They've made their intentions clear. As soon as third-parties start to use adb for sideloading there's a very good chance they start to lock that down as well.
Stealing? They're freaking paying for it. If you're paying for 4 streams why the fuck do you care where they are streaming it them from? This is just a money grab for their shareholders pure and simple.
Yes, stealing. If you are sharing your login with people the terms you agreed to don't allow you to share it with, you are stealing. As for why I care - because I despise stealing and the entitlement and distespect and ignorance that's usually behind it.
This is not a food, medicine, shelter, human-rights, or access-to-knowledge situation. We're talking about bingeware, no one really needs this in any serious way, it's purely optional junk food for the brain, so there is absolutely no excuse for stealing it. Extra especially not because of how much as-good-or-better entertainment content is available online for free.
HackRF One requires a host computer such as a laptop so I wouldn't compare those to be siblings. More a cyberdeck with an SDR would be a larger sibling like this one: https://hackaday.io/project/183892-cyberdeck1
Didn't they work with the Signal team for their e2e encryption of messages and calls? Are you saying that they've removed that despite showing the opposite at the beginning of of every new conversation?
The nuance here lies in what a "message" is. In the contemporary era of smartphones, data transmission, and all the bits-and-bobs in between, a message is much more than just the word contents. The "messages" might be e2e encrypted but the metadata is not, and that subtle difference is ridiculously important. e2e encryption is used as an indicator that your communication is private, but while the messages on whatsapp may be private (well, until your partner in the discussion decides to send a copy to meta themselves), the communication is anything but. For some reason though this nuance is set to the side and we all bicker about the message contents.
The reality is, sending information is a multi-layered thing. There's the message contents, the message metadata, and the network that the message is sent on. All of which are subjected to different levels of privacy. Each of those things can be used to spy on you, to abuse your rights, and to generally invade your life in ways that most would consider to be inappropriate. Which leads to the obvious conclusion that e2e encryption of the messages is only a portion of the issue. By using WhatsApp, you're trusting Meta corp as arbiter of all of these pieces and their implementations. Which is obviously, given everything the Zuck has ever leaked from his mouth piece, is not a great choice.
I know this, you know this, and it's abhorrent. I wanted to skip over that detail and point at the more glaring issues with trusting them in general. The real point is that trusting Meta to be a good moderator of your communication and all the ways that can be misused is really absurd. Emphasized by your point that they can automagically escape their encryption routines on a whim.
Neither of those says that anybody other than sender and recipient can access message contents. Just metadata, which is well understood (and from what I know, also true for Signal, correct me if I'm wrong).
The subpoena asks for "all correspondence with [these] users". I am not a lawyer, so I don't know if that gave enough wiggle room for Signal to not provide metadata, or if they don't store it in the first place.
Where does it say that? It says they could do that, not that they are doing it.
Although nothing indicates that Facebook currently collects user messages without manual intervention by the recipient, it's worth pointing out that there is no technical reason it could not do so. [...] An "end-to-end" encrypted messaging platform could choose to, for example, perform automated AI-based content scanning of all messages on a device, then forward automatically flagged messages to the platform's cloud for further action.
I'm not sure about the subscription model. Everything is a subscription these days and I think it's a bad thing because if you've already made the icons then just set a fixed price. Made new icons? create a new version and charge for it.
I agree with your emotion, as an individual I also worry about the trend away from ownership. But this is targeted at companies, who definitely need to be able to pay the fee, right? (even tiny ones)
For comparison, we pay Hoefler a similar recurring fee for using one font on our website and in our app. I think it's fair. Designing good fonts or icon sets is hard work, and a few hundred euros a year for what's a fundamental part of our marketing and image is a pretty good deal.
One thing is whether they can pay, the other is the process - especially for big orgs each bill has a huge overheaf to check and make the payment, anf the responsible teams have to justify the expense regularly.
Because real-time malware scanning causes way more trouble than it is worth. It adds latency to every file open on the off chance that it might contain some kind of identifiably malicious code. That might be mildly useful if I had any faith it could actually detect the majority of malware, but I don't. In fact, the only things I've ever seen it identify reliably are any kind of piracy or forensics tools.
Personally, I am not a fan of Windows Defender in general, but disabling it completely renders other services (e.g. Windows Store) unusable. That's why I only disable the real-time scanning component.
There are two reasons for doing this:
Firstly, it has been shown that the real-time scanning features causes issues with file access latency. It's apparently quite noticeable when using WSL. On a laptop there might also be a noticeable improvement in battery life, but I don't have any data to back that up.
Secondly, every now and then the real-time scanning triggers on some file, removing/quarantining it without asking me first. This often happens, for instance, for video game cracks that I'd like to analyze / revers-engineer [^1]. So, for me, it's a lot of false positives and so far I haven't encountered a single case where Windows Defender actually protected me from something. At least that I know of.
^1: It's a hobby, I don't build DRM, don't worry. The games I work on typically release DRM-free.
Probably also makes for a more predictable experience; you don’t want to show off your shiny new engine and have a subset of people getting a poor experience because of their varied hardware (which I guess is also a marketing reason)
Epic is worth almost $30b. They make the largest 3d engine and own Fortnite, a franchise worth billions on its own. They have their own game marketplace. Their legal team is squaring against Apple. They've got more resources than a tiny indy shop these days.
