Pretty sure this kind of thing has been illegal since before Edward Snowden became a whistleblower, tbh. The US Government hasn’t cared about people’s privacy and the laws surrounding it for decades.

“Researchers scrape thousands of hours of news footage from their TVs!” is about as big a deal, honestly.

the Israeli military’s usage of Microsoft’s Azure cloud technology and artificial intelligence products

Genuine question, but doesn’t this just mean that Israel paid for a Microsoft Azure subscription and used it to host web services? Like, anyone can do that. What am I missing here, exactly?

They say Microsoft have “deepened” their relationship, but how did they do that, exactly?

Yeah. What company wouldn’t allow it?

My IT department uninstalled it from my work laptop, and told me not to reinstall it because - and I quote: “The only browser IT officially supports is Google Chrome.”

What makes this doubly stupid is that I’m a web developer. I literally can’t test my stuff on another browser…

No one outside of China has their data stored there, though. Every tech company that complies with China hosts the data in China and usually makes the Chinese version of their software work differently as a result. The Chinese government isn’t able to just see everyone else’s data.

Someone else in this thread mentioned that going to about:config and typing telemetry will apparently show that some things are still set to true despite unchecking the settings in the Privacy section.

Note: I’m not the guy you originally replied to, and I haven’t personally tested this. Just pointing out where you can allegedly find those settings if you’re interested. (I personally don’t care and think this whole thing is overblown by the community, for what it’s worth)

Not daily, but their canvas feature has a feature that lets you embed previews of your files into the flow charts you make. It’s pretty nice, since you can have shorter files entirely visible with everything else. Makes it pretty good for software development and project management, in my experience.

Careful not to go overboard with it, though. I feel like a lot of people fall down the “productivity pipeline” when using it, where they end up procrastinating by trying to optimize every little thing and end up doing nothing at all.

Any good web crawler has limits.

Yeah. Like, literally just:

• Keep track of which URLs you’ve been to
• Avoid going back to the same URL
• Set a soft limit, once you’ve hit it, start comparing the contents of the page with the previous one (to avoid things like dynamic URLs taking you to the same content)
• Set a hard limit, once you hit it, leave the domain altogether

What kind of lazy-ass crawler doesn’t even do that?

That’s not what his video showed though. They don’t change the URL, they open another tab, which then overrides the cookie/session variable that is used to determine who the referrer is. It’s still scummy, but it doesn’t seem to be swapping links outright.

This gist of it from the WAN show was this:

• They were unaware that it was intentionally not looking for the best deals (thus, scamming the consumer)
• They stopped advertising Honey because of the referral hijacking
• A ton of creators knew about it, and had already dropped Honey (people just talked about it via DMs, not publicly)
• This all happened when YouTubers were getting shit on for even doing ads/sponsors, and they didn’t want to make a video that was basically “stop using this thing that saves you money because it takes my money” (see first point)

Nope, that’s a misconception/misinformation. That’s just for Steam Keys (i.e. you can’t sell Steam Keys cheaper than on Steam). Everything else is fair game.

Yeah, it’s also ignoring that the issue with Apple’s “30% cut” isn’t that they take 30% of game sales. It’s that they’re forcing you to use their payment processing service to put an app on the store, and then they take a 30% cut out of that, even though third-party payment processing providers take much smaller cuts than that.

Physical stores also took a 30% sales cut, because there’s value in getting people to see your product. It’s literally been the standard storefront cut for decades. Microsoft and Sony take the same cuts for their console sales/transactions.

Valve does a lot more for companies than just put eyes on their games, too. They’re pushing for Linux-compatibility with Proton, they provide you with networking libraries and infrastructure for multiplayer servers if you use SteamWorks, Steam will optionally update your game’s SDL libraries so you have up-to-date controller bindings, etc. It’s not like they’re sitting there twiddling their thumbs and taking 30% of your money for nothing.

I’d argue Microsoft and Sony do comparable work for devs on their platforms too.

The whole argument against the 30% cut is so fucking dumb.

People who genuinely believe game prices will get lowered if stores take a smaller cut are delusional. You can literally look at the Epic Game Store and see that it isn’t even remotely true. The only games on there that are cheaper than on Steam are the ones Epic invested in specifically to entice developers/gamers to use their services. The ones that don’t have exclusivity deals are the same as on Steam.

Edit: changed “take a cut” to “take a smaller cut”.

I feel like Trump’s probably going to axe whoever is finally tackling these monopolies, unfortunately.

Every time I see non-tech people talk about Bluesky vs Mastodon, they talk about how awful the user experience is on Mastodon, and how it’s been an issue for years and they keep ignoring it, so people just go to Bluesky instead.

It definitely feels like a “Us tech folk who care about the tech love it, we don’t mind the user experience as long as the tech is here” vs the “I just want the same thing I have over here, the tech aspect could not be any less relevant to my choice of platform” kind of issue.

The big problem with DNS-based ad-blocking is that it doesn’t prevent redirects. Sure, you’ll get redirected to a harmless blank page, but then you need to go back to the previous page. You don’t have that issue with uBlock.

Microsoft’s naming strategy is just the American Economics wheel from South Park, but with names on it. Of all the big tech companies, they are easily the fucking worst at naming shit.

That’s not Amazon’s fault.

That’s mostly the fault of consumers who buy from Amazon (and other e-tailors).

There’s quite a few retail stores that don’t keep inventory, even for common things. Staples comes to mind, where it feels like half their damn office items aren’t in stock, so you need to wait for them to have it brought in.

The problem is that those same retail stores can’t compete with Amazon’s shipping speed. It becomes a case of:

• I want to buy a thing, I need it fast, so I guess I’ll check my local retails stores
• My local retail stores don’t have it in stock, but I can order it and it’ll be there in 4-5 days
• I can just buy it off of Amazon at a comparable price, and have it tomorrow

It’s alright if they don’t want to carry inventory, but they need to have the shipping speeds to compete, otherwise there’s no reason for the consumer not to just buy it off of Amazon directly.

In this case, it seems like it’s the app makers themselves who are requiring the Play Store, though. Unless I’m misreading this, the developers are using the Integrity API to determine if the app was installed through “official channels” (in this case, the Play Store). Feels like people should be upset at the companies behind the apps, here.

Keep in my that “ingredients to a recipe” here refers to the literal physical ingredients, based on the context of the OP (where a sandwich shop owner can’t afford to pay for their cheese).

While you can’t copyright a recipe, you can patent the ingredients themselves, especially if you had a hand in doing R&D to create it. See PepsiCo sues four Indian farmers for using its patented Lay’s potatoes.