I doubt that you’re interested in arguing in good faith, but if by some miracle you do care about having an informed opinion before opening your mouth, how would you respond to things like this?

This essentially killed my (EU-based) startup in the project management and collaborate space. Before MSFT bundled Teams with O365 we were rapidly growing and closing enterprise customers in the automotive, energy and education industries with high retention rates. Right around the time the Teams bundling started our retention dropped, churn went through the roof, growth slowed down, we failed to raise our next round because of it and had to drastically downsize the company, causing even more churn (about 80% net churn in 2 years). This move by the EU is good, but too little too late - 99% of the companies that were hurt by this have already shut down, and the ones still running will take years to recover…

Interesting! Sorry, I don’t know why I thought you were using swipe keyboards, it must have been stuck in my memory from reading other comments. I definitely agree that pressing the buttons was a little annoying, but manufacturers could probably make softer buttons if they were willing to put the money into developing them.

Anyway, I really miss the phone I had from about 2008-2010. It had two sliders that moved in orthogonal directions. One of the slide directions revealed a standard 12-button phone pad, while the other had a 4-row keyboard. And yet, I’m pretty sure it was under 1.5cm, so not too large. It was definitely easier to keep in my pocket than current phones!

If it weren’t for reading Lemmy/RSS feeds and a camera, I’d probably be going back to dumb phones for my next one…

But what’s the error rate? I could type at 200 words per minute (even on a phone!!) if I didn’t care about how many typos I was making. And swiping keyboards get confused incredibly easily. The error rates are especially bad when you’re writing words that only use a single row of keys - on QWERTY keyboards for example, try writing something like “type”, and you could get that, or you might get something else, like wipe/write/ripe. Other groups could include things like tip/top, pit/pot, wit/wire and the selected word will be wrong almost as frequently as it’s right. And autocorrect systems can’t really correct for things like when you mean to press enter and hit the backspace key instead. Plus, their suggestions are generally just very stupid. So while buttons take longer to press on physical keyboards, the reduced error rate makes typing speed about the same in my experience.

Plus, with physical buttons, you get tactile feedback, so you can tell when your fingers are slightly off and adjust them, whereas on a flat surface, you have no idea whether you pressed the correct button or not. You have to stare straight at the screen to make sure every press is correct, which is exhausting and bad for your eyesight. I feel a lot more eyestrain from simply typing on phones, whereas with physical buttons, I didn’t even have to look at the screen, and I could look at something else around me while typing. And don’t get me started on how many calls I’ve missed because I accidentally hit the hang-up button, or couldn’t find the accept call button - not a problem when you have physical buttons!

Regarding screen real estate, all you need is a slide-out keyboard. They work great!

There are a few downsides to physical keyboards, but in my experience, they’re far superior to non-keyboard devices. But what can you do - in the 21st century, practicality never matters, it’s just all about aesthetics and nothing else…

The intent is to allow companies time to implement the change. But if you’ll pardon my cynicism, in practice, what ends up happening is companies just use it as a tactic to delay the implementation and continue recording the revenue.

At the very least they should forfeit the revenue that they earn during the period for this. I’m not sure exactly how the fines work and whether they take this into account, but I doubt Apple is seriously going to use the 12-month period to actually come clean and change their ways. I think they’ll just use it as more time to come up with some new bullshit form of non-compliance.

Excellent news:

At the heart of Monday’s findings are three elements of Apple’s practices, including fees charged to app developers for every purchase made within seven days of linking out to the commercial app.

source

This is, in my opinion, the most egregious non-compliant practice from Apple. They have no reason whatsoever to entitle themselves to purchases made outside their repository just because the software runs on their hardware. It’s also the most asinine set of rules that they established to pretend that they were complying with the DMA.

It’s a bit disappointing that it will take so long before the fines can be enforced, but I really hope that they get the maximum penalty over this because it’s really the most shockingly brazen breach of the DMA’s terms. In fact, I hope that they get imposed the maximum penalty multiple times - the same article I linked mentions that there are two other DMA investigations being launched into Apple, though I don’t know what grounds those other investigations are looking into.

And I really hope Apple gets the message loud and clear: they’re gonna start making less money. And this is a good thing. They don’t deserve it, and they were never entitled to it in the first place. This is what happens when you invent new revenue streams that are criminally worthless.

