DismantleMars

I think there's a deeper issue around paying customers being assumed to be businesses. I have a paid Google account for just one reason - using a custom domain with Gmail. This lets me have a wildcard email address, but more importantly, it gives me the ability to move my email address to a different provider if my Google account got caught in an automated system and blocked, so I wouldn't lose access to all the services I've used that email address to sign up with.

If there was a way I could continue to just have a regular personal Google account, but pay an extra fee to use a custom domain with it, I'd much prefer to do that than maintain an enterprise Google Workspace setup with only a single user in it, just for this one feature.

I think the lack of activity since the conspiracy theory started could be easily explained by the user being creeped out by the witch hunt and abandoning their account. I know if I was accused of secretly being a hated figure like Maxwell on an account that wasn't connected my real identity, I wouldn't come out and deny it, I'd just ditch my account and make a new one.

It also seems unlikely to me that someone like Ghislaine Maxwell would have the time to be such a prolific Reddit user, and that she would write like a Redditor - for example calling someone "butt-hurt" in one comment.

For anyone wondering "Why 88x31?"

Back in the early days of the internet, a lot of websites were hosted on Geocities, which was popular as it offered free hosting on one condition - you had to embed a small banner into your webpage advertising them. The banner image they provided was 88x31 pixels, and so many Geocities sites would include other external links as 88x31 images so that they matched the dimensions of the mandatory Geocities one.

The irony is, if Google had made their plan for how to handle end-of-life for Stadia clear from the beginning, they might have got a lot more users.

I'm not sure if their strategy ever changed along the way, but when Stadia was first announced, it was a purely cloud gaming platform where you still needed to buy a license for every game. Not knowing what would happen to my purchased games was the main thing keeping me from trying Stadia - I'd have been happy to use it if it was a Netflix / Xbox Game Pass style service where you pay a flat monthly rate for access to a library, or if it was clear that any games you bought would be refunded if the service suddenly shut down.

As it was though, it seemed as though you could drop a ton of money on Stadia games, and Google might pull the plug the very next day, and you lose everything you just purchased. That worry was the deciding factor for me to never give Stadia a go.

>That EFF page is really weird - English text, but right-aligned, with question marks to the left of the text, as if the text had been translated from a RTL language (Farsi perhaps given the /fa/ in the link?)

It's just a Farsi link to an English article that's automatically applying RTL styling, the original version of the page in English looks fine.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/eus-digital-identity-f...

Janelle Shane, who does this sort of thing for real on the excellent blog https://aiweirdness.com gave a good breakdown on Twitter: https://twitter.com/janellecshane/status/1007061610005794817

It's Keaton Patti, a comedian whose shtick is writing nonsense and pretending that it was written by an AI.