The proximate reason is that there are no editors on Slashdot.

The broader reason is that the fortunes of tech companies are often caught up in financial headlines, so publications that cover economics are invariably syndicated here. The intended audience of these publications—the capitalist class—is deeply anxious about any changes in their host organism that may result in the contraction of their debt-based casino, so they eat up stories with pearl-clutching themes. Naturally, slave shortages are a major concern.

Patrimony is a word already. It refers to a son inheriting possessions from his father. The -monium suffix is productive in Latin and means "obligation:" testimony is the obligation to testify; patrimony is the obligation to act as a father; matrimony is the obligation to act as a mother, i.e., fulfil "womanly duties."

Whoever sold you this bullshit was lying to you, and not even doing a particularly good job.

You are being scammed.

Ads: The homescreen has a couple of small store links at the bottom that are relatively unobtrusive. There are no recommendations forced on you unless you go to the store. There is a store button at the bottom of the homescreen, which I imagine is pretty handy if you actually want to get your eBooks from them.

Organization: You have to set up book categories after putting files on the device (like how the Kindle 3 was back in the day) but there are no forced labels or anything. There are at least 2 homebrew launchers that replace the homescreen, one of which lets you use a directory structure for files.

There is no screensaver advertising at all, unlike the Kindle—you can set it to display the cover of the last book you read, a generic "sleeping" message, or upload your own pictures for random display. I was really surprised by this; it's like they asked Kindle modders what they wanted and just made it the default.

There is a trick for skipping user registration during the onboarding experience by plugging the device into a PC and editing a YAML file, allowing you to use the device without giving them any info at all—unthinkable on Kindle!

Rakuten is a small Canadian company, so their niche is being less shitty than Amazon. If they ever stopped doing that they wouldn't have any customers.

Back when "Broadcom" meant "Henry Nicholas doing all the drugs" it was at least crooked in an entertaining sort of way.

After Avago took over and used them as a namesake and skin suit it was all downhill.

Is there some aspect of this grinder that anyone thinks is actually encouraging us to toss more meat into it?

They keep asking people "Don't you want to use Edge instead of Chrome?" too.

There's not 10 petabytes of sensitive data in all the world. 10 petabytes is enough to store a copy of every movie and television show ever released to DVD plus every book ever written in any language on Earth.

What they captured was some sensitive data and a whole lot of garbage that someone could possibly, maybe analyze to make some statistical inferences about conceivably sensitive data.

They sabotage themselves just fine with user-hostile security implementations and bloat bloat bloat.

The CIA is running Chinese language ads looking for spies.
https://www.theguardian.com/us...

The US will pay very good money for secrets.

These guys could have quietly cut a deal with the NSA/CIA. Now that China knows to look for them, they better watch their backs. Talk about poking the dragon.

Don't you want to know all the latest news on enshitification?

Everybody's gone to Truth Social, obviously! /s

The ACLU went to court to defend the freedom of speech right of nazis to march through Jewish neighborhoods. Personally, I would have classified that as threatening speech, but I'm no the ACLU. (They fought for the right of the Klan to march through black neighborhoods too.)

I'm also a pedantic, and the term you're trying to think of but failing to is "milquetoast". Milktoast is just... soggy toast.

Be a lot cheaper just to fly them to the jungle and give 'em all Ayahuasca...