TWeaK

Microsoft are unlike Facebook and Google in that they make you pay for the software they use to steal your data.

My experience is limited, but not no experience. In any case, it’s not like Windows 10 will be immediately unusable when support ends.

What are your plans when end of life /support comes to Windows ten?

Switch to Linux and run virtual machines when I need to use Windows.

Right now I don’t quite have the drive to do it, but an end to support for Windows 10 would push me over the edge. I just can’t stand Windows 11, not even because of all the bullshit but just the way it mandates the UI structure - last time I tried it my dealbreaker was that you can’t just have it always display all taskbar icons, you have to manually force each one to show. If a new icon comes up, it will be hidden.

I’m sure I’ll be there with you soon enough.

/me Laughs in Windows 10.

Thanks, yet another reason why my example was a bit off hah.

I said you came in to correct me but didn’t actually deliver any corrections. You just talked about the things you know.

I didn’t say the same thing you said, I provided the correction that you left out.

I dunno, allegedly people actually vote for a man named “Trump”.

Because of enshittification lol

It looks like you haven’t really digested anything of the conversation here before you came in to reply with corrections.

Not everywhere.

Previous rulings are a precedent in Common Law systems like the US, UK, Canada, or Australia.

Only Supreme Court rulings become a precedent in Civil Law systems like the EU, Russia,most of the rest of America.

Sure, but we’re talking about Brazil. You haven’t established whether Brazil is common or civil law. Also, we’re talking about a Supreme Court ruling.

Not all of the EU is civil law. Ireland and Cyprus both use common law systems.

While common law countries often have roots connected with the UK and are very similar, civil law countries are far more varied. Many civil law countries are distinctly different and arguably should be a separate class of legal structure - even ones with French roots (perhaps the most prominent civil law country).

Ultimately, though, the differences between civil and common law structures are almost entirely technical in nature. The end result is largely the same - in a common law country, case law can continue to be challenged until a Supreme Court ruling, and as such it isn’t really proper case law until such a ruling, just like in civil law countries.

https://guides.library.harvard.edu/law/brazil

Brazil is, in fact, a civil law country. However, they do follow case law from Supreme Court, which would make this ruling about requiring a representative valid case law. Which is what I said to OP.

The EU at its top level creates “Directives”

This is exactly what I said.

The EU made GDPR law (well, strictly speaking they made a directive, then member states make laws that must meet or exceed that directive)

The EU made a directive, this directive led to GDPR laws made by member states. However I was apparently mistaken, it wasn’t an EU Tribunal court case that led to cookie splash screens through case law, it was Recital 66 (lol Order 66), essentially a 2009 modification to the 2002 ePrivacy Directive, followed by roundtable discussions that heavily favoured the advertising industry over civil interest groups leading to its formal implementation into the directive in 2012.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/truth-behind-cookie-banners-alexander-hanff-cipp-e-cipt-fip-

To summarise:

• What I said at the start was right - Brazil’s Supreme Court ruling requiring social media companies to have representatives is valid case law.
• My example of cookie splash screens wasn’t ideal, but you did not give the right reasoning, or any reasoning - it was a poor analogy because it wasn’t a judge’s rulinig that modified the law but legal discussions that were prompted by public interest groups.

Like I say, it really feels like you didn’t read very far before you made your reply. Your comment reads more as a statement of tangentially related things you know with a thin veil disguising it as a correction. If you’d just made those statements without the veil, or if you’d followed through with the corrections and actually explained what was wrong, I don’t think I would have found your reply so objectionable (although I may also have woken up on the wrong side of the bed to your comment, sorry about that).

But then, I also wouldn’t have looked into the specifics of Brazilian law or the full origins of cookie splash screens, so thanks for the motivation lol.

Yes and no. It only really applies to Twitter/X and Twitter clones. You wouldn’t call a Facebook post a tweet, no matter how short, nor would you call a reddit or lemmy post/comment that.

And even then, Mastadon has its own term, toots, and BlueSky calls them skeets.

Until Twitter comes up with a new name in line with their new branding, I think the business should still be referred to as Twitter. But the business should go bankrupt before that happens, hopefully, the lenders need to call in their debts already.

They have at least moved away from the twitter.com URL, up until then it was hard to argue that it wasn’t still Twitter. However, until they come up with a new name for “tweets” I think the original name should still stand.

