Why should you have any right to look through everyone's private communications? Nobody really has any choice to reject your EULA if they want to stay in contact with someone on your service. I could force you to sign a ToS that includes "By using our service you owe us $10 million and agree to donate your kidney to our CEO" in order to reach your overseas grandma, but that doesn't mean it's actually enforceable or legal...
> Over time, Windows Lite becomes the main, and only, version of Windows. Development and maintenance costs fall, and somehow Microsoft makes more money than they ever did on an OS.
Looking from the outside, it doesn't seem that Microsoft treats Windows as an isolated product anymore with a balance sheet of sales versus development costs. Rather, it's an advertising billboard for their other money-making products like Edge, Copilot, Microsoft 365, OneDrive, and at some point Candy Crush of all things(?). In fact this isn't isolated to just Windows or Microsoft either. SwiftKey pushes you to use OneDrive, Google (search engine) famously pushed Google products and there were antitrust discussions about that. Advertising was just some annoying thing that was necessary to power free web services but now it's infiltrated the very core of our day-to-day technology. Until we can get proper antitrust enforcement, we'll only see technological stagnation get worse as more products become boring billboard monopolies with little incentives to get better.
Sure and maybe Google also subsidizes the Pixel phones because they'll make up for it with Google Play transaction fees. But what if I don't want something that's arguably illegal price dumping, and would rather pay a bit extra to actually own my hardware and be able to run what I want, even after it's discontinued? We don't get such an option.
Quickly more and more companies are adopting the model of finding ways to trap the user into continuously paying them more money after the sale, then locking down hardware and software to ensure the customer is properly trapped, and maybe price cutting their competitors a bit. The death of mobile computing is actively happening right before our eyes as Google completes the trap by restricting users ability to install apks. Ultimately customers end up paying more and having a shittier experience as a result of this.
I think it needs to be applauded when a company refuses to engage with this model and simply lets you own what you bought and paid for, and brings this idea to a market that has long been infected with lockdownitis. (Unfortunately in this case the price is not "a little bit higher", but what can you do when component prices have become crazy...)
Every console on the market right now is locked-down proprietary garbage, that's the basic reality. The PlayStation 5, the Xbox One, they are also technically x86 PCs as they run on x86 processors, but they are specifically locked down to prevent any use outside of their narrow use cases that are optimized to make them money. Valve is really the only company that's developing proper consoles with a custom operating system and custom AMD chips while not locking down the hardware, despite the strong incentives of locking people into paying them 30% forever and preventing access to competing game stores
I made an account on LinkedIn while forgetting my VPN was enabled and set up my profile. They immediately flagged me as suspicious and restricted my account, and demanded I upload an ID to remove the restriction, to which I complied and they lifted the restriction. Then about a month later I tried to add my sibling as a connection and they didn't get any notification, then my sibling tried to search up my name to add me and I wasn't showing as a search result. Seems I was shadowbanned even after providing my ID, which seems insane to me that the main professional social network can just do that to someone without due process or any indication. This type of thing could sabotage someone's entire professional career or ruin their self-confidence as everyone ignores all of their messages and activity
I used to have a $20/mo ChatGPT subscription and now I spend $12 per year using Kimi models on OpenRouter, and that's with zero-data-retention-only providers (some models sometimes have free providers with scary tracking). Maybe I just don't use that many tokens, I don't fill the context with more than what's needed for a specific request, but it goes to show how these subscriptions can be an absolute ripoff. The thought of spending 200x that is insane to me
I think the point of funding this stuff is not just to produce projects but also invest in the people building them, and to encourage a more resilient and open internet. So it seems entirely understandable if they'd want to prioritize funding people developing skills to understand and work with certain technologies, over funding people who will mainly send the money to some foreign AI giant for an AI that at any point may be taken away (see Anthropic Fable 5 export restrictions), get some specific use case suddenly restricted or quietly sabotaged (see Anthropic Fable 5 on LLM development), or get its price hiked beyond what's viable for an open-source project.
