Star Wars was one of the original franchises to do it. It was highly unusual at the time that merchandising rights were retained as generally speaking, they didn't traditionally do well.

So not-well that a little toy company called Kenner was the only one to express interest in it and demand after the movie opened was so immense they were backordered on anything and everything.

I think there was a time they had to sell coupons to get a certain toy because they couldn't meet demand by Christmas, so instead they printed up coupons that could be redeemed for the toy later on so you'd have something under the tree.

But it was Star Wars that really showed the power of merchandising rights.

Nevermind some of Japan's greatest achievements were inspired by outsiders.

Tempura, for example. Japan didn't have a habit of frying food until the Portuguese brought it over. Japan then refined it into the fine art of fried food it's known for today.

This was shortly before Japan decided to close themselves off to the world.

People moved around for centuries

And hate Ubisoft or not, the one thing they do really well for Assassin's Creed is historical accuracy. They've actually won awards for it recreating historical cities to a level of accuracy that's astonished historians and even serve as a reference work.

The problem is people think history is just what they've read in history books, when you don't take into account it's written by the winners and thus represents a very biased one sided account. Nothing shameful in realizing that history has a greater depth beyond the books and stereotypes. People are complex - and never nearly as clean as what the Comic Code Authority approved texts would allow.

It's been a universal truth since the first days of Unix that root permissions allow unconstrained access to configure, execute, steal and destroy. Still, the fact is that while secured Linux installs are going to make running such an exploit very hard or even nearly impossible with regular user access, not all systems are secured. I've seen people intentionally reduce or remove security rules to get something running, so there are no lack of improperly secured Linux systems out there.

Google and Trump are in negotiations on how much Google needs to pay to make the lawsuit go away.

It's not getting done anytime soon because the Art of the Deal means that Trump is asking Google what Google can do for Trump.

You know dude, part of the "mend it don't end it" shtick one usually finds on the left...that does speak to me. I grew up in a poor country. We fixed things. We didn't stay there and we didn't stay poor but the "know how to fix your shit in case of emergency" got deep into my brain early on and the living off of disposable Chinese trash does bother me and always has.

I don't like having to junk a perfectly good coffee maker or children's toy or whatever because one made-in-china plastic piece cracks to pieces and the fly-by-night manufacturer doesn't exist anymore and wouldn't make spares available even if they did.

Repair is an option only if your time is worthless.

You hate throwing away a coffeemaker? You can fix it, or you can buy a new one for $50. Depending on your financial situation, $50 might not be worth fixing - by the time you get it all said and done you'd probably have spent $200 in time and effort. And certainly hiring someone to fix it is not an option - when a technician costs $75/hr+ with a 2 hour minimum.

That's why it ends up in landfill - it's Beyond Economical Repair. It's a problem with old cars as well - you have a junker that now needs $3000 worth of parts, but it's only worth $500.

In poorer countries, sure, they can repair stuff because you're not paying first world wages - where spending 2 hours of time probably costs $10 at most to fix.

Now, if you were to buy a $2000 coffeemaker, it makes sense to fix it. But how many people would buy a repairable $2000 coffeemaker over a $50 one that will break in a couple of years.

Freemium apps depend on impulse purchases to work - if you can't get your smurfberries right now to continue the game, they can lose out on that revenue.

Apple as payment processor allows you to click "buy" and have it in seconds.

Using anyone else means you tap Buy, get redirected to a web site, log in somehow or have to manually type in your credit card number then get the transaction done, then return to the game. This is a massive context switch and will certainly take you out. Sure it might work for the first transaction or two but after that your brain might start objecting to having entered your credit card for the 3rd time in an hour to possibly stop doing it.

It's how those games can rack up kids charging thousands of dollars in transactions during a trip to the grocery store. Not so much if they had to keep entering a credit card number.

Sure they may not have to pay Apple 30%, but they can easily find people are stopping after the first transaction because they refuse to go through all that hassle again, then move onto something else. So in the end the losses are much bigger and you made more money giving Apple 30% because they could keep people playing.

When your business model relies on impulse purchases, any little bit of friction easily incurs a huge drop in revenue. It's also why freemium apps never make you create an account or do anything more than get you in the game - the effort of logging in can easily make people skip to something else. Sure they can make you log in later on to save your progress to the cloud, but that's completely optional.

Plus, even non-freemium apps may continue to use Apple for the simple reason that if you buy something permanent, you know you can always restore your purchases. Third party sites don't have that guarantee so if you bought that costume for $10, with Apple you know you can get it back, but not necessarily so on Android or other platforms. Indeed some games and apps note that Android lacks the "Restore purchases" option and you can find threads of people whining about paying $10 for their premium item all over again.

Everything else, like Netflix or Spotify, they weren't giving Apple 30% anyways so this makes no difference at all.

