Someone paid the ransom.

Only if the bank authorized you to use agents. Read the fineprint, banks have a lot of that.

Try to take away Google from an average user. They will get very vocal about how every other search engine is crap.

It was not. People did a lot of hard work to prevent the catastrophe and it paid off. Otherwise a lot of stuff would have collapsed.

You're missing that Airbnb is promising some kind of security (in this case privacy) to the customers. So they need to hold the providers accountable. It is also way faster and easier for customers if Airbnb enforces such things beforehand than having to go to the police afterward.

If it were about access they would only need to ban the DeepSeek cloud but could use the model hosted by US companies.

"they said they needed his phone to look for "kiddie p*rn"

They should use their own phones to look at kiddie p*rn.
On the more serious side: This is a good excuse for anything. If they don't find any, they can just plant some. Have a URL ready, open the browser and load it ... voila you have some evidence for kiddie p*rn and can detain him.

Google help pages are not very helpful. With the chatbot reading them to you, you at least find the information you're looking for. That doesn't mean it is more complete than before, but you have fewer clicks through a FAQ labyrinth than many sites have.

Have you ever tried to find the Twitter support form? You get asked what your question is and each option leads you either to a FAQ page or a second question. You need to find a very specific path to get to the form where you may reach a human (now probably also a bot).

Technically correct ... but a crawler does this at 100 times the speed because it doesn't involve AI inference.

I invested heavily in humble bundles when they still did indie bundles and only stopped when they started to add Android apps whose DRM doesn't work without play store and similar things ... they also should not have stopped doing the funny promotion videos. Anyway, I have bought a lot of bundles to the default price, because I liked the idea, both to support indie develops and that they share with charity.

I said everyone *but* you is wrong. So it doesn't say anything about you.

Some day you'll realize that ALL words are made up. ;)

I think the problem started with mobile devices.
On the PC people were used to freedom and went to war when someone wanted to take it away.

Then Apple and Google introduced mobile devices without freedom from the start. Locked bootloader, proprietary OS without alternatives (Android ROMs are still android and most of them contain quite a bit of components ripped from the stock firmware because they otherwise wouldn't work), trusted computing to prevent you from tampering with things, DRM all the way, apps can only be installed from the store, adware is completely normal from the very start, tracking frameworks do not lead to an outcry and the vendors get their share from the ad/tracking revenue.

The "you take my free software from my dead cold hands" people ignored these devices at first and the "digital native" generation didn't know why to protest. Google appeased the nerds by providing Android source and allowing some modding (they are now starting to lock things down), so they didn't provide real alternatives. That worked for Apple and Google real well and now it is (almost?) too late to change anything.

Apple already made it hard to run unsigned Software on PCs, Microsoft would like to do the same with the Windows store and game shops like Steam and Epic picked up the "You only buy a revocable license" thing as well, mostly starting with the death of physical media. If you download something instead of putting a disk into your PC you don't see the online requirement and the mechanisms to revoke your rights any time until it is too late.

They also don't let you resell your games.

I think you confuse agents with crawlers. A crawler comes and fetches everything (if its polite slow, but currently they are often aggressive). An agent is more or less an automated browser, doing targeted actions like a user would do, just with fewer clicks for the user. An agent doesn't overly strain the website.