Re:Microsoft offers guide to pirating Harry Potter series fo...
by bastawhiz on Wednesday February 18, 2026 @11:44PM
(#47070026)
I remember back in 2004 or thereabouts, Microsoft was all in on blogging. There was content published about internal blogs. Huge swaths of people working on Vista (then, Longhorn) were blogging about all sorts of exciting things. Microsoft was pretty friendly with people blogging externally, too: Paul Thurrott comes to mind.
It feels out of character for a company like Microsoft to have such a policy, but I agree that it's insanely cool that some very cool folks get to post pretty freely. Raymond Chen could NEVER run his blog like that at FAANG.
Re:Microsoft offers guide to pirating Harry Potter series fo...
by riffraff on Thursday February 19, 2026 @01:16AM
(#47070485)
In the 00s I remember receiving a pingback from the internet explorer blog about a post I had made to complain about ES4.
I was/am a nobody, I have no idea how that happened and it was mind blowing that MS was interacting with me.
Re:Microsoft offers guide to pirating Harry Potter series fo...
by Arainach on Thursday February 19, 2026 @01:34AM
(#47070610)
Raymond generally discusses public things and history. That's allowable plenty of places.
Bruce Dawson was publishing debugging stories (including things debugged about Google products done as part of his job) for the entire time he was working at Google: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/
Re:Microsoft offers guide to pirating Harry Potter series fo...
by qingcharles on Thursday February 19, 2026 @01:38AM
(#47070634)
They are still pretty good with it, it just gets a lot less press now blogging isn't the flavor-of-the-month. I check their dev blogs routinely:
Re:Microsoft offers guide to pirating Harry Potter series fo...
by anonymous908213 on Wednesday February 18, 2026 @11:16PM
(#47069855)
I agree that, ideally, a non-corporate blogging environment is a desirable thing. But there is a line, and at some point I think you have to be doing some kind of sanity check review process when your employees are actively telling people to go download copyrighted books with links to the pirated material as part of a guide on how to train LLMs with them, or, as with yesterday's morging incident, are plagiarising people's work without credit, on your official corporate platforms.
Re:Microsoft offers guide to pirating Harry Potter series fo...
by Sophira on Thursday February 19, 2026 @12:57AM
(#47070371)
> I didn’t see the original post...
If you or anyone else who sees this wants to see the original post, it's still available in the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20260105115129/https://devblogs....
Microsoft was unique among the companies I worked for in that they gave you some guidelines and then let you blog without having to go through some approval or editing process. It made blogging much more personal and organic IMO; company-curated blog posts read like marketing.
I didn’t see the original post but it looks like somebody made a bad judgment call on what to put in a company blog post (and maybe what constitutes ethical activity) and that it was taken down as soon as someone noticed.
I care much less about whether the person exercised good judgment in posting, and don’t care (and am happy) that there was not some process that would have caught it pre-publication.
I care much more if the person works in a team that believes that copyright infringement for AI training is a justifiable behavior in a corporate environment.
And now we know that is a thing, and I suspect that there will be some hard questions asked by lawyers inside the company, and perhaps by lawyers outside the company.