Apple will be just fine. And freemium apps know they can't just switch to a third party webstore or they can lose their whales. They might try, but what's the point of getting 30% more if you're making 50% less?

To be fair, I've seen some analysts pointing out that some of the increase in other markets may well be to soften the price spike for US consumers given that it's XBox's biggest market.

Seems like a false dichotomy to me. I find it likely that some of the adjustment may be due to plain old increases in cost on their side - the consoles have been out for quite some time, but the US increase has the cost of the tariffs factored in which is why it's proportionally higher? But indeed maybe it was easier for them to swallow making those non-US market adjustments thanks to the forced hand of the tariffs?

It's easy to speculate, but certainly the difference in proportional price increase points to American consumers having to locally cover a bigger gap for tariff related cost increases.

Did they really alter the deal if the thing the user agrees to when they start using it is "We can change the deal at any point"?

that their positions correlate with what they perceive might be better for themselves from a business standpoint

They're raising costs in all markets, but the difference in price varies significantly between markets:

While prices for Xbox consoles and accessories are increasing all around the world, the difference is far greater in the U.S. For instance, in the UK the Xbox Series X is increasing from £480 to £500, only a four percent rise compared to 20 percent. (The Series S is changing significantly more, going up 20 percent from £25o to £300, but that’s still a smaller change than in the United States.)

src: https://kotaku.com/microsoft-x...

It's kind of cute you think Windows would constitute a significant portion of their code footprint.

Google doxxes independent developers FULL legal name and STREET address where they (and perhaps their family) resides on Play Store app listings. This info is available for all and sundry to exploit and/or scrape for any purpose.

No, it's the law in some places like the EU. Basically if you do business with some entity selling you something, you have a right to know where that entity exists.

You know, are they a real business or are they some shady company with no way to contact them other than email.

And on both sides there are always issues. The buyer wants to know that the person on the other end actually exists and is not some scam artist, and the seller wants to be protected from the idiots of the Internet. And where both collide is where we end up today - the buyer's need to know who the product actually originates from and the seller's need for privacy.

In general, the solution has always been to incorporate - I hear Delaware has thousands of companies using a single address and it's so cheap to use it as your official place of business.

It's also good for many reasons including taxes.

Because e-SIMs are a step back. You have to be an old fogie to remember in the US when, on CDMA networks, you had to beg the provider to accept your phone, and one provider just refused to have any phone on its network that they didn't sell. Another sort of allowed stuff, but you had to jump through a crapload of hoops.

Then came SIM cards. Didn't matter who made your phone. If it was unlocked, it worked. Going to another country? Pop in a foreign SIM, or maybe two. Swap them out when needed, freely.

e-SIMs are a US thing... Canadian iPhones still have SIM trays (IIRC). Here in the US, we are going back to having to beg/wheedle the cell provider to accept our phones again, while the rest of the world doesn't put up with that shit.

Except that's not how e-SIMs work. e-SIMs are just reprogrammable SIM cards - you can tell it to generate a new key pair and send your provider the public key of that key pair, as well as download any code necessary.

The old CDMA days was done because the provider needed your ESN to allow it onto their network. So they could ban you easily by refusing ot add your ESN to their network.

But e-SIMs don't work like that - a provider can provide e-SIMs and offers a web page with a plan. You sign up, and they then download the e-SIM data to your e-SIM chip. Then your modem uses it as if it was a regular e-SIM.

e-SIMs are not a US thing - they are a standard and used by lots of providers - notably in Asia.

And providers can always ban 3rd party handsets - SIM chip or no SIM chip. Your phone's IMEI contains all the information needed for the provider to know what phone it is, what color it is, how much storage and other things. If they wanted to ban you, they can reject your IMEI. Many providers share lists of stolen phones so if that phone appears on the network, it gets rejected as stolen.

The reason Canada has SIM trays is because Canadian telecom providers don't all support e-SIMs already.

eSIMs have nothing to do with locking phones out of a network - a provider can do that already if they wanted to using IMEIs. These days, phone handset sales aren't a profit center for the provider - they want people to bring in their own handsets because it means they don't have to subsidize a loan for the phone.

My, admittedly layman's, understanding was that SIMs used asymmetric key cryptography for authentication purposes; rather than a shared secret or the like, with the private key never leaving the UICC during authentication(or even on request, the user is considered a potential threat for cloning purposes).

I can imagine a variety of weak customer service 'authentication' scenarios where having the sort of data that they obtained would probably be useful to an attacker; there's probably a call center script somewhere that treats knowing the IMEI as a secret; but how would you actually clone a SIM with just the server-side data? Do the telcos generate the private keys outside the UICC and store copies when they load them? Do I misunderstand how the authentication works?