Law isn’t defined just by legislation, it is also defined by case law. A judge’s ruling on a previous case makes that ruling law.

Now, I’m not saying this ruling is appropriate - I simply don’t know enough about how it came to be. But if Brazil made laws about social media companies and then a judge made a ruling based on that law requiring social media companies have a representative, then that absolutely is valid law.

To draw an example, the EU never made a law about cookie splash screens. The EU made GDPR law (well, strictly speaking they made a directive, then member states make laws that must meet or exceed that directive), and then a judge interpreted that law and made it a requirement to have cookie splash screens. I would personally argue that the judge was trying to shove a square peg through a round hole there, when really he should have identified that data collection is in fact a secondary transaction hidden in the fine print (rather than an exchange of data for access to the service, this isn’t how the deal is presented to the user; the service is offered free of charge but the fine print says your data is surrendered free of charge), and he should have made it such that users get paid for the data that’s being collected. However, the judge’s ruling stands as law now.

If this is what I think it is, the hard drives are used data centre drives that are sold as “renewed”. They wipe the drives then use manufacturer’s tools to reset the clocks, effectively the same as winding back the mileage clock in a car. They are sold cheaper than new drives, but not really at a price that reflects their age and true used status.

I bought 4x 14TB drives of this type, pretty sure they were listed as new, although some show as used. 1 drive was DOA and I’m still waiting on the refund.

You can see tons of them on diskprices.com

Edit: oh wait, this is a different scam. This is like a combination of the classic size scam with the data centre scam. Fun!

It’s probably related to Amazon’s practice of binning all products with the same barcode together. So when someone sells something through Amazon their products get bundled with everyone else’s, and when someone buys they get one from the bundle. A counterfeiter basically poisons the stock, and you end up with counterfeiters selling legit products and legit sellers selling the counterfeit ones.

Almost not surprising. Inventors and R&D businesses patent things all the time, then it takes a while to claim them. There was a guy in Australia who apparently invented WiFi (he calls it “wiffey”) and he successfully asserted his patent against WiFi manufacturers worldwide such that they paid him a couple pennies in royalties for every chip manufactured.

The saving grace is that patents only last for 20 years. After that, anyone can use the design, like Gillette’s double edged safety razor (which is why their modern razors are so silly and change every few years).

Erm, WhatsApp would suggest otherwise.

WhatsApp was the vector for zero click access to a target’s phone from Israel’s weapons grade hacking Pegasus toolkit. They would send a video call, typically in the middle of the night, and with no input from the used they’d get full access. My personal belief is that they used functionality WhatsApp itself uses to access user data.

There was also an encrypted phone called ANOM, which had this trick calculator app with a hidden encrypted messager. “Made for criminals, by criminals”. Except, when the guy started his business he got investment from the FBI and Australian Federal Police to pay for the servers and some of the phones themselves. Basically every time it sent an encrypted message it sent a separate encrypted message to the ANOM servers. It’s entirely possible (perhaps even likely) that WhatsApp would do this also.

As for Google, they’re truly insidious. Lots of banks now require you to connect to Google captcha servers - they don’t give you the pictures, it’s just the back end, basically the tracking parts. Then there’s the controversy about them collecting location data when users have said no. They absolutely do collect data they shouldn’t.

I’m in Europe, and I don’t use banking apps. For the most part anyway, one of my credit cards pissed me off by switching to app only, then eventually I relented with one bank because I wanted a 2nd account that required the app.

Banks either verify by SMS (lol) or provide a passkey fob.

GrapheneOS should provide some measure of protection. You can also perhaps disable some tracking features using something like Warden (requires root) - although this hasn’t been updated in years and probably misses stuff now.

Run Magisk in Zygisk mode with the deny list hiding itself from banking apps.

However I would advise not using the banking app if you can help it, they’re not clean. Hell, even accessing online banking via a website seems to require connections to google.com and gstatic.com to perform hidden captcha (you don’t have to do the picture thing but it still does the server side tracking).

Lol I do run Android without Google Play Services.

That’s the crux of it here. Microsoft wanted to get into the data game they saw Facebook and Google reaping. However, Microsoft still charge you for the software they use to harvest your data.