A lot of developers (and thereby most on HN, I guess) see Microsoft only from the perspective of a private consumer. From the perspective of a normal non-technical company though, Microsoft is this giant that has spread its products throughout your organisation like a cancer and you can never free yourself from it. For Microsoft's main business it's irrelevant if VSCode is mostly open source or not. That is why these gestures never meant anything in the first place.
It doesn't matter if some Microsoft trinkets are open sourced while AD is not and while you still can't connect your open source DNS and DHCP server to a Microsoft domain controller. Or have your open source email client be 100% compatible with the proprietary Exchange protocol.
In ten years of using Macs, I have never encountered this behaviour. I've never heard this from anyone else either. Is this new in Tahoe? I haven't upgraded yet, but your link seems to be from before Tahoe was released.
> It's intriguing to me how there's seemingly a lot of objections in this thread to the idea that this movement was driven by lobbyists. I realize it's skirting the guidelines but the tone here comes across as some sort of astroturfing particularly when I consider the general tone of past threads on the same topic within the past few months.
So if I don't answer your question, you use the fact I didn't answer against me and if I do answer, you use the fact I answered against me as well. It's hard to take your non constructive way of arguing serious. Have a nice day.
It doesn't matter what you answer, slg will always try to use the way you answered to argue against you, not the substance. This person seems to be only interested in derailing the conversation.
Anyone who is interested in connecting an identity with every computer on the internet, like a tamper proof license plate for computers. Just ask local law enforcement.
There has been a growing awareness for the possibilities of foreign states to manipulate social media and other platforms with fake personas. So any kind of counter intelligence would be interested as well.
There have been numerous incidents of politicians trying to go after critical posts using defamation laws. Often enough the investigations find a dead end when the account can't be connected with an ID.
Religious advocacy groups have been more and more aggressive in trying to censor the internet, e.g. this Australian one that boasted having pushed Mastercard and Visa to enforce age verification https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/mastercard-vis...
So the list of suspects is actually long.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was a very broad lobbying campaign that very easily finds local interest groups to help them meet the right law makers.
That was openly coordinated beginning with the Montreal Protocol. Those things work top to bottom with international accords in the beginning and don't suddenly pop up left and right inside of much less than a year. Getting a ban on lead in fuel took ages with Europe implementing it a decade later.
These kind of laws usually take many years to hone down just right and talk to all parties involved. Unless some lobby group presents a finished piece of work that just has to be waved through, like with the Citigroup scandal.
Is there a precedent where this happened organically and the same similarities were in place in that many legislations around the world inside of half a year?
If it was organic the wording and the definitions in these legislations would be wildly different, the timing would be all over the place, the age limits and the methods to provide ID as well. But they are not.
Seeing how surprisingly similar the wording and definitions are in every case, in even far flung societies, can send you a shiver down the spine. It's like someone gained unfettered world wide write access to legislation.
It's also interesting how Windows 11 with it's hard dependency on TPM hardware just happens to be in place at the right time. And how a certain former Microsoft employee just happened to start working on a similar solution for Linux before this all started https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
Looking up words on the fly by just holding your finger on them.
If the book is not written in your native language or you like to read books with unusual vocabulary (e.g. historical books), it's an absolute delight. So far, a concise dictionary like Oxford has worked the best for me, while Wiktionary or similar always came short.
The other is heft and handiness. If you read anything that is larger than a small notebook, an e-book is much more practical. You also don't have to hold it open all the time.