And at its worst it prices residents out of their own city while destroying the local hospitality industry. For every "common person with an unused spare room showing tourists cool local things" there are at least ten faceless investment firms treating them as de-facto hotel rooms you get the honor of cleaning yourself.

Seriously, AirBnB is your shining example of why we shouldn't view tech bros with extreme skepticism?

Want to talk about the rest of the gig economy which only exists by evading decades of hard won labor rights/regulations?

I can just imagine a system where you get a "one minute charging speed boost!" when you choose to watch a video ad...

In Soviet Russia, correlation causes YOU!

No, you don't. You remember what the marketing men spun punitive damages as.

It was not an investment. It was not anyone saving anyone. It was Microsoft caught stealing and paying.

Read the link.

The EU does capitalism better than the US does. What we have in the US is not capitalism. The correct term is crony capitalism.

Gulfstream.

You didn't think they flew commercial with the dirty plebs, did you?

Those products all paid licensing fees to whomever owns the underlying IP. You can find examples where the IP owner decides to be a dick. I'll call out everyone's least favorite, EA, and point out that you can't legally get the SNES version of Sim City on modern hardware via any sales channel that I'm aware of. Of course, there are "gray" options to play it, but you won't find it in the Wii store and there's no (legal) packaged emulator for it on Amazon.

Meme: After years of working in tech the only "smart" device in my house is an inkjet printer. I keep a gun next to it in case it makes a sound I don't recognize.

It's pretty trivial to install your own certificate authority and perform MITM attacks against all encrypted traffic coming from a particular endpoint over which you have control. It's less trivial but still doable to decompile a program and look through the source for hidden processes like you describe. All of which is to say I doubt Google could keep something like you describe a secret for very long, if they were inclined to try it, which seems unlikely. Why risk the bad PR and inevitable lawsuits when the majority of the unwashed masses happily consent to being spied on?

It absolutely is. What Google is doing here is no different than how most endpoint protection suites work. They all submit visited websites to a real time authority to check for known pfishing/malware sites. They will block in the moment where possible and retroactively alert the IT team when a visited site is later determined to be bad. I'm assuming Chrome will at least do the first. The second would be trickier while maintaining privacy but would still be doable locally, if the browser can download the database and compare it against its own history.

You're not wrong to call out the nonsensical equation to slavery as being silly at best and highly offensive at worst....

But where do you see a choice to go to work or not? Did you mistake Amazon's home country for one with a meaningful social safety net? Did I sleep through humanity waking up in the Star Trek utopia where we only work doing the things we love and not to meet our basic needs for food, shelter, healthcare, etc.?

They used to. Boeing is a case study in what happens when you let Next Quarter MBA assholes run an enterprise. The story of the last few decades of American capitalism has been such assholes hijacking virtually every company of note. It's not enough to be profitable, you have to be MORE profitable than you were last quarter, where you were MORE profitable than the quarter preceding it. That appeases the Wall Street beast, which boosts the stock price, which is all you really care about in the C-Suite since stock options make up the majority of your compensation.

Now, it's obvious to those of us who don't have MBAs that you will eventually reach a point of maximal efficiency/profit where further gains can only come at the expense of safety, worker's rights, product quality, customer satisfaction, or most likely, all of the above and then some. And here we are. To quote John Oliver, "We went to business school. Get on our plane!"

Some additional backstory if you're interested.

Everywhere I've worked where I had involvement with the CCTV systems aimed to keep at least 90 days. I've never heard of 10 days, that seems awfully low, might have made sense in the analog/tape era but digital storage is cheap.

One of my locations is on an accident prone intersection. We get a lot of requests from insurance companies and drivers for footage of accidents. When the requests come from the insurance carriers it's pretty damned rare they make it to us within 30 days. I guess the bureaucracy slows them down. Requests from the drivers involved usually make it to us a lot faster.

Yeah, that's utter bullsh1t.

MS didn't invest in Apple. MS stole code from Apple, got caught, and settled out of court.

I've seen that claim loads of times -- it's all over Quora -- and it's a flat lie. It's credulous fools believing the marketing lizards' BS.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/...

MS is utterly amoral and ruthless.

It stole from Stac:

https://www.latimes.com/archiv...

https://tedium.co/2018/09/04/d...

It sabotaged DR:

https://www.geoffchappell.com/...

It screwed over Central Point:

https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topi...

It discussed how to "knife Netscape in the back":

https://thehistoryoftheweb.com...

Gates personally lied to the head of Aldus:

https://www.cringely.com/2013/...

He tried to screw his cofounder while the guy had cancer:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/f...

[Article author here]

> NT3.51 was perfectly viable for a workstation in its day

Yes it was. I used in in my day job at the time, on PC Pro Magazine.

But it was the 3rd release of NT and it came out 5 whole years after this product. At that time, given the speed of development of computing in the 1980s and 1990s, half a decade was almost an eternity. It was time for NT 3.1+ 3 service packs, then 3.5 + another 3 service packs, then 3.51, which itself got 5 SPs.

> the last version of Windows that prioritized reliability and security.

Arguably.

> Too bad about the 2GB filesystem limit

Only applied to FAT. This was before FAT32 was invented; it appeared with Windows 95 OSR2 in 1996.

NTFS volumes could be much bigger. You could create a 4GB volume during installation, but that's because it formatted as FAT16 (with nonstandard 64kB clusters) then converted it. But you could format the partition in advance with another OS, such as another copy of NT, and have NTFS partitions as large as the disk.

Do you mean Eric Raymond?

If you get the name of the co-inventor of the term "open source" right, rather than confusing him with a French videogame character, it will make your comment rather more believable.