Such a sad world we live in. When the internet was hitting the mainstream, virtually everything was standardized. There were RFCs for probably every standard the internet operated on. Email, HTTP, DNS, TCP/UDP/IP, etc.

Today, we live in a world where we can’t even decide on a fucking chat protocol without making it a proprietary piece of garbage. The internet has been consolidated into giant companies that see interoperability as a weakness that enable their competitors and prevent them from oppressing and exploiting their users.

A small group of gatekeepers that kill anything nice for their own short-term gains: it is sad but true that it feels like any technology that’s commercially successful will end this way.

It can’t possibly be that. We have to abolish trees - that’s the real answer!

Your Steam games will go to the grave with you

Great, then I’ll finally have some time to play them…

Honest question here: what would stop me from starting a video, then pausing it and walking away from my computer for several hours so youtube plays ads to no one?

Now repeat but with several tabs.

And bonus points if the videos simply happen to be mine and I were to enable monetization on them.

Hmmm…

Those documentaries are great findings (and really really interesting). I would highly suggest posting them to the channel (or I would be happy to if you don’t mind)

And ofc, Microsoft is well aware and is not interested in letting that happen.

This is true, but there are only so many times that they can pull off what they did in Munich. If enough cities keep trying at this, there’s no way they’re going to be able to hold the floodgates back forever.

I’m usually a pessimist, but stories like this actually do get my hopes up

I’m really curious to know which version of KDE Microsoft was copying that gave them the idea to insert ads in the first place…

Win98 had themes, and they were absolutely fantastic!!

Opt in??! Before you know it, you’re going to suggest that we start to respect our users!!

Just updated on void and saw the same thing

Honey, check it out you got me mesmerized

With your black hair and fat-ass thighs

I only wish I could find someone someday who will think of such romantic things to say to me…

HO-TEL MO-TEL HOLLIDAY INN!!!

Right - they say that they’re just going to use it to defend their “property rights”. In practice, they’re going to use it for a whole lot more than just that…

Of course! I hope you didn’t read my comment as hostile. I read yours as sort of a devil’s advocate type of argument and was just trying to point out the logical flaws in it. I’m glad that you didn’t hesitate to voice a contrary opinion. The points that you raise are interesting… and it’s always good to consider both sides of the argument, even because it just helps us hone our own arguments. You could certainly argue that this is just another enforcement mechanism. It’s just that it comes with a lot of unintended consequences, which most people will overlook, and they’ll inevitably be used in ways that we didn’t anticipate, long after the fact that these kinds of mechanisms become commonplace.

Regarding the reduced cost of lending: sure, in theory they could lower the prices. In practicality, will it? Any time we see cost-reducing developments, it usually ends up resulting in higher profits for the vendors moreso than better competition and lower prices for consumers. Look at how car manufacturers are just letting electric vehicles sit in their lots because they refuse to accept what buyers are willing to pay. The corporate types really, really hate to lower prices on anything for any reason. So I would be surprised to see something like that happen, even though it’s still theoretically possible…

All your points are sound. The issue that I have with this is that remote disable functionality is not necessary to achieve any of these aims. Before they were connected to the internet, people were still able to rent/lease autos and the world managed to survive just fine. There were other ways for lenders to get remunerated for breaking lease terms - they could issue an additional charge, get a court order for repossession, etc. Remote disable was never needed or warranted.

So let’s start by considering the due process here. Before, there was some sort of process involved in the repossession act. With remote disable however, the lender can act as judge, jury and executioner so to speak - that party can unilaterally disable the device with no oversight. And if the lender is in the wrong, there is likely no recourse. Another potential issue here is that the lender can change the terms at any time - it can arbitrarily decide that it doesn’t like what you’re doing with the device, decide you’re in breach, and hit that remote kill switch. A lot of these things could technically happen before too, but the barriers have been dramatically lowered now.

On top of this, there are great privacy concerns as well. What kinds of additional information does the lender have? What right do they have to things like our location, our habits, when we use it, and all of the other personal details that they can infer from programs like this?

There are probably lots of other issues here, but another part of the problem is that we can’t even start to imagine what kinds of nefarious behaviors they can execute with this new information and power. We are well into the age where our devices are becoming our enemies instead of our advocates. I shudder to think what the world would look like 20 years from now if this kind of behavior isn’t stopped.