I'm fairly sure at least one entire department at MS is tasked with making sure people don't switch to other formats, that despite on-paper "open" XML it remains incompatible and no competitor software can flawlessly read and write it.

So no, unless you can hire a dozen people full-time to counter that, you don't have a chance to break through that.

Qualified immunity is a reasonable concept that I agree is needed for police work.

It's just being completely overdone, used to cover up clear abuse. The basic idea of "when in doubt, police still needs to be able to act" is sound. The actual practice "unless you can prove to criminal standards and beyond, that the police officer knew at that exact moment, that what they were doing was totally definitely illegal and they intentionally decided to break a law. That's quite a bit too much of "err on the side of caution".

What a complete and utter surprise... to the three people who are so high their brain stopped working but miraculously didn't kill them.

For everyone else, this was literally the first thing we thought about, right? Please tell me I'm not the last sane person on planet Earth. Nobody expected that this would NOT be abused in such ways, right?

I will not write it, Sam-I-Am,
I will not offer colored ham!

Which is why you never answer "yes" to anything a prosecutor asks you. It's always a trap. In this case, asking if this is your account and not asking if you sent those messages is the trap.

Hard disagree.

There are mistakes that can happen - getting a phone number wrong, knocking on the wrong street number, stuff like that, sure.

But all of those mistakes need to be found and fixed DURING the investigation. This is the duty of the police officiers.

Not finding any evidence and STILL going to trial - that's on the prosecution. But I doubt that there would have been a conviction if police had not omitted things or outright lied in court. I doubt any courd would hand down a guilty verdict if all the police involved said that they found no evidence of anything.

I got Google Play Music for my family back when that was a thing. It was the same price as Spotify, had the same catalog, and included any music on Youtube as well. The fact that it included ad free Youtube was just a bonus. These days that has morphed into Youtube Premium, and I still pay for it. I am mostly there for the music, but the ad free Youtube is not terrible.

The interesting thing is that it is pretty clear that most people just watch the ads. Youtube had $60 billion in yearly revenue last year. More than Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount, and Warner Brothers combined. Roughly $20 billion of that is credited to Youtube Premium which is bigger than any of its Hollywood competitors.

There's a reason that Peacock is being included with Youtube Premium and not the other way around. Youtube is worth something. Peacock, not so much.

Things have changed dramatically since the heyday when everyone had a cable subscription. I used to work for SlingTV (and then Dish), and I had a front row seat as the whole industry imploded. Every year the television networks and movie studios would sit down and renegotiate their contracts. Despite the fact that viewership was always down at least 10% year over year they always wanted price increases. If the cable providers pushed back (as Dish often did) they would lose access to channels, invariably during football season when it mattered most.

You see, as technology started allowing people to purchase their entertainment piecemeal it soon became clear what parts they were willing to pay for, and which parts they weren't willing to pay for. Hollywood thought that people paid for cable subscriptions to watch their scripted television. It turns out that, for most people anyway, the part of television that they were willing to pay for was live sports.

That's why Disney won't sell you ESPN unless you bundle it with everything else that they sell, and that's also why Disney is suing SlingTV for reselling access on a daily basis. SlingTV's "sports pass" allows you to pay for just the games that you want at a ridiculous price. Disney should be stoked, but instead it has sued because it wants to force sports fans to continue to pay for their other channels.

Almost no one is watching traditional scripted television these days. The few hits that the networks do have tends to be reality TV stuff like "Dancing with the Stars," where the audience can watch people compete in real time. Youtube (not YoutubeTV) has at least half again as many viewers as their next highest competitor (Netflix), at any time during the day, on traditional 10 foot devices (your living room TV). That's not counting people watching Youtube on their phones or their computers. Youtube is killing scripted content on living room televisions, during prime time. During the day its an order of magnitude worse.

Take a look at nielsen.com and take a look for yourself. It's absolutely grim. Look at the shows that are doing relatively well, they are all either sports or sports commentary. That's literally the only reason that anyone watches anything besides YouTube and Netflix.

Apple spent over $20 billion building up a content catalog. At their height they were spending nearly $5 billion a year making shows. They made some great shows and got rave reviews. Amazon spends $1 billion a year for the rights to Thursday night football. That is arguably the worst football game of the week. However, Prime generally gets as many viewers for a single game as Apple has total subscribers, including all of the free subscriptions that Apple gives away. It's not just Apple that is shifting away from scripted television either. Take a look at any of the streaming sites (including Netflix) and you will see that all of their recent moves have been to try and compete for the sports market. That's definitely what YouTube is doing by bundling Peacock.

Hollywood is currently circling the drain. Everyone is up for sale right now. No one is watching scripted television. They certainly aren't paying for it.

You can call a piece of coal "off-white, tending towards darkish", or you can call it "black". Both are technically not incorrect. Only one of them is not intentionally misleading.

The whole shit is obviously intended to chill critique. If you are seriously offended by someone calling you an incompetent ass, then politics isn't for you, go get a real job.

And the police really have more important things to do than scaring pensioners who got a bit emotional online. (one of the most famous raids was in 2024 against a 64-year old guy who had called a minister "Schwachkopf" (english: dimwit).

Tell me you think that justifies sending the police to someone's home. Seriously, these people need to get a grip. You can call me dimwit all day and I wouldn't dream of sending the police after you.

What else would you call it when police arrives at your home at 6 am to search it because you posted something online? (like they would find a reddit posting in your sock drawer, I mean come on, seriously?)

During the ""Aktionstage gegen Hasspostings" (Action Days Against Hate Speech), around a hundred or so such raids are conducted on the same day, and a substantial portion of those is for insulting politicians.

The details are clickbait, and the take questionable, but there is enough truth in it. From my perspective (I'm Germany, but I currently live elsewhere, but still follow German politics closely):

One, there is a considerable crisis in the German manufacturing industry. And the current government has pushed through (with questionable methods) and insane military spending bill while at the same time complaining everywhere else that there is no money and they need to cut this and that and everything else.

Two, there is a strong US influence in european politics, and especially in Germany. A long list of recent and current high-ranking German politicians has direct connections to US think tanks or corporations, and an even larger number found employ with these or US universities, etc. after they were voted out. One would have to be incredibly naive to think that they're hired for their competence or out of charity.

This is not the only case and there HAVE been police raids and quite a bit of police overreach, all in the name of a law specifically made to protect politicians. There have been several HUNDRED cases brought by politiciians against ordinary people for things they posted online.

You can discuss individual cases, but that doesn't change the pattern.

And, btw., this is not a right- oder left-wing topic. The dude in question here is a right-wing politician (the CDU being Germany's equivalent to the Republicans). Not the most right-extremist-wing, but clearly right-wing, pro-corporation, fuck-the-working-class right-wing.

Some famous Frenchman once said: Give me ten lines, written by the most innocent man, and I'll find something in them to hang him for.

Once the government becomes oppressive, there is no such thing as non-problematic data.

Corporations never, ever (pinky-swear) destroy evidence. What they do is destroy data before it BECOMES evidence. That's the whole trick. It's what they try to argue here: As soon as they asked, destroying the data they had asked to see became illegal. I sincerely hope this gets thrown out.

Can we please pressure Apple and Google into making duress passwords a standard feature on all OSs?

We need this to become common.

So someone is going to jail for it?

Because if ordinary people do something that is very very illegal, they do.