IIRC with Windows 98 you could just use any product key you had on as many machines as you wanted since there was no activation or real phoning home capabilities. So most likely your whole friend group would be using the same serial that was copied off your uncle's old gateway.
Was it Sony that had the patent on a device that would require the watcher to say the product name out loud to the microphone to continue watching? The product to my knowledge doesn't exist but the patent for it did.
See the Mattel lead painted toy scandal. The end result was congress passed regulations that manufacturers had to have their toys tested for lead and then made large companies like Mattel exempt from it because they were deemed large enough to handle it on their own. Even though they were the reason for the legislation because they weren't handling it on their own. Mattel sells lead painted toys and congress responds by hobbling their competitors.
I felt like part of Google's success was that the simple search bar loaded fast in an era where I often had slow internet. Yahoo's portal page had to much on it to distract or slow me down from doing what I came there to do.
Later on I remember finding out Yahoo had a search.yahoo.com page or something that was also just a search bar but that was harder to type so was still a failure of design.
As wealth inequality and corruption based economic policies push people further and further into a corner the state will have a greater need to identify any nascent organization of political movements that threaten the status quo earlier so these can be strangled in their cribs.
They wouldn't pull out of California. It's 1/5 of the US economy and would leave a gaping opening for a competitor to gain a stronger foothold there. You're right it's about money not principles but that's exactly why the threat would be empty. They'd probably lobby congress to try and make it illegal for the states to enact the protection and do some performative annoyances instead.
They might try to make an example out of a smaller state, but since they aren't selling food or fuel or heart pills it isn't like the state is going to collapse without access to Meta properties.
Not sure how common it is now, but based on repair manuals my TV's wifi is provided by a standard m.2 wifi module and can be trivially removed. That wouldn't stop them from changing the TV's OS to nag or otherwise disable itself afterwards but the hardware change is about as trivial as it could be.
Now why the disable wifi option isn't available on the TV when it appears in the user manual is another matter...
They probably didn't want a news article drawing attention how creepy and pervasive their facial recognition system is, even if it was actually used for a good cause for once.
That's exactly my take. I've had a similar thing where a car of mine got stolen and I petitioned the police to use their ANPR capability to give an idea of where it went and they said they couldn't even though I already knew that they could. It was a funny conversation. It hinged on 'couldn't' because of 'reasons' vs 'technical ability'.
Or, it could be that they didn't get a warrant, and don't want to get into the habit of giving the government things without a warrant (or, given that it's a big US internet corporation, something political in return would probably also work).
I'm not saying they're nice, they're not. But it's probably for the best that they don't (or didn't, again, it was 10+ years ago) give government everything they ask for without a warrant.
I repeat the question: why would it be so hard to get a warrant?
reply