> but I'm not sure the tradeoff is worth it.

Well corporations decide on that. I abandoned rubygems.org when they added the 100.000 download limit; past that point I was no longer able to remove old gem. Then came the new corporate laws for rubygems.org and mass-firing of about 8 open source developers who were involved with the ruby ecosystem.

We simply need to accept that corporations controlling an ecosystem can lead to HUGE problems. We need an alternative here. I don't have a good alternative either to suggest - money is influential. People adjust their behaviour and how they think with regards to money all the time. We could need some kind of model that also handles the economy. And, again - I have absolutely no clue how that could or should look like.

True, but there is yet a one major OS that allows you to run whatever you see fit on your computer.

If you are really disgusted by those moves, you have a time to switch. If enough people switch, then we can just forget about that garbage.

Yeah, but you're not allowed to call it "abuse" because that's too "baity" according to the cabal.

It seems to go against developers of Windows drivers (which includes VPNs) - apparently there was a “mandatory account verification for all partners in the Windows Hardware Program who have not completed account verification since April 2024”, but for some reason it looks like no one notified these guys that they have to verify their accounts.

I wonder if they were compelled by someone in the government.

This is preemption, I believe, in the US for what's coming. Given the states trying to ram in "age verification" (mass surveillance propaganda, same agenda as CSAM) I no doubt believe that the only VPNs the USG wants people to have access to are corporate (easy entry point) and pwn'd VPNs [0] (in the media lately).

Fuck Microsoft (aka Microslop).

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/using-a-vpn-may-subject-you-to-n...

this source is a bit better and answers a couple questions.

first the verification wasn't just "click this link to prove you own this email"

>That account verification process meant that developers were required to upload their government-issued ID before they were allowed to publish potentially highly sensitive code to the broader Windows user base.

Also according to at least one affected user they didn't actually get notified of the process.

> “Microsoft never sent me any notification at all about this. I’ve looked in every inbox in every spam folder in every mail log, and zero, nothing, zilch,” Donenfeld said.

The problem is that the social media companies have not been dealing with abusive posts of various sources. Governments can't take action against the bad posters are they are from another Government (and in some cases are employed by that government to cause trouble). Thus Governments have to take actions which they can control, unfortunately these actions will affect more than the bad abusers.

CCP-level control over access to information is not actually very tight, technologically nor ideologically, but it does enable a form of rule-by-law which is far more useful.

I wouldn't install that update if I were you

Dave Cutler and Raymond Chen might like a word.

I don't know about his career in general, but Hanselman once spoke at a conference I was helping organize here in Thessaloniki, and he was great. Really knowledgeable and very down to earth.

Sacrifice principles for pragmatism and you lose both.

I think it's just like in software in general: most software is bad, but it doesn't mean that all software is bad and unnecessary.

Most security is done badly, but it doesn't mean that security is unnecessary.

But I agree: TooBigTech has TooMuchPower.

Because some people realised that insurance is the ultimate form of security? Why prevent failure when the consequences of failure can simply be offloaded to others?

Apple has done the exact same with its iphone app store, lots of companies got shut down because of their app not beeing available anymore with no explanation. The problem is with exclusive app stores.

Writing this from a corporate win11 computer, the whole thing is so laggy, it's unbelievable. Last year, I had revived my old desktop from 2007 with an intel Q6600, windows xp and a clicky dying HDD, and that thing flied compared to this. Dear Microsoft and its partners (Especially DELL!), what the hell happened?!

I mean, we have been saying that exact thing for close to 30 years at this point.

Yet, they are still around, they are still deeply embedded in most businesses, and no matter how much they screw up, it just keeps going.

> At this point people will move to

I think most people just don't care about their computer. Most people just use whatever they are told to use at work.

And also consider moving some of your repos to Forgejo. I’m running it for more than a year now and it is by far my favorite service. Way faster and essential features do not require monthly payment (branch protection for example). It can easily run on a Raspberry Pi 4 1 GB RAM.

Use Docker Compose and put Caddy in front of it for HTTPS. For backups the easy way is to just git pull your repos via cron on some remote systems. Or use syncthing to also move the server configs over. For the runner, 1 GB RPi 4 should be fine for many situations. It can compile and run many Rust/Python tests fine or build static sites. You could also setup an old x86 next to it (this is essentially what GitHub Runners are too: old x86 cpu’s).

No they won't, because Apple is out of reach for their pockets, and most OEMs still don't sell Linux powered devices on the shops people go to.

"Crying wolf" constantly like this is so frustrating. It waters down the message until they send something you really need to worry about, which you ignore like the rest of the pointless messages.

Because it absolves them of liability of anything goes wrong. They can point to the email say "we warned you". Having to filter and target the specific set of customers that a notice applies to carries risk and costs to them and they wanna pass it to you.

That's actually a good case for a LLM going through it and deciding: "nah, overblown" and "Oh, yeah, this one can close the account"

Google famously just did this with their Captcha service. Had lots of people signing up for a more complicated version on Google Cloud that they didn't need to do.

lol.

Even if they did, it didn't work.