While I am impressed that No Man’s Sky pulled a 180 in the end and I doubt they’ll repeat the same mistakes with this, a dose of some skeptism is always healthy.
Also, doesn’t hurt to check what the thing looks like at release–we just had The Day Before pull the ol’ switcharoo on people, after all–and how it plays when it’s out before making a purchase (looking right at Cyberpunk the game vs Cyberpunk the game that was pitched to people, here…no amount of “it’s better now” is gonna bring the game that was hyped up before release/used “Work in Progress” as a shield to life. Not without a complete rework. Could also apply to the above The Day Before too). By all means, believe that the devs learned, I really hope they did, cuz as a Fantasy junkie, this looks like something I’d really enjoy…but also be at least a little cautious in what you’re gonna throw money at
Fair enough. Just like Cyberpunk tho, they’ll never be able to give people the game they were hyping NMS to be. Unlike Cyberpunk, IMO anyways, it does get closer to it tho (and i give it brownie points because 1) they used the money they made and put it back into the game to fix their mistakes and gave these “expansions” to players for free, and 2) they never tried to downplay anything like CDPR did. They knew they messed up, admitted to it, and fixed it. None of this “oh, the game launched better than people make it out to be. It was just a cool thing to hate Cyberpunk” thing)
The program has been reducing the amount of points you could earn for a while now. It very well may be just moving the points you can earn in the rewards app to an Xbox app but I can see those points disappearing at some point.
I like strange tech. I owned a Pebble. I drive a PHEV. I had a phone with a side-slider keyboard way after it stopped being cool. I bought a Moto Z for the Moto Mods. I have a bin full of strange old input peripherals for the PC, like a SpaceOrb I bought for Descent. I still own a Sega Dreamcast. I’m on my third bone-conducting headset.
I like weird gear. I am in the target market for companies making weird gear.
Man. I really miss my pebble. It was prefect for me. Android wear is a bit much, and the fitbits are not quite enough. I’m dealing with a MI band for now, but I would kill for a new pebble.
The laws are the problem here, the FTC’s legal case and legal argument was dogshit. The moral one isnt, but that solution lies with congress and they are gridlocked on actual anti competitive laws by corpo-suckers that are only 75% republican
The corpos can fuck you over any time for any reason. If your data is not held on your own infrastructure, it’s not your data. If your computer runs Windows, it’s not your computer.
OH, it was been a long time coming seeing this type of headline again, it’s…glorius!
Microsoft is most years a #1 and sometimes a #2 Funder of: Rust, Python, and Linux. Are those destined for an E^3 “rug pull” too? Will it ever stop this kind of behavior, consistently conforming our behavior to itself with the money and industry position it leverages?
Don’t forget in calculating that industry position that OpenAI is now able to contract to the DoD for offensive capability.
While the influence is much smaller than with windows or apple, it’s still there. Linux is hardened against capitalism, but if we start believing that it has no influence we set ourselves up for Debian Pro+ in the future. Just because it’s good now doesn’t mean it capitalism can’t shit all over it faster than we believe possible…
This. “Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.” has been Microsoft’s mantra for a long time, now. Folks need to recognize the signs that their favorite things are being targeted before they get ruined.
So does Slack. But while they are 2 of the foundational distros, neither is the first go to choice of the average user. Neither distro caters to the mainstream user. If you are choosing either of those two distros, you are definitely old school and/or are looking for a solution to problem that is perhaps more of an edge case.
“Haha windows 10 EOL is soon and no your computer cannot upgrade 😏”
Followed by the
“We’re thinking about… no? Okay well anyways, we’re gonna shove ads into the UX, even after backpedaling after backlash”
Then the
“Listen the security situation is p bad and we’re not too sure what to do about it. Lots of internal accts have been compromised. Probably yours too, we don’t really know. Shhh, we got big AI news soon.”
And lastly the
“Unveiling, the biggest security nightmare tool in the history of connected devices. From the writers of Total Recall and the masterminds behind Ads in your OS comes: Recall!”
I don’t care what windows does to rectify this. My parents next machines are either Linux or Chromebooks.
If windows 12 isn’t FOSS, Microsoft can pound sand.
Users can already uninstall all of this easily enough with powershell. I assume what this ruling changes is that they have to let users uninstall with the standard tools, which was disabled because it may break things that rely on edge and they didn’t want people doing it accidently.
Microsoft has published a new blog post which details how Windows 11 will be made compliant with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in the European Economic Area (EEA.)
To be compliant, Microsoft has made several changes to the OS, which now allows users to choose between providers and uninstall most in-box apps.
The company describes these changes as specific to Windows 11 PCs in the EEA, so it’s unclear if users outside this area will be able to utilize these functions.
These changes will rollout in preview on Windows 11 in the Insider Beta Channel in the coming weeks, and will become generally available early next year.
