> Why do the country's accountants need guns or bullets?
If you've actually inspected a reasonable subset of the multiple sources you found on this, you'd understand that these are purchases for their Criminal Investigations Division, a division with a narrow remit which has been armed for over a century.
The only reason why this is suddenly shocking news is because right-wing media has been increasingly hyping this up as some unprecedented and dangerous overreach since ~2020, cynically playing into the enduring paranoiac belief that govt stormtroopers are just around the corner (yet somehow never actually materializing). You're dancing to the tunes that your echo chambers choose for you.
No surprise at the MS non-response here. Anyone forced to use Teams every day can see that it's being maintained by a skeleton crew (at best) on the dev side. Every single day I miss basic features (like global message linkability) that I came to love in Slack, and suffer 101 little bugs and annoyances that never seem to improve much.
MS clearly thinks Teams is "good enough" - enough of the feature checkboxes ticked that they can focus mostly on aggressively marketing it, making it seem crazy to use a separate third-party chat platform instead of Teams if you're using Azure.. even if does happen to be a buggy bloated beast, with almost unusably wretched mobile apps.
If there's just one area I wish we hadn't switched to MS-brand dogfood after making the move to Azure, it's chat/calling. It's a deceptively tricky domain to get it right in, and one where you really want as little friction as possible for all users.
"We should have stuck with Slack." - every team that ever switched to MS Teams.
> Not that I want to give them any ideas, but surely the best solution would be to just lock the account down to the region the billing account is from?
I'm pretty sure (based on dealing with DRM/geoIP restriction requirements in other spheres) that it's because the media companies are incredibly anal about enforcement on strict geographic lines. They don't care if your account is linked to a US credit card at a US billing address, despite how effective that is at ensuring that you are a US user (and how difficult it is to spoof). They are hellbent on the idea that no US-only content should ever be streamed to an IP address terminating at a non-US location. For them it's absolutely not about people or accounts - it's entirely a matter of geography.
Netflix could easily apply a rule based on the region of the billing account, and I am sure it would be vastly more effective than playing whack-a-mole with individual IP addresses. However, the media companies would undoubtedly still insist that they do strict geoIP restriction as well. And if Netflix did both, anybody who is traveling outside of their home country would find Netflix to be bereft of content; anyone who travelled frequently would find Netflix to be perfectly useless. By going all-in on geoIP, Netflix keeps the geoIP-fixated media companies happy, while ensuring that users see plenty of content even as they move from country to country.
I'd guess that Netflix is only upping their game on residential IPs etc now because the media companies are no longer happy and are leaning on them - VPN services are simply becoming too brazen about advertising the ability to bypass Netflix geo restrictions by clicking flags. Whenever it becomes this obvious to the media guys that anyone with a pulse and a credit card can circumvent Netflix's controls, they'll be pressed to 'do better' or lose their rights to content. Netflix takes some steps, catches some backlash, and the media companies are placated for a while.
I've been in largely the same situation as OP - early-stage startup, rushed work on an MVP requiring far too many bells and whistles, CEO doing a crucial demo before potential investors who would likely make or break the company.
The crucial difference in my case was that the CEO was whipsmart, and a natural salesman; he knew his market, he knew his audience, and he knew our work. He ran through the app enough times in advance of the demo to know it inside and out, and he prefaced his demo with boilerplate warnings that it was an MVP/prototype and that bugs were to expected - he did this so effectively that it almost seemed like he had them excited about the prospect of seeing bugs. When the inevitable faults in the application / backend did occur, he was able to gracefully roll with the punches and sustain the momentum: he joked his way past it and adjusted his approach as he ran through the failed step again (having correctly guessed at what the problem was with his input the first time around). The investors could see - as our CEO had emphasized up-front - that the shortcomings were superficial, and that both the app and underlying system were fundamentally solving the problems they were meant to solve - and doing so in novel ways for the vertical we were in, with much better UX than that vertical was accustomed to.
That company succeeded by any measure, and is still running strong today. And at least 80% of why it succeeded, imo, is because of the quality of its earliest employees, both C-level and technical. A CEO may not need to be a one-in-a-million kind of guy or gal, but they definitely do need to be one-in-a-whole-lotta-thousands, at the very least - if they're just another thoroughly average individual with an oversized ego and a 'fake it till we make it' ethos, you are screwed - no amount of unpaid blood, sweat and tears in the trenches will save you. We were lucky enough to have an inspiring and intelligent CEO who brought in critical voices rather than yes men, and who at the early stages of the company's life would often directly interface with the coders who were designing the apps and systems he and his sales people would be pitching to potential investors, partners, and customers. And when your company has ~5-20 employees, that's absolutely how it should be - all doors should be open. Rigid management hierarchies are no more than adult make-believe at this stage, and indulging in them is inherently toxic.
Anyways, I suppose OP's story is really just an old and universal one: bad management will fail, and it will always find someone else to blame for its failures.
If you've actually inspected a reasonable subset of the multiple sources you found on this, you'd understand that these are purchases for their Criminal Investigations Division, a division with a narrow remit which has been armed for over a century.
The only reason why this is suddenly shocking news is because right-wing media has been increasingly hyping this up as some unprecedented and dangerous overreach since ~2020, cynically playing into the enduring paranoiac belief that govt stormtroopers are just around the corner (yet somehow never actually materializing). You're dancing to the tunes that your echo chambers choose for you.