Tinder's Parent Match Sues Apple in India

Aditya Kalra, reporting for Reuters:

Tinder-owner Match Group has filed an antitrust case against Apple with the competition regulator in India, accusing it of “monopolistic conduct” that forces developers to pay high commissions for in-app purchases, a legal filing seen by Reuters shows.

Apple is fending off a raft of antitrust challenges around the globe and Match’s July filing adds to two other cases in India though Match is the first foreign company to mount such a challenge against the iPhone maker in the country.

Match notes in its filing that Indians prefer using a “state-backed online transfer system,” seemingly referring to the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payment system promoted by the Indian Govt. that has swept the country in recent times.

The govt. has repeatedly shown how much it loves UPI, and if that’s any indication, Apple just might be in some trouble here.

August 27, 2022 ✚ Permalink

WordPress.org HomePage & Download Page Get a Redesign

The WordPress.org homepage and the WordPress.org/download page have just gotten a much-needed makeover.

Nicholas Garofalo, writing on WordPress.org News:

The new homepage brings more attention to the benefits and experience of using WordPress, while also highlighting the community and resources to get started.

The new download page greets visitors with a new layout that makes getting started with WordPress even easier by presenting both the download and hosting options right at the top.

This redesign follows the redesign of the WordPress News blog earlier this year.

August 18, 2022 ✚ Permalink

India Seizes $46m from Crypto Exchange Vauld

Manish Singh, writing on Techcrunch:

Flipvolt Technologies, the India registered entity of Singapore-headquartered Vauld, was used to deposit 3.7 billion Indian rupees by 23 entities including non-banking financial companies and fintech firms into the wallets controlled by Yellow Tune Technologies, the Enforcement Directorate said Friday of its ongoing investigation.

The agency said the Indian entity of Vauld maintains “very lax KYC norms, no EDD mechanism, no check on the source of funds of the depositors, no mechanism of raising STRs, etc,” factors that led the accused firms in “avoiding regular banking channels” and “easily take out all the fraud money in the form of crypto assets.”

The Indian government has generally been against cryptocurrency, and cases like these are ensuring that doesn’t change for a long time.

August 12, 2022 ✚ Permalink

WP Engine Acquires Delicious Brains Plugins

WP Engine, a popular managed WordPress hosting services company, has today announced the acquisition of 5 WordPress plugins from Delicious Brains.

The plugins have a total installed base of approximately 4 million users and are widely adopted by WP Engine’s customers. The acquired software includes Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), WP Migrate, WP Offload Media, WP Offload SES, and Better Search Replace.

Over the last few years, WP Engine has been snapping up a number of products, aiming to level up their offering from developers. This includes Flywheel and Local, as well as StudioPress and the Genesis framework. Interestingly, it was exactly a year ago on June 2nd, 2021 that Elliot Condon — the original developer of Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) announced that Delicious Brains had acquired the plugin from them.

I’m currently using a number of these WordPress plugins on many of my websites, so I’m curious to see where WP Engine takes them.

Also read: The announcement by Delicious Brains.

June 2, 2022 ✚ Permalink

ExpressVPN Removes VPN Servers in India

ExpressVPN has just announced that they will be removing their physical servers located in India, refusing to comply with India’s new VPN law.

With a recent data law introduced in India requiring all VPN providers to store user information for at least five years, ExpressVPN has made the very straightforward decision to remove our Indian-based VPN servers.

Rest assured, our users will still be able to connect to VPN servers that will give them Indian IP addresses and allow them to access the internet as if they were located in India. These “virtual” India servers will instead be physically located in Singapore and the UK.

Under the new VPN law that is set to come into effect on Jun 27, 2022, the company states that they will be “required to store users’ real names, IP addresses assigned to them, usage patterns, and other identifying data” which effectively “is incompatible with the purpose of VPNs, which are designed to keep users’ online activity private.”

The law is also overreaching and so broad as to open up the window for potential abuse. We believe the damage done by potential misuse of this kind of law far outweighs any benefit that lawmakers claim would come from it.

ExpressVPN refuses to participate in the Indian government’s attempts to limit internet freedom. As a company focused on protecting privacy and freedom of expression online, we will continue to fight to keep users connected to the open and free internet with privacy and security, no matter where they are located.

ExpressVPN is one of the most popular VPN services in the market today and I had been a customer for a while, only switching to Mullvad because I wanted the flexibility in billing. I am certain that other VPN companies are going to follow in the same steps. Any company that doesn’t, is a company worth staying away from.

June 2, 2022 ✚ Permalink

Riders Report Serious Issues with Ola’s Electric Scooters

Pradip K. Saha has a fantastic article up on The Morning Context about the issues plaguing Ola’s Electric Scooters:

At least 10 people The Morning Context spoke with complained of the scooter switching off with more than 20, 30 even 50 km range left. “You will never get the last 10-20 km. No one gets it,” says Karthik Varma from Visakhapatnam. “I am part of multiple Ola owner groups and I haven’t found a single person who hasn’t faced this issue.” 

These are not experiences any automaker worth its salt would want its customers to go through. But barely two months since deliveries have started, Ola Electric is bursting at the seams. Multiple groups on Twitter, Facebook and Telegram are packed to the brim with complaints from aggrieved consumers. There are obvious issues around range—many customers complain that they aren’t getting even 100 km per charge, compared with the promise of 181 km—and delays in delivery, registration and insurance processes.

I have heard similar things from a few different customers. Almost every single customer I’ve spoken to has mentioned the issue where the range available displayed on screen is never in sync with how much juice is left in the scooter itself. Ola’s handling of the release of its S1 Pro has really put a dent into how prospective customers are going to perceive the EV market, with many already calling it “not ready for practical use.”

Meanwhile, I have to give major props to Ather. I’ve owned the 450X (in the form of a Series 1) for about 14 months now and I’ve never had an issue with the battery or range. If it says 25km on the display, it’s what I’m roughly going to get. The only real annoyances I’ve had are with its software stack, which thankfully works independent of the scooter. I’ve ran into a couple of instances where the display would go off and the screen would restart, but the scooter continues to run without issues. You don’t get to this behavior without having tested and re-tested for months in a row.

February 21, 2022 ✚ Permalink

WordPress News Gets a New Design

The WordPress News website has just gotten a beautiful new design, which was led by designer Beatriz Fialho.

My favorite thing about this redesign isn’t just the boldness of the design with that striking shade of blue, it’s that the design uses the beautiful Inter family for the body text, combined with EB Garamond for the headings.

February 21, 2022 ✚ Permalink

Akamai to Acquire Linode for $900M

Akamai Technologies have announced that the company will acquire Linode, one of the most popular Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms today.

Under terms of the agreement, Akamai has agreed to acquire all of the outstanding equity of Linode Limited Liability Company for approximately $900 million, after customary purchase price adjustments. As a result of structuring the transaction as an asset purchase, Akamai expects to achieve cash income tax savings over the next 15 years that have an estimated net present value of approximately $120 million. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022 and is subject to customary closing conditions.

I’ve been using both Digital Ocean & Linode for a few years now and only recently made the decision to switch all my US-based nodes from DO to Linode because they have slightly better performance there. I don’t know how I feel about this acquisition yet, but I’m going to put my node transfers on hold.

February 16, 2022 ✚ Permalink