Terrible idea, terrible company, terrible users.

All those right-wing-ish libertarian-ish people who complained about cancelling are still the ones complaining about cancelling. What changed was people abusing an alleged "cultural moment" before were left-ish or left-coded (or whatever you want to call them if you don't like my words just insert your own), and now they are right-ish. Specifically "Collective Shout", a culturally right wing pressure group, was responsible for this exact campaign that got Steam to pull games. And they did it because of a perceived or claimed "cultural moment" where they could get up to THEIR shenanigans.
The anti-censorship, anti-cancel people are the same in all cases.

Definitely not, Anker makes solid stuff.

The article gives us a vague description:
"The dedicated card and payment crime unit of the City of London police launched an investigation after receiving information from the intelligence firm WMC Global about the fraudulent kits being sold online."
How did they even know the guy was in London?
From Crown Prosecution Service:
"The investigation uncovered a large amount of digital evidence, which the prosecution used to build a strong case and successfully link Holman to the online offending."
And also:
“I hope this case sends a clear message to those intent on committing fraud: no matter how sophisticated your methods, you cannot hide behind online anonymity or encrypted platforms. Fraudsters like Holman will be robustly pursued by law enforcement, prosecuted by the CPS, and brought to justice.”

How did he initially get on their radar? Did Telegram provide authorities with whatever IP he logged in from, or maybe he just posted his email? Did he not really try to stay anonymous out of some belief that he wasn't doing anything illegal?

Regular use or only exception weirdness? If this covers a free battery for every device eventually, that would definitely provide some value that is pretty reliable (most Apple devices would benefit from a battery swap between two and four years in).

But if it only covers "battery fails", some rare event, then whatever.

A RISC-V computer may be the only way in decades to not have some inbuilt vulnerability like Intel's Management Engine or AMD's Platform Security Processor. That alone makes it worth considering.

>"It's bordering disgraceful how many people around here didn't instantly come to the conclusion that old software versions still exist and work just fine on the same vintage hardware it's meant to run on."

You're right, but this really is one of the exceptions. A huge pile of things stop working forever when updated- the fact that these are self contained bootable OSes makes them the exception, not the rule.
If a new version of Libreoffice didn't work on my current hardware for some reason, I'd have a ton of hoops to jump through if I wanted it to still work. I'd have to install it via a different mechanism that doesn't get updated any more, and eventually the libraries it relies on would get updated underneath it to a point of incompatibility, so I'd eventually have to stop updating those. Then of course various other externalities would eventually require those. It would be possible to do, but it would be a large amount of effort going forward.

Since that's true of like >95% of stuff now, you can see why some people would think that way.

I've always loathed the term "Nintendo Tax" because it implies some kind of penalty, like a wealth tax or a vice tax. Though I can't argue that it's not a real thing - Nintendo's best games hold their market value far better than rival games, even from other top-tier Japanese developers.

Still, I would approach this phenomena from the other direction. Nintendo is not able to maintain high prices because they're somehow fleecing people (as a tax would imply), but because they work to make games that stand the test of time. And then back it up with a sales strategy to match.

So much of the industry treats video games as ephemeral entertainment - something to consume, and then throw away as you move on to the next game. It's the traditional media model for TV and movies extended to interactive media. And for most of the industry it's an accurate observation: game sales are ridiculously front-loaded, and few games (especially single-player games) have a long tail. After the initial hype subsides, you need to lower your price quickly in order to keep unit sales (and thus revenue) from cratering. All the while you're already hard at work on next year's game.

But Nintendo has been able to channel the lifecycle of board games and card games. In their eyes they aren't creating media, they're creating a digital plaything. They're creating something that you'll play now, but you'll also want to play next month, next year, next decade. Case in point: Mario Kart 8 is 11 years old and the only thing that has really diminished its value (and sales) after all of this time is that it finally has a successor in Mario Kart World.

When is the last time you saw a permanent price cut on Monopoly? Uno? Settlers of Catan. The occasional sale, sure. But a copy of Catan is still going to sell for $40+, even today. That's the business strategy Nintendo is tapping into. If a game is good - like really, really good - and it's repeatedly replayable, then why does the price need to be cut soon after launch? Why can't people come along and discover it years later? Why does it need to be priced like it's a quickly depreciating asset - like a movie instead of a board game?

And that is the ultimately where the Nintendo Tax as we know it comes from. Make a game good enough, make a game gamey-enough, and don't devalue it by replacing it 3 years down the line - and it's something people will want to buy even years later.

Though this is a relatively recent phenomena. It's only after we hit the PS360U generation of hardware that systems had enough processing power and memory for games to not be constrained and do whatever they want. And that games stopped being obviously dated in terms of visual when compared to the previous generation. It's no coincidence that this was the last generation where Nintendo offered their Nintendo Selects line of discounted games.

Still wondering about those upload speeds, though.

It's kind of a complex question. It depends on where you are and what plan you currently have.

If you're in a mid-split area (where Comcast is using a larger range of frequencies for upload traffic) and had a plan to take advantage of it - which it sounds like you are - then the new plans actually regress on upload speeds. The old ~1Gbps and ~2Gbps plans had 300Mbps nominal uploads (closer to 360Mbps due to overprovisioning), while all other plans were 150Mbps nominal. The new plans drop this down to 100Mbps nominal for everything except the new ~2Gbps plan, which gets 250Mbps nominal.

Unfortunately, you're facing an either/or proposition. Comcast won't remove the data cap for existing plans, you have to transition to a new plan. But if you do that, then you'll get the new, lower upload speeds. With that said, Comcast isn't forcing anyone to upgrade, so current customers can stay on their legacy plans indefinitely.

Apple typically provides mainstream support for a macOS release for a year, and then security patches for the two years following.

For example, macOS 13 (Ventura) was launched in the fall of 2022. It is receiving security patches until (at least) the fall of 2025.

quietly request the READ_GSERVICES permission. This lets them grab your Google Services Framework ID, a persistent device ID that survives app reinstalls and SIM swaps. Translation: perfect for long-term tracking.

Given how critical that permission is, how are they even able to request it quietly? I would think Android would be screaming at the top of its lungs if that permission were requested.

I think part of the problem is that external search engines would simply put worse interactions to the top based on some metric known only to them, so there was a desire to eliminate things that were superfluous, to channel searchers into the places that have their answers.

But of course it ran into the exact problem you described- generally a class of moderators wants that position for some reason. You're looking for the moderators who share a vision of a really useful place where everything works great, but many moderators will just be there to enforce some value (sometimes political) or because they have a keyboard sadism streak and that's that. Basically when you take volunteers for "who wants to have power", only some of the people coming forward want to use that power for thing you want, the others will do that to fulfill the job role but they'll REALLY use it for $LAME_THING.