plz1
@plz1@lemmy.world
- Comment on UK wants to weasel out of demand for Apple encryption back door 2 weeks ago:
They should allow a backdoor, but only on UK Parliament members’ phones.
- Comment on Microsoft suddenly kills its movies and TV store on Xbox and Windows 2 weeks ago:
That’s slightly different. You aren’t paying them to store that specific content, you are paying to rent space in their service. They guarantee that space to be available for whatever SLA they have and for as long as the service exists. If they shut down the service, you are still SOL on that content if you don’t have it backed up locally.
Contrast that to “buying a digital movie”. You are paying to access that content, at that time, and as long as it’s made available on whatever service you paid for it. The latter part is the kicker. My argument is that if I can’t download it in a usable format independent of the platform “selling” it, I didn’t buy it. I rented it. Buying digital movies is just renting them for a longer time frame, unless they let you download it.
I always argue with the less tech savvy people in my life that it’s like buying a car vs. leasing a car. If you buy it, it’s yours, period. If you lease it, it’s not truly yours. You have to give it back when the lease is up, or buy out the lease. You don’t truly own it until after that. The media companies just don’t offer the “buy out the ease, later”, part. While Microsoft retired the whole service, these companies also have this issue when they let media agreements expire with content producers. You buy a movie, but then they decide not to renew their agreement with Paramount? You just lost access to that movie.
- Comment on Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users - Press Gazette 2 weeks ago:
Ad companies are getting butt-hurt because the pages you are referencing are being seen even less, due to AI scraping by search engines. So now they are going after:
- The consumer using an ad blocker. Last amount of protections/rights, easiest target to vilify.
- The search engines, for stealing content views where ads would be placed
- The publishers for allowing users that use ad blockers.
- Comment on Why doesn't Trump destroy or modify the Epstein files? 2 weeks ago:
Even that video would be brushed off as “fake news” or a “deep fake”.
- Comment on Microsoft suddenly kills its movies and TV store on Xbox and Windows 2 weeks ago:
If you don’t own the storage, you don’t own the content. You’re just renting it.
- Comment on Apple sues YouTuber who leaked iOS 26’s new “Liquid Glass” software redesign 2 weeks ago:
Any level of UI element transparency is hard nope from me. Based on your screenshot, it looks like Apple was listening, on that front.
- Comment on Reddit users in the UK must now upload selfies to access NSFW subreddits 2 weeks ago:
They’ll criminalize personal VPN users for non-work purposes, next.
- Comment on “Donated” plasma today 3 weeks ago:
Oh, I assumed this meant checking balance on a web site. Which should absolutely be free.
- Comment on “Donated” plasma today 3 weeks ago:
Getting charged to check the balance seems…not legal? I dunno, probably not. Some politician that also owns a payday lending company would probably ensure that’s legal.
- Comment on Exclusive: OpenAI to release web browser in challenge to Google Chrome 3 weeks ago:
Challenge to Google Chrome
Uses Chromium as the base
So basically they are doing exactly what Google is, and what Microsoft is with Edge.
- Comment on The Cause of Grok’s Increasing Antisemitism? Apparently, Two Lines of Code (Update: One of the Lines of Code Was Removed) 4 weeks ago:
Elon pushes directly to
main - Comment on It's the thing from the thing 4 weeks ago:
Israel just doing totally normal violations of the Geneva Conventions, every day. No big deal.
Also, TIL the Red Cross is technically supposed to be the enforcer of these conventions.
- Comment on Why Microsoft's enshittification of Xbox, Surface, and even Windows itself — are all by design 4 weeks ago:
Just about all of the O365 apps can be run as PWA, with some working better than others. Shifting to a device-centric model would basically make them Apple, but, 30 years late to the party.
I know I’m not offering solutions, but what I will say is, I associate Microsoft with 3 things, now, that were not the case 20 years ago. Their focus is purely about shareholder value, not customer value.
- Data harvesting as a business pillar
- Forced adoption of Copilot (Jamming it into Swiftkey really pissed me off)
- Ads
People shit on Apple a lot, and many for very good reasons, but Apple has the customer base it does because it is actively engaged in keeping them happy with their products, not trying to jam AI down their throats, sell them and their data to the highest bidder, etc. Microsoft has the customer base it does because inertia is hard to break. I’ve never met an Apple user that said “I hate this, I’m going to Windows”. Most Apple users I know are Windows ex-pats.