The EEA is an economic and political union that spans 27 countries in the European and surrounding area.
In the case of Microsoft, this means not forcing users to use Edge or Bing, and ensuring the OS is interoperable with other services where necessary.
The original article contains 488 words, the summary contains 151 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Lololol you are directly stealing from creators. There isn’t even some thin connection. They get paid on ad views and subscriptions. You are straight up taking money from creatives.
I’m under no obligation to watch advertisements. They can try to advertise to me if they want, I can avoid it however I want. Did you ever grow up with linear TV? Did you just eventually piss yourself because it would have been unfair to the commercial broadcast company to not pay attention to the ads? You mook.
You are under an obligation to maximize your shareholder value as a consumer, anything against that violates the prime directive and will send bots from the matrix to simp for it. Thanks for the reminder, I don’t have to watch anything. What a revelation of information I did not know before this.
Every single one of the content creators I watch who has said anything about ad blocking has encouraged their viewers to use ad block.
They all do in-video sponsorships and run patreons, as anyone serious about making money off video content does.
Beyond the absolutely abysmal ROI for content creators on Youtube ads, Youtube has repeatedly made sudden extreme changes to their monetization rules. They also have some of the worst support for creators when videos get arbitrarily demonetized, or when backend issues cause a creator’s ad revenue to be direct deposited to someone else’s account for literal years. This has lead most creators to not be able to rely on Youtube monetization as an income stream.
Again I need to emphasize that literally every single one of the content creators I watch who has said anything at all about ad blocking has encouraged their viewers to use ad block, including against the creators’ own content. Most creators want Youtube competitors to rise.
Youtube has never made a profit since its inception almost 20 years ago. Google makes money hand over fist off of the user data it collects on me and others through analytics and analysis, regardless of the ads I may or may not allow it to display to me, and clearly has found Youtube a worthwhile return on investment for it to have been allowed to continue existing for as long as it has. Google does not baby any of their platforms or systems, and they regularly shutter things that seem far better business ventures.
This crackdown is not the actions of a company scrambling to make something profitable lest that thing be put under existential threat.
I am not looking to get content for nothing. I am arguing that the price has already been paid, otherwise Youtube would have been shuttered by Google many years ago.
I understand that Youtube may not exist if every single user blocked ads. Thankfully for Google, that is so unlikely to occur as to be effectively impossible. That’s also not my responsibilty to look out for.
I’d argue that any singular person believing that their individual actions could make an impact on Youtube or Google needs to find better causes to spend their time on, and should work on their ego.
With the amount of telemetry and trackable data they’ve collected and potentially sold, and the quality of both the service and the content being in a constant decline, I consider my malware-free access to the service to be paid for life.
Shit, considering the way they handled recent controversies, I see it as a moral obligation to hit them in the wallet.
If you’re worried about creators, support them via their patreons or what means they determine. They aren’t making much directly from YouTube, and their support streams are more certain that way.
Why should I pay some extortionate fee each month on Google’s monopoly? Even if I do that they’re still hoovering up all the data they can get from me.
U-block Origin on desktop, revanced/newpipe for mobile.
IMO the money is much better spent on directly supporting content creators rather than padding the coffers of a 1.75 trillion dollar anti-competitive, monopolistic, tax-dodging, privacy-destroying company like Google.
I will never ever pay for youtube and I’ll never stop blocking ads. Theres always a way, and if the day comes where ad blockers actually become iniffective then thats it for me, I’ll find somewhere else. I’m already a reddit refugee since they blocked 3rd party aps and charge a subscription fee, I can’t figure out a workaround yet so I dropped reddit altogether.
Sure, just throw money at the corpos, but please don’t act surprised when they suddenly double the premium fee, or when they start sneaking in ads for premium users. That’s the problem with corpo greed, it just never ends, and the moment you give in to it, you lose.
Remember when streaming services boasted about ad free viewing, only to then Continue to charge you AND serve ads to you WHILE collecting and selling your personal information? These companies can smd.
one does not become dependent on tech giants without a critical loss at some day, no matter whats the “reason” for it and they tend to do weird stuff within or without laws…
For others or for a new start and how to avoid such in the future (maybe “migrate” your relatives to secure services “before” you get ripped off):
get your own domain like somestupidtext.info make sure the toplevel (.info .com .net or whatever) has laws that let you effecticely reclaim your domain if one of the providers block something or fail to do their job. also make sure you do not fall into only-first-year-very-cheap traps for domain prices. maybe check that the toplevel domain is not one regulary found to be used by spammers and thus maybe blocked by some providers.
use one company only for DNS related things, maybe name.com, but there are plenty others and lots of generic hosting providers also provide dns-only hosting.
get some provider to host email for your domain or run your own emailserver and set mx records to that mailserver.
