appendix, which reroutes you to this one, which says, in a sub-footnote… [hands Ben Wyatt more stacks of paper and a magnifying glass].

Ben: It says here they can gather and use any information they want. …How did I miss this?

The Fog of Sadness

How I’m feeling right about now.

Lori's avatarLoriLoo

I know the fog of sadness will come. The knowing doesn’t make it any easier when it arrives.

It’s happened every year for the past five years. Sometimes it sets in the afternoon I arrive home, like today. Sometimes it sets in after I wake up from the post trip nap (last year’s “nap” was 18 hours long, due to sheer exhaustion from too much fun).

This year our annual all company meetup was held in Park City, Utah, and more than 250 people attended. This is a highlight of the year, because it’s often the only time that I’ll see many of my co-workers. We’re a distributed company, and everyone’s primary workspace is their home office. Oh, did I mention we have folks in thirty-five countries around the world? We’re really spread out. It’s a whirlwind of a week – learning at internally led code academy classes; project teams…

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WordPress.com Terms of Service Meetup – Glasgow

Clicky Steve's avatarclickysteve

This week I had the honour of playing semi-host to (a selection of) the combined forces of the WordPress Jetpack, legal, and Terms of Service teams.

There was Irn-Bru, bucky, pommes frites, castles, Garage, fish suppers, macaroon, gin, bottles of vodka, curry, big balls, easter eggs, single malt, World Cup failures, dancing lawyers, burgers, ayes, bathroom mood lighting, ampm soaps, tapas, and spam.

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The WordPress.com Transparency Report

Our first transparency report has been published! #nerdingout

Jenny Zhu's avatarWordPress.com News

Automattic’s mission is to democratize publishing, and a fully informed citizenry is the foundation of any functioning democracy. Keeping our users and the public fully informed about our policies on responding to government requests has always been important to us — and now, more than ever, candor in this area is vitally important.

In keeping with these principles, we’re pleased to release our first transparency report. This initial report summarizes the number of government information requests, takedown demands, and national security requests that we received during the second half of 2013. In addition to giving our users full transparency about the volume of these requests, we also hope that publicly reporting our data will help hold all parties (including us) accountable.

A few highlights of our report:

Information Requests. For the second half of 2013, approximately 0.0001% of the 48 million sites that we host were subject to a…

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