Also, the prompts and dates is for writing the grant proposal itself, and not for coding. Maybe they receive too many AI generated proposals. It feels rather rude anyway to be asking for 5,000 to 50,000 euros funding for your project if you can't even fill in the six free-form fields yourself.
Yet it's 2026 and we see extreme examples of spam content and misinformation to the point that it's killing the internet, but AI companies have collectively decided to not care
In a circle of irony, reuters.com is denying my request to read the article about Apple deciding to deny rolling out Siri in EU due to being denied their request for an exemption to law
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There is a uniform centralized group that operated for a decade under the name of Internet Research Agency, and almost certainly something like it continues to operate to this day. These had paid employees who got directions on what to promote with the goal of manipulating the public debate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
What incentives does OpenAI have to make sure the AI actually works well with Norwegian beyond capturing a (small) Norwegian market? What incentives do they have to take Norwegian values into consideration, or to preserve Norwegian culture into the future? The matter is also a question of national sovereignty, so to simply release the data and nicely ask foreign companies to solve the problem for you, would be a fool's move
My experience with Google hardware is that they shipped an update for Pixel 4a that crippled the battery. In Australia, they announced a safety recall due to a discovered battery safety issue, but in the rest of the world, it seems they wanted to save money by crippling people's phones of their own volition without much explanation. But no worries, they're offering 3 methods of compensation: free battery replacement to restore it, $50 cash, or $100 credit for another Google phone.
I went to redeem my compensation - free battery replacement unavailable in your country, $100 credit unavailable in your country. I guess I'll take the $50 cash...? I fill in the form with my IMEI, full name, address, etc etc. After a week they send a response saying unfortunately after thoroughly looking into my case, I'm not eligible, and no further explanation is offered as to why. In effect it's as if they hacked into my phone and installed a virus that cripples the battery and there's nothing I can do about it, like this is just a normal way to do business now. You don't really own your phone after all...
Because taking Windows from an operating system to an intelligence system worked out so well for them, that now they're trying to figure out how Windows can reach performance parity with Linux running Windows software :)
Google could actually do everyone a solid by killing gmail. They have enough influence in the industry that they could create a standard for email address portability, and then slowly force everybody to move off. By the end, one of the biggest problems with email would be solved and people would be able to switch email providers like how we can switch phone providers without needing to change our phone numbers. And Google would get to save a lot of money by no longer needing to provide everyone's emails
Retail phones for sale without Google Play Services:
All Huawei phones, which uses Huawei AppGallery after sanctions
FairPhone 6 /e/OS
Practically all modern feature phones: Nokia phones, HMD phones, etc. As I understand it, predominantly used by elderly and kids. But it's also gaining traction among millennials and Gen Z for digital detox and defeating mobile addiction.
Linux phones (Jolla Phone, PinePhone, FuriPhone, etc) - these you probably won't find in your local retail store but this is another competing platform being built from effectively an entirely different lineage minus the kernel
Google has already been crippling the audio CAPTCHA access for many years. If your trust score is low enough, the visual challenge is ridiculously slow and noisy, and pressing the audio challenge button will just give you an error saying "To protect our users, we can't process your request right now", accessibility be damned. Where are the lawsuits? I want to believe there are still forces that would create hell to pay for doing something so evil, but I'm not seeing any.
Are you genuinely asking? To pay your taxes, order items online, access your bank account, log into your favorite AI service, there are very often CAPTCHAs involved. Try going a month with CAPTCHAs blocked in uBlock Origin, and you will find yourself unable to do many basic things.
How do you know which country to blame? It is standard practice for foreign actors (or just hackers in general) to use proxies around the world to misdirect and insert false clues as to their origin. It could be an American teenager proxying through North Korea, and it could be a North Korean proxying through another American teenager's residential connection, there's no way to know.
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