ocdtrekkie

They just need to ban these companies from operating in their countries. They are fundamentally burdens on society run by bad people.

Your best case scenario with fines is getting them into the narrow definition of compliance just until a new "innovation" gives them a different way to conduct the same abuse while evading the letter of previous judgments.

I mean obviously fees should either be included in the original price, or there should be a reason it might apply in some cases but not others. But I can also see someone just wanting to break out the costs as separate line items to highlight where their costs come from. (Here's what I pay for the property taxes, here's what I pay for the included utilities, here's what I pay for these maintenance services, so tada, there's your rent.)

But again, if the advertised price must be the total price, it doesn't matter if there's a mailbox access fee or not. It's no different than if they eliminate the fee but raise the price the same amount. Make the advertised price be the highest price, and say "hey, you can advertise discounts off of that".

Nobody's going to advertise you can save $5 a month by eliminating your mailbox.

A similar effect, would be no longer advertising a plan's price if you enable paperless billing and autopay. You'd have to advertise the price without, and then can offer discounts for those things.

Or movie ticket prices being required to be listed with the convenience fee included, and if a theater wants, it can advertise a discount for buying a ticket some other way. More than likely that would just kill convenience fees.

I think in general my preference is the other part of this story: Rather than choosing what fees can and can't be offered, require both brutal price transparency and prohibit advertising the unrealistic/lesser cost.

A friend of mine has recently lamented the idea gas stations can advertise "with car wash" pricing on top with what is "fine print" on the sign, which looks good but isn't when you factor in the cost of the car wash.

Another favorite is the personal loan ad, saying you're preapproved for a loan as low as 6% APR but actually you can be denied and the loan could be up to 36% APR even if you get approved. Nonsense.

I don't have a huge problem with a discount for car washes but the advertisement should be an out the door price or rate. Similarly I don't mind capped or content-restricted data plans, but the advertised price should be the unlimited one.

I don't think we should decide what businesses can sell, but we should make it very hard to mislead on the ad. Force advertisements to be the highest price instead of the lowest price, and you'll find companies finding ways to remove fees from the table themselves.

The MADA has been illegal for a long time, but you'll still find nobody willing to cross it. Samsung is indeed the only company with the power to actually escape Google and survive its penalties intact, which is why they are paid so lavishly to stay in.

Google will destroy any OEM which ships an Android fork out of the box. Google only permits alternative ROMs as long as they are niche and keep developers distracted from creating real competition.

If you are not working to destroy Android, you are supporting it. You might feel happy about your custom ROM nonsense and how it protects your privacy, but that just means you're selfish, because nearly everyone will still be trapped on Google's version.

Technologists need to aggressively reject solutions which don't spread freedom to ordinary users as well.

Neither Wine nor Proton run on Windows. Building Android emulators for Linux: Worth your time. Building Android knockoffs which claim to remove the Google from Google's operating system? Foolishness.

The bigger problem is wasting developer effort contributing to Google's platform. The real secret behind Android being "open" (sorta) is that while almost nobody runs AOSP, Google has tricked a bunch of fools into working on Android forks instead of building a real competitor.

Playing at their table is a losing game, the house always wins.

Rebooting is the first step: If it fixes it you don't have a problem. If it doesn't, you know more about the problem.

It's a joke, but like, after nearly two decades of engineering I have something break on me, due to updates. I figure the updates broke it, call the vendor, and they go... did you try rebooting it again?

Rebooting it a second time fixed it.

I've dealt with a fiber cut, it wasn't nearly that bad. Fiber cuts impacting my SaaS providers were worse because there was nothing I could do about it.

> which belies deep misunderstanding

I think you are missing the point. When I state my Exchange server is more reliable than Exchange Online, I don't think I'm a better engineer. I recognize Microsoft has harder problems to solve than I do. I think building overengineered, oversized SaaS environments is introducing extreme risk. It's an inherent flaw of the current approach.

Smaller is, in fact, better, because it's easier to operate reliably.

Open Web Advocacy's goal is Chrome on all platforms, which just means the Play Store problem gets even worse. The moment OWA wins, the open web dies. These are people with a truly bad astroturfy goal, clothed in charitable nonprofit status.

Paradoxically, as long as WebKit is mandatory on iOS, the open web is safe: Websites have to build for a lowest common denominator standard instead of building for Chrome proprietary APIs.

Yeah the games I most want to play on VR aren't only old... the servers have been shut down.

This is it. The truth is Google's largest revenue sources are scams, fraud, and malware, and they wouldn't be in business without them. They're not going to remove all of their highest pay per click customers because it might harm society or something.

Just try to convince Google to remove "MapsQuest Driving Directions", a browser hijacking extension advertiser who clearly impersonates one of Google's competitors: It's an extremely high value scam targeting seniors (the folks who mostly look for MapQuest on... Google) and it makes them way too much money for them to stop it.

One of the wildest things to me: Kagi actually warns you before renewals so you can cancel first if you want.

That's confidence in the product right there. I'd argue any subscription which won't do this is designed to exploit people who don't need or use a subscription.

Let the Google Ads account run dry, discover your Analytics never actually goes down. It was just donating to multibillionaires the whole time.

Considering the government routinely both decides Google is violating the law but is unwilling to do things to change it, like split apart their ad monopoly, suing them is most likely futile.

Better ways to spend your money, like funding competitors.

I think just running cmd still uses much less memory but Terminal is much, much faster than it was.

Yep, if Google lost money/owed damages every time someone got a fraudulent Google ad, you better believe those ads would be squeaky clean.

Sergey's flotilla needs a new vessel this year though, so can't do that.

Same, I went from a base model iPhone 11 to a base model iPhone 16. Assuming the trend line holds up, I'm in for an iPhone 21 next!

Apple has almost never been first to anything, but usually goes for "best at it" once it enters the market. I'm assuming you'll see four times as many foldables next year as a bunch of people start to consider it no longer an experiment. And obviously there's a lot of people who simply couldn't consider a foldable before because they were only available with Android.

Considering only two major mobile platforms exist and both are proprietary locked down software ecosystems, I assume you have a PinePhone or something?

Our current work is in the dev branch, we are preparing for a new release soon.

City/state/US is logical, the problem is most other hierarchies confuse people. For instance k12 subdomains for schools couldn't use that nomenclature because school districts do not map cleanly to towns. And that's before you talk about fire departments, townships, libraries, park districts, and countless other governmental bodies and districts which have overlapping boundaries of their own.

.gov certainly cares a level of exclusionary access that isn't really true of .us. Only one entity, the US federal government, can decide to hand someone a .gov address. And generally there is few signals harder to fake or impersonate than one.

The feature is about fifteen years too late for me, unfortunately. By this point I need this feature to let me "merge Google accounts". But then I barely use Google anything anymore anyways.

.us was primarily a hierarchy structure which in practice made confusing and hard to remember domain names, whereas .gov addresses hand out single domains which are generally easy to remember.

What an incredible miscarriage of justice. Make enough money and pay off enough politicians, and you can pretty much shoot people on the street in broad daylight.

Disposable mail providers generate a ton of spam too, but CSAM is illegal to host, so it's pretty risky to allow them unmitigated.

The reason it's toxic is because the Venn diagram between disposable email addresses and email addresses used for CSAM is a circle: If you accept disposable email and allow users to upload anything, you will have CSAM.

Whereas a Fastmail masked email or iCloud relay is still in the backend tied to your real account and identity which means it provides privacy generally for you but is traceable enough that it is unappealing for predators.

I wish there was a required limitation of once per day. Not only would it have avoided this incident, it'd made looking up flight tracking much easier.