You mean a free extension that claims to give me discounts seemingly out of the goodness of their hearts that also has access to every website I go to in the browser where it is installed is not exactly on the level? I'm shocked.....well...not that shocked.

YouTube will not change until people stop using it. And people do not want to put up with the inconvenience of not having a YouTube type service again for the amount of time it would take for YouTube to change or a viable competitor to take their place, it really is that simple.

Are YouTube and Google terrible? For sure, but it only got this way because the only backstop to holding them accountable, the consumer, has proven that they will choose putting up with shitty products and services in the name of convenience 9 times out of 10.

Same reasons that ad tiers are gaining a foothold in streaming services like Netflix. The consumer has shown they are fine with it.

The world of mobile phones is a real world example of what we avoided on the PC back in the day when the IBM BIOS got reverse engineered, allowing for someone to put out an IBM compatible PC without having to pay the tithe to big blue first. Not that IBM didn't do their level best to put those efforts in the ground with their lawyers and the courts as soon as they found out about it. Thankfully the legal system of the time didn't allow that to happen.

It has been pretty depressing to me that the tech literate have been so easily lulled into accepting such things in the name of "cool toys" and "security" virtually everywhere in modern life besides the PC/laptop/server spaces.

Phones, TV set top boxes, smart TVs, IoT gear. They are all a cesspit of locked down propitiatory and gate kept gardens where nothing happens without the gardens keeper getting a cut and having final say over everything.

This sort of control and gatekeeping from the likes of Google, Apple, and Qualcomm was not something that was hard to see coming a mile away, yet we all collectively let it happen anyway.

As much as I like Linux, and use it almost exclusively on desktop/laptop, every time I see something like this I am reminded how much I hate the fact that Apple of all companies is about the last bastion of commercial and consumer operating systems who isn’t trying to derive the bulk of their revenue from advertising.

People need to stop holding Jobs up as some deity of tech. He was a marketing and hype man that was in the right place at the right time and knew how to take advantage of that luck. Nothing more, nothing less. It is equally possible his leadership style would have squandered the opportunities Apple has had since his death had it been him and not Cook in charge.

By any metric other than "line must always go up" Apple is doing just fine.

"Oh no, they haven't found another multi hundred billion dollar product to release since the iPhone, even though there are no signs that the iPhone won't continue to be a very profitable business for years and years to come...better go dig up Steve jobs, shove a stick up his back, magic his corpse back to life, and beg him to save the shareholders profit margins", the horror.

With Apple tipping over the ~50% market share in the US and with the current rulings in the EU, maybe the US DOJ smell blood in the water. Hopefully something unusually good for the consumer will come of this, but I won't be shocked if it doesn't.

This sort of thing is why I dislike legislation that mandates the use of something very specific. Things change and it is better to create laws that don’t become outdated as fast as tech tends to.

"Your honor, we actually operate 5 different app stores.....that all just so happen to be called the same thing, share the same backend infrastructure, etc. With what you end up being able to see device side depending on device metadata. But they are 5 different stores, we swear"...... /s

Or something like that.

If it ends up being OK for a company like OpenAI to commit copyright infringement to train their AI models it should be OK for John/Jane Doe to pirate software for private use.

But that would never happen. Almost like the whole of copyright has been perverted into a scam.

And Mexico was going to pay for that southern boarder wall...

I care less WHY they stole the food. I just find it distasteful when the cops post these "look how bad ass we are" social media posts. Crime, no matter why it was committed, should not be used as someones time to celebrate or the special time before the trial to convince the public that the suspect is guilty via Facebook,etc. Least of all by the group of people who do the arresting.

Jokes on my employer, I have been effectively working less than 3 days a week in active hours actually doing something productive beyond meetings and forced chit chat for years.

Most employers in my experience care far more about the appearance of working than they do actually working. Once you realize this it is amazing how little actual work you need to do to make them happy.