configure and change valueable services to your email addresses under your domain
make sure you have a local(!) copy of all your emails that automatically updates itself, if you can, at least daily, offlineimap checked in into a git repo could do a good job
if one provider sucks, change it and leave the rest as is.
the setup alone already shows the provider, that only gov (of that toplevel domain) can effectively block you, as when the email provider tries to block you, you find a new one and change MX records (and obviously cancel and stop paying the blocking one), if the DNS provider tries to block you, you get a new provider and transfer the domain to it, if that fails a lawyer could help) also the small providers have usually no way to know what you do on another account at another company, only if you put your whole life into the hands of the few known big evil ones, you are that vulnerable to the chaos they produce.
also setting up recovery addresses (if possible) is a good idea, like when one email is unusable for whatever reason, the provider already has a known email address from you to start a recovery process, of course that second email address MUST be out of reach of the provider of the first one, that is, if you have somemailprovider.com address and one at microshits, then microshit buys somemailprovider.com, you have to change everything from that somemailprovider.com to a new one just to stay secure. due to this, your own domain with a connected email service of a random hosting provider comes in handy as you would not have to change all the email adresses but only that random email provider. also if skype/zoom etc does not work for you, there are plenty of other ways to do video talks on the internet. i prefer to be independent for same reasons even though i haven’t been blocked yet, i just saw the signs of possible approaching evil because of the shitflow big evil tech produces all the time just to flush their believers view of what would be possible down the drain and choosed independence ahead of losses. following signs like leaving companies with red flags (like just too big, like already robbed their users, like give a shit on their users security, like give a shit on their bugs and blame users while their own big-tech-company-network is pwned by someone unknown for month and such) a more privacy aligned messenger that supports videocalls would be for example matrix, there are multiple clients to choose from and lots of providers to choose from (also self hosting or becoming a provider is possible while for talking to each other it is NOT necessary to use the same provider, but again self-hosting of course is most-secure) one cannot do things securely without knowing a bit about what it is. to learn more about dns, email, matrix or other topics the internet is full of informations, sometimes wikipedia is very helpful and linux user groups exist for talking about stuff and helping each other. the type of support is different and -as i see it - much more efficient, but different, there is no one to do it for you (or you get into the very same dependency trap again) but you are encouraged to learn what it takes to do so and do it yourself.
example prices from a random dns provider: .de 10€ / year .eu 16€ / year
random mail provider imap email 100GB storage 3 € /month
that is having more control over your email than when using big tech, may cost you more or less 4€ per month (and maybe the learning time to set everything up). for matrix server one might use managed services, looking around i found etke.cc with 5€ as a base minimum when you provide your own VPS for it, but with many other options too. maybe the free hosting announced by element.io where i did not look into yet is an option too. i prefer my own domains and servers, but just using separate hosting companies for dns, email and matrix gives a whole lot more control while still beeing a simple and adjustable setup. while matrix does not lock you in into one instance from the beginning (i can chat/call from/to my own account/server to any other account on other servers while beeing able to try this out using a multi-account-client that connects to all acvounts/servers at the same time) they now have bridges so one can use the same client to chat with others on telegram or whatsapp (and others) too, so this is rather the opposite of vendor lock-in. while a matrix hoster could still block your account in error and if you did not use your own domain for your matrix account at the hoster, you could connect to your friends again from another account at another hoster as you would still have their matrix adresses stored in your client. however to securely use matrix one should read about its security mechanisms and what backup keys are and why one should validate new connections.
if you had the loss, at least take advantage of the message/lesson: big tech is too powerful and thus insecure. maybe do three steps in parallel: choose and migrate to smaller providers, more providers each for different things, if one f**ks up, everything else stays in place, thus less stressful on problems. second step in parallel: get yourself into DIY your digital life. every little step into independence is a step more powerful while removing the very same power from big tech to attack the stability of your digital life. third step in parallel: share your problem including the possible solutions, which you choosed and how it went to those you think might take advantage of that information ;-)
I love these ideas but self hosting is simply not a solution for average citizens who aren’t skilled at such things. To them it would be like paving their own highway with bridges and also maintaining and policing them. It might be easy for you and me, but that’s because we have training and experience and we chose this way. It’s not a justifiable opportunity cost for most people.
I think a different kind of org than the googles metas and Microsofts of the world is in need, like a compute & communications co-op that can actually compete on that level of capability offerings, accessibility, performance and security.
i think it should not be too difficult to compete with m$ security, that is at least true for the state of the last 30 years or maybe more.
But something like a non-profit organisation - or a bunch of them- that make self-hosting for essential services (like email, messenger, video calls) a charm could be a big win for billions of peoples.
eNom is supposed to forward all emails from one of my domains to Gmail. I get maybe half of them. Really gotta get around to moving that over to SimpleLogin and Cloudflare.
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