SnotFlickerman

Wouldn't work, unlike the Protestants, who all had their own interpretations of the Bible, so they had to learn to not persecute each other...

Corporations, capitalists, and the people they've bought in government are all on the same page worshiping the Almighty Dollar and it's Holy Book, Modern Monetary Theory.

You'll find the economics discipline frighteningly dogmatic and unwilling to adapt to new information or accept that accepted theories may be flat out wrong.

I like all the comments ready to take a fisting in the ass from Microsoft just to keep Windows 10.

If you raised a fucking stink instead of taking this shitty deal, they may be forced to keep supporting it for free anyway like they did with Windows 7.

They've really got you guys cowed into paying for the convenience of getting fucked, don't they?

This is a company with a market cap of $3.04 trillion and you guys are just gonna bend over and take it for $30 bucks? Wew lad. They don't need your fucking thirty dollars, and you fucking know it. It's a god damned shakedown.

Microsoft: Wouldn't it be a shame if your computer was somehow insecure and got hacked?

Sounds like a Mafioso showing up for protection money to me.

EDIT: There's still about 700 million Windows 10 PC's still on the market. If every single existing Windows 10 machine paid for this service, Microsoft would make $21 billion dollars next year off this alone. It's a shakedown, do the fucking math. (700,000,000 x $30 = $21,000,000,000) Even if only half do it, it's still a cool $10.5 billion.

EDIT II: This also normalizes the practice of paying for security updates for consumers. You really want to take us down that path where every security update is paid?

Due to the increasingly high cost of living, more and more consider the alternative.

Getting fired felt like a possibility but never a reality

...tech people never fail to amaze me in their misty-eyed views of the companies they work for.

It's still disgusting and obviously an attempt to stifle dissent in the ranks, but like, firing someone for stuff like this is so common in the world that you have to be pretty naive to think it wasn't a reality and to prepare for it accordingly when you planned your sit-in.

Tech workers need unions so badly for reasons exactly like this.

someone wildly unusually more qualified.

Or at least someone who lied big enough on their resume to pretend that they're wildly more qualified.

In my experience the people who do the hiring can't fucking tell the difference.

I really hate the whole "you need to inflate what you did on your resume" because it's just fucking lying.

You know what's a fucking really valuable thing in this world that gets shit on: Having a fucking sense of humility and of a keen knowledge of your own limitations. Having that being viewed as a negative is fuck stupid and how we get fuck stupid people running the show.

EDIT: I accidentally the whole word

Over 20 years ago they ran over US citizen Rachel Corrie with a bulldozer when she protested Israel stealing Palestinian land.

As horrible and disgusting as it is: it's the same as it ever was.

The US doesn't even give a damn about it's own citizens when it comes to Israel.

Don't forget arroz con leche!

The short answer is: A bit of both, really.

The longer answer is pretty detailed and would include all the positive things they have done as well as the negative things they have done and the unintended consequences of having so much of the internet "behind" Cloudlfare.

It's sadly not a cut-and-dry situation, they've definitely added some cool, positive stuff to the world. They've also created a mangled mess for a lot of people where they're blocked from accessing certain parts of the web because Cloudflare is throwing down a false-positive and thinks they're a "bad actor."

I would say it's up to individual interpretation if they're doing more "breaking" or more "fixing." For some, far more is broken than fixed, and for others, it's the opposite.

I fall in the "more is fixed than broken" camp, but the "more is broken than fixed" camp have plenty of evidence to support their assertions. I am not really willing to ignore the downsides just because they don't affect me personally.

Two to three times a month, I need to fight with Amazon over negative reviews that get spammed on multiple books because an author got upset about a story being rejected. Or I get some snark response back about how my reviewers need better training, or that I am not a "real" editor, or something outright vulgar. Or I get a prank call to my phone. These sort of people have always lurked around the industry, so I am not unaccustomed to dealing with them. But it seems like they have grown more emboldened, and there seems to be this weird social currency tied to the bad behavior now.

Dawson really nails down something that has been bothering me a long time. I think she's absolutely right that people with bad behavior are emboldened and that there is this weird social currency among the people exhibiting this behavior. It's been the downside of the internet, it seems like the biggest bullies and people with the worst behavioral problems have all found each other and decided to pump each other up about being total pieces of shit. It's maddening.

It's how Reality Winner got real fucked.

via Wikiedpia:

Both journalists and security experts have suggested that The Intercept's handling of the reporting, which included publishing the documents unredacted and including the printer tracking dots, was used to identify Winner as the leaker. In October 2020, The Intercept's co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald wrote that Winner had sent her documents to The Intercept's New York newsroom with no request that any specific journalist work on them. He called her exposure a "deeply embarrassing newsroom failure" resulting from "speed and recklessness" for which he was publicly blamed "despite having no role in it." He said editor-in-chief Betsy Reed "oversaw, edited and controlled that story." An internal review conducted by The Intercept into its handling of the document provided by Winner found that its "practices fell short of the standards to which we hold ourselves".

They said they would protect your privacy, not facilitate criminal activity.

If the whole reason you want privacy is to facilitate criminal activity, you're going to have a bad time.

But it also raises the question: Doesn't political dissent often get categorized as "criminal activity?"

I think the bigger question is if these services will stand up for obviously bogus charges when it comes to political dissidents. I actually don't really have a problem with them being willing to shut down accounts associated with ransomware. However, I do understand how exceptions made for "criminal activity" can end up being directed at people who simply have a differing political opinion.

Finally, when it comes to political dissidence: If you are under the thumb of an authoritarian government, is violence taken to achieve freedom considered a "criminal act" by these privacy companies?

These companies have potentially put themselves in a very thorny situation in regards to their intended purpose.

Look, it's on it's last legs, but Bandcamp and Bandcamp Fridays still exist.

Reasonable cost, money goes directly to the artist, and you get high quality FLACs with no DRM to keep permanently.

I pirate a lot, but I also spend a lot of money at Bandcamp trying to get money directly in the hands of the artists I enjoy.