If you’re happy on Linux, stay on Linux. This is Microsoft’s “I can change baby, I swear” play. Just like they did after Windows 8. And Windows Vista. And Windows ME.

Surely they have learned their lessons and will never intentionally tank their product in the name of profit again. Surely this time.

Matching payment method/date/cardholder name to bank statements. You can prove that you paid X amount of money to Y company on Z date, and the matching itemized receipt received from that company indicating that you bought A, B, and C products that may have been tariffed.

Harder to prove if you paid with cash or gift card. Doable, but probably more trouble than it’s worth to effectively collect pocket change after lawyer fees take their cut from the class action settlement.

Not that difficult, actually. The company pays a tariff on the specific product being imported, which would have been recorded. Customers who then buy those products should receive itemized receipts, either physically from a store or electronically via email when buying online. The receipt should also indicate a payment method that can likely be matched to a bank statement if needed.

Match the itemized receipt to the tariffs paid, there you go.

The harder part is directly linking the tariffs paid to the price the consumer paid. The tariffs were inconsistent and changed a few times, and we don’t know if all price increases were caused directly by tariffs or if there were other factors as well. Moreover, some companies ate the cost in some cases, notably Nintendo, who chose not to increase the original pre-tariff price of the Switch 2, but did for Switch 1 and accessories for both systems. Nintendo will likely be refunded for all of those, but not all of that was a cost passed on to the consumer, so it’s hard to figure out at that specific a level.

This lawsuit is definitely going nowhere, at any rate, so this is basically all just idle musing.

So what you mean to tell me is that every 3D printer in New York is going to come with an index of firearm components?

This one even commits the cardinal sin of presenting itself as a transparent image but really just has a checkered background baked in.

I used to pay less than the single plan for a family plan, split between 5 people. Back when ad-free YouTube was an afterthought and my primary reason for using it was Google Play Music’s unlimited music storage and streaming.

The amount they just increased the cost of YouTube is about how much I’d be willing to pay total for no ads. Until then, they’re competing against zero ads (but no casting) for free.

You’d think you’d want it recommending porn in that case to use later as blackmail.

And yet the “free” market can’t be trusted to correct itself and fill the gaps if we allow a giant megacorp to fall.

A Microsoft-oriented news outlet.

Think similar to MacRumors/9to5Mac/AppleInsider for Apple.

I’m just recommending that folks treat the answers to the security questions, at a minimum, like they treat their passwords themselves. The security questions are a way around the password, and so they should be kept just as secure and hard to guess.

If you’re using a secure password manager, great, that’s exactly the best approach. The majority of people don’t, which is where this sorta thing becomes an issue. If you have a password manager and the service you’re using forces you to answer security questions, of course you can let the password manager generate something just as random as the password itself (provided it can remember it and can track which term corresponds to which question). For anyone who does not, it’s just important to choose something you’ll remember but no one who knows details about your life can simply guess. Otherwise it doesn’t matter how secure your password is.

I’ve only used Bitwarden, so I can’t speak to the others, but Bitwarden does, yeah.

But to the average person, “password manager” is whatever their browser does for them, and I’m not sure those have much more functionality beyond username/password and ID fields.

Ideally you still want it to be something you’ll remember, unless you’re using a password manager capable of tracking those for you.

The mistake that guy made is that he still chose a name he had some attachment to. You want to make sure you choose something you have no attachment to whatsoever.

And then never reuse the same answer between different services, just in case one of them is storing them as plaintext.

The security questions are often forced.

The trick is to make up answers. Have some go-tos or a pattern that only you know and no one else could guess with information from your life.

Why yes, I did grow up on AmazonFakeStreet. Oh, my spouse? MicrosoftSpouseName of course.

Exactly. And if for some reason they truly were selling it for less than it was worth (doubt), there’s only two assumptions I’d have:

1. There is something wrong with it, which is why it’s being discounted.

2. The product is unappealing, they produced way more than there was demand for, and it should probably be worth even less.

I don’t like approaching economics with the idea of “everything is a scam”, but capitalism makes it so that people charge whatever they think they can get away with. Everyone selling you something is trying to maximize the amount of value they can extract from you, and so there is always some angle being worked. Hence why one must always question what it is they aren’t saying.

I can’t be arsed to keep up with changing the config of the browser I didn’t choose every time the device updates with new admin-defined settings. That’s all.

On my personal device I still use Google right now for consistency/because change is hard, but I set the default behavior in Firefox to exclude AI results.

I’d just prefer to use/support a search engine that abstains from AI entirely, regardless of whether or not you can turn it off. I don’t want to be a happy customer of companies that still try to weasel that stuff in, because they won’t stop at a toggle. They never do.

Yeah but you can do the same with Google as well (just can’t be arsed to change the search settings on my work PC), it’s the principle of the thing.

That’d be my guess.

I have never once went out of my way to use Gemini, for example, but having it appear in every other Google search with some lying bullshit to spread is probably driving up their engagement numbers.

I really should stop using Google. But can’t use DDG either because they just use Bing and their own AI service as well, and so does Kagi.

Hmm, so is it light-based? If a werewolf is on a shaded side of the moon, no werewolf, but if the sun shines on them, werewolf time?

Would make for some interesting fiction, actually. Space werewolves that only come out during a lunar day, night is the only safe time.

Not to mention those companies have divided priorities. Valve’s main income is Steam, they have a vested interest in keeping their product dominant. Microsoft and Epic simply don’t, because their stores are only side projects that incentivise their main income sources. But that’s not to say I want to substitute Steam with some other corpo giant’s latest money grab either.

The bigger question is why more consumer-friendly stores like GOG that sell DRM-free games can’t compete with Steam. High profile games have no incentive to release DRM-free versions of their titles on GOG because the bigger store where they make more money encourages DRM. And these locked-in publisher relationships built on DRM allows Valve to outcompete more consumer-friendly stores through sales and user experience.

Valve gets a lot of clout in the Linux sphere because their adoption of open-source platforms is better than their competitors, and we have the mindset of “a rising tide lifts all ships”, but this is also what we were saying about Google and Android 15 years ago and we can see how that is shaping up. Something something “you either die a hero…”

Basically, Valve is too big to compete with at this point, because any competing product needs to be more perfect out the gate for people to even consider using it. Which is hard to do when you are not as entrenched and don’t have the kind of money Valve has.