I'm all for removing reliance on TurboTax, H&R Block, etc, though I do have friends and clients that are tax preparers. I think Direct File is very much a step in the right direction, though it will naturally cost money to wean the public off the current providers.
IRS stated through the GAO that the combined costs to develop and run this initial pilot ran about $25 million**. That's pretty steep, but doesn't seem particularly egregious for essentially breaking into and disrupting an entrenched industry. The running costs for Direct File were estimated at $2.4 million**, which will certainly go up as/if the program expands, but so will the amount of revenue diverted from tax preparers.

** These numbers are disputed. According to a GAO report, there were a number of additional costs that should have been included, particularly costs related to the Direct File pilot incurred by the US Digital Service (USDS, a technology unit that is part of the Executive branch of the government) that were not required to be reimbursed from IRS. USDS developed the prototype that was eventually developed into the Direct File program and also loaned 29 staff to the IRS to assist with building and running Direct File)
GAO report about IRS Direct File

The link for KB5037422 in the summary points to KB5035857, the update it supercedes. You know...the update that introduced the memory leak?

smdh.

Remembering all the Spectre/Meltdown hullabaloo of the before times, this statement elicited some giggling.

I cackled when I read your post! That's a brilliant recursive acronym and one I haven't had the pleasure of previously encountering.

Thanks! :D

Interesting. The first thought that comes to mind is whether such bans/rules will be challenged under the Commerce Clause. Labelling requirements are probably fine, and outright banning them would probably pass muster (at least with the current judicial landscape).

Bit disappointing, though. While there are sectors and industries that are likely valuable enough to warrant domestic protection/incentives, is ranching really one of those?

I will agree, it was technically an error.

"Captain! There's a giant boat in our path!"
"Ram it. Our Iceberg is invincible."

(Thank you, Zach, for the laughter! "Hubris")

Wish I heard about this happening more often. Sadly, I suspect this is very unusual. Also, some scalpers may be turned off of doing this by such cases, but the more successful...middlemen...will likely absorb this as a cost of doing business.

Still, nice to hear of it happening at all. It's not like TicketsMaster has any desire to shut this crap down.

That was true for the "Less Secure Apps" method, but I haven't experienced this when using an App Password.

Regardless, though, Gmail still sucks for third-party clients.

The problem with this approach is that by reflecting the incoming message to other addresses, you are re-sending it from a new server while still claiming the message originated from the original account/server.

Obviously, this will fail SPF since the entire purpose of SPF is to designate which servers are allowed to claim sent messages are from a given domain.

If you want to forward incoming messages to one or more other recipients, you need to generate a new message quoting the old one with the new origin being the original recipient. I don't really see a problem with this, outside of the forwarding mechanisms that attempt to use an external domain as a glorified alias for other email addresses.

This is just my stance on it, though, and perhaps I misunderstand why this is a bad thing.

Impressive!

Oh. SMS. Well, yeah.

...that still included SMS. Oops.

Wasn't this sort of the plot in Black Mirror S6E1 "Joan is Awful"?

I can't help but chuckle a bit.

"AI", the great equalizer.

It's like training monkeys to train other monkeys, and it make me laugh haha!

Politics has shown me I don't need math nor to read, write or talk good to be the President.

The captain and CEO are taking their VIP hostage and experimental, undetectable submarine to where they are planning to defect to the Russians.