Sign-ups vs cancellations vs downgrades - why pay for more screens if you aren't using them? I suspect that a lot of accounts are dropping down a tier or two, rather than outright cancelling.

This line of reasoning is tired and incorrect.

Nothing was being taken that was supposed to be paid for. The account was being paid for. The increased number of screens was being paid for. Netflix tacitly (and in some cases more overtly) encouraged families to share accounts, and to upgrade accounts to allow for more sharing across more simultaneous devices.

Netflix changed their rules to increase profits and now people are annoyed. Nothing illegal has happened. You might argue that something unethical was happening (either Netflix changing the rules or customers breaking the rules). But whatever happens, customers (whether direct or indirect) have a right to complain about a product without being accused of being part of some "entitlement culture".

I'm sure that Netflix's PR department can handle the bad press without blanket accusations of entitlement (unless you're part of Netflix's PR department, in which case I suggest that entitlement-shaming critics probably isn't a great sales approach).

The "no one is forcing anyone" argument is tired and unhelpful.

In most web services, we understand that users are the product, sold to ad agencies. We're not getting anything for free, there is an implicit contract by which we pay for their services by allowing them to attempt to sell things to us. When Google or any other big provider renegotiates the terms of that contract, we are allowed to voice our displeasure, rather than just walking away. That's how this all works. And that's how things change for the better.

I admit, I'm still not sure about the "metaverse", but I am pretty sure that if there's going to be a metaverse, I'd rather Facebook not own it. So anything they do to drive people to their competitors is fine with me.

To misuse Clarke's 3rd Law: "Any sufficiently advanced assholery is indistinguishable from trolling”. :)

You can put anything you want in the license, and people may or may not argue with you whether it's still "open source". But I think what TFA is talking about is not the RIGHT to specify who can use open source software or for what purposes, but vigilante ENFORCEMENT (in this case, via data wiping).

Next thing you know, former open source developers are creating the next Sony rootkit, for all the "right reasons".

The full version of the extraordinarily-poorly-summarized-because-this-is-slashdot-so-of-course-it-is article makes some worthwhile points. And it's short. It's worth a read.

Parent was saying the "little messages" are protestware. The "attack" was indiscriminately wiping data if the IP address is in Russia or Belarus (as per TFA).

Downloaded it to give it a try, but like Chrome (and unlike Firefox) on Android, it provides my phone's make and model within the useragent. This seems like a privacy control that a browser with "advanced" privacy options ought to take into account?

Pass.

Ban the Kinder Egg! Oh, wait, someone already did that...

"after spending the last four seasons in the titular role of The Doctor" - no, it was only three. The British do TV different than the Americans but there were only three "seasons" (including the current one) with Smith.

"where he will star alongside a majority of the other actors who have taken on the character" - That was the fan theory ages ago, but the casting has long since been confirmed by the BBC and David Tennant is the only other former doctor to appear in the special.

Regardless, Smith had a great run. I was skeptical at first at the "youngest ever doctor" but I was thrilled with the result.

Or get them from Canada. Or Mexico. Or any of your neighbours who don't have a ridiculous embargo against Cuba. :)

Thanks, /. After a morning of depressing news stories, this one made me smile. It even gives me hope that my government (Canada) might make the same realization before their next attempt to ram some US-written legislation through!

The unreasonable part is that you're putting a tax on something that is ridiculously changeable. Right now 1 Terabyte seems a lot, so to pay an extra few euro for a hard drive seems ok.

In 2002 the Canadian copyright lobby proposed a levy of 0.8 per megabyte on removable flash media and 2.1 per megabyte on non-removable storage in an audio player (in addition to the existing levy on blank audio tapes / cd's).

That means that the 16GB SD card I bought recently for my camera would have cost not $10 but $141 and a 32GB media player would be an extra $688.

Those sizes were unheard of in 2002 but only ten years later are commonplace. In another ten years, a gigabyte tax will probably be just as absurd.

That's incorrect, Canada does not have this tax on storage devices or media players.

The copyright lobby has tried and failed a few times to have the copyright levy extended from blank media. As of right now the levy is only on blank cd's. http://www.cpcc.ca/en/the-cpcc/private-copying-tariff