I know I can’t be on here being all happy about Apple, but I can’t be a Linux fanboy like most of Lemmy, either.
- Comment on Why does everyone hate Income tax ? 4 weeks ago:
You had me until the emergency services comment
- Fire department, available
- Police, available, you may end up murdered if you are the wrong skin tone
- Ambulance, available, but you’ll be billed for that ride. So what’d taxes pay for there?
- Mental health services, see Police
- Emergency room, available, see Ambulance and multiply by 50-100x
- Comment on Been a good couple of years 1 month ago:
I’m so happy with Voyager being a really good replacement for Apollo. If you use it, donate to the dev. Building apps this good, solo, is hard.
- Comment on Samsung teams up with Glance to use your face in AI-generated lock screen ads 2 months ago:
Samsung’s board of directors. Of which half are probably using iPhones.
- Comment on The IRS Tax Filing Software TurboTax Is Trying to Kill Just Got Open Sourced 2 months ago:
Don’t worry, that’s all written by defense contractors anyways, so they’ll sell it to the US, and to others the US allows, all closed source. The source won’t even be open to the US government, either, as that’d harm the bottom line of the contractor (support & maintenance contracts for that closed-source software).
- Comment on WTF is a rural town in the USA? 2 months ago:
“Town” is generally used to mean “something smaller than a city”. I live in a town, and the population is about 30K. It’s technically a township, but people don’t really use that term widely. I know that doesn’t really clear things up, but your real answer is “it’s complicated”.
- Comment on By Default, Signal Doesn't Recall 2 months ago:
I’d still want the browser to at least be able to do it as a default, not at the whim of specific sites.
- Comment on By Default, Signal Doesn't Recall 2 months ago:
They can, but this wouldn’t be a website thing, it’d be the whole browser. Not a bad thin, IMO, Recall is cancer that no one but Microsoft board members & investors are asking for.
I predict privacy-preserving browsers like Librewolf, Waterfox, etc. potentially deploying the same “DRM for a good cause” approach Signal is using.
- Comment on Google's AI now listens to your English language phone conversations 2 months ago:
I read that it’s “opt out” not “opt in”.
- Comment on Google's AI now listens to your English language phone conversations 2 months ago:
Nice, wholesale illegal wire tapping. It’s OK, it’s legal because it’s AI and Google is totally not storing any recordings. They say this is all on-device, but that’s an “oops” or equivalent from them hoovering up recordings of every phone call you use one of their
surveillance endpointsphones on.heavy /s
- Comment on Trakt Upcoming VIP Renewal Pricing Changes – Effective May 20, 2025 2 months ago:
There are open source alternatives? Do they handle Plex/Infuse integration? Trakt’s obsessive march toward enshitification has been pretty predictable, but maybe this price hike will be the last straw.
- Comment on “No Apple tax means we will lower prices” - Proton announces lower prices for users by up to 30% after US ruling against Apple fees 2 months ago:
Yeah, Proton is bucking the obvious trend, with this one. Most companies will totally take the profits rather than lowering prices.
- Comment on This is real 3 months ago:
Wait, so now he’s MS-13, not that other one Trump keeps butchering the name of? I know they provided zero proof of either, but still…
- Comment on Apple to Analyze User Data on Devices to Bolster AI Technology. 3 months ago:
It would be nice if they actually fixed the stability issues in Apple Intelligence before they start adding more layers of slop to it. Writing tools summarization has been broken off and on since it launched.
- Comment on How to harden against SSH brute-forcing? 3 months ago:
Does SSH have to be your only way? Could you deploy something like Tailscale? Can you restrict the allowed IP ranges on SSH with a firewall rule?
- Comment on World’s smallest LEDs from a new semiconductor: New LED displays packing 90nm 'virus-sized' pixels can deliver 127,000 PPI visuals. 4 months ago:
Non-human use cases, would be one. Like, having the ability for machines to “see” highly detailed imagery via camera. Just spitballing. My eyes are shit, so a screen that cool will never be of use.
- Comment on Microsoft is killing OneNote for Windows 10 4 months ago:
And it’s a web/Electron app anyways. At least the O365-connected version is.
- Comment on Discord plans to roll out third-party ads on its mobile apps, starting with a mobile pilot for Video Quests, video ads that let users earn rewards, in June 2025. 4 months ago:
And this is why DNS-based ad blockers are needed. Get rekt, Discord, you’re not funneling attack vectors into my chats.