If they are in a game and there is music when you’re in the temple then yes it’s part of the soundtrack for that game.

Your original title didn’t say anything about games though. The Tower of London dungeons don’t come with a soundtrack.

No I’m not confused about that. I have seen the problems you talk about. That’s why I felt the need to qualify modern with “well engineered”.

Did you forgot to specify that you’re asking about a game? Dungeons and temples don’t usually come with a soundtrack.

I have a house. But it’s old and decaying. I want a well-engineered, modern house with great interior design and lots of space. I want to be able to put the couch in the center of the room instead of putting it up against a wall.

Can you think of any other possible and more likely explanation for them being filtered, other than “the entire EU is being filtered by Google”?

If you wanted evidence that the entire EU is not being filtered, what would that evidence look like?

So email from one EU domain got filtered for you, and you concluded that every email from the EU is being filtered for everyone, on account of being from the EU? Am I understanding this right?

I can’t imagine where this attack would work

Deadbeef is awesome. No nonsense and powerful features.

On Android I use Poweramp. Not open source or even free, but great UX and all the features I need, with every effort being made for the best sound quality.

No argument there. But apparently there’s a market for it.

Is it really too much to ask that apps/devices are made secure from the ground up?

In a way, yes. They can and should definitely be made with security in mind from the ground up. But they will never be totally secure, and a necessary part of what constitutes a “secure product” is to continuously and quickly patch security issues as they become known.

Surely that’s just a secure end-to-end encrypted connection?

I would bet it’s still a bit more than that. But even if it’s just a secure end-to-end encrypted connection, here is the list of vulnerabilities fixed in OpenSSL (which is probably what they use for secure encrypted connections). It’s five so far in 2024. Then there’s some OS kernel below that which can have security issues as well. The Thermomix probably also has user authorization components and payment methods, plus various personal information that has to be protected under GDPR.

I agree that the current system is broken. So let’s say that instead of paying $300 for a pair of headphones that last three years, you pay $8.33 / month for renting the headphones. Now, if the headphones break after three years the manufacturer has to produce new ones for you. That’s an undesirable cost for them.

It is now in their best interest to make headphones that will last a long time and that they can repair if something breaks. But also, since you can easily cancel the subscription at any time, it is in their interest to offer you something that is competitive. They might even upgrade to better technology over time or add new features to the bundled app to keep you as a customer. Or alternatively, lower the subscription cost over time to reflect the relative value of the headphones.

For you, there’s also the benefit that there’s no high upfront cost that you can’t reverse. You’re paying for what you can afford in your current situation. If you lose your job you can stop paying for the headphones at a moment’s notice. I imagine that this would leave fewer people in credit card debt.

Depends what kind of ownership you’re thinking about. When it comes to electronics, “ownership” is just subscription with a longer period between payments. Your existing phone, tablet, TV, dishwasher or what have you will last a finite time and then you have to buy a new one.

If there’s something that will last a lifetime, that’s a different discussion. But those are rare. Almost every purchase you make is a commitment to a recurring cost.

Something like myfitnesspal or a thermomix shouldn’t be a subscription, there is no major updates to how someone tracks their exercise uses a hot blender that justifies it beyond users being locked in.

I won’t dispute that both of these likely abuse the subscription model for their benefit. But they definitely have a social responsibility (and in many cases a legal responsibility) to keep updating the software in these products and the network infrastructure that go with them. The internet of things is one of the most vulnerable attack vectors we have. It has been exploited many times not just to attack individuals, but to create massive bot nets that can target corporations or even countries. The onus is on the manufacturer to continuously keep that at bay. You know what they say - the “S” in “IOT” stands for security.

I know I’m in the minority but I am also a software developer, and I think subscriptions are a much healthier payment model for everyone. The issue IMO is not recurring payments but the total cost of ownership.

“Digitial goods” is very rarely just a thing that you produce once and then it’s done. The OS is regularly updated which causes incompatibilities, app stores introduce new demands, and there’s a constant stream of security vulnerabilities in your dependencies that need to be patched. Failing to adress any of these things breaks the social contract and causes rage among your users (“I PAID FOR THIS, WHY ISN’T IT WORKING/WHY AREN’T YOU FIXING BUGS/etc”). Even movies and music need to be maintained because new media formats are introduced, streaming services have to be kept responsive and up to date etc.

A subscription models the cost distribution over time much better, and it does benefit the users because it means the company can keep updating their shit even if new sales drop, instead of going bankrupt.

I don’t think this stops with just digital goods. Manufactured products (and the environment) would also benefit from a subscription model because it means there’s no incentive for planned obsolescence. It’s an incentive for keeping the stuff we already built working for a long time, instead of constantly producing new crap and throwing the old in a landfill.

But, the caveat is that this shift must not result in higher total cost of ownership for the end users over time. In fact, it should reduce the cost because repairing and updating is cheaper than building new stuff. The way many companies are pricing subscriptions today, they are being too greedy.

Sure, but that’s far from a universal experience.

Not only shitty, it’s dumb. Even Adobe knows to give students hefty discounts. It’s how they get new users on the hook.

How is this even possible? Why does Office have access to NTLM hashes?

I misread the title as “Fire men convicted of massive, illegal streaming service” and was wondering if they were broadcasting fires

So call the shareholders and ask them to pay back the dividends that they’ve received over the years, to fund the YouTube infrastructure? That begs the question, what do we do when that money runs out?

That’s conjecture, and so is my view, but I disagree. They’ve even developed specialized hardware just to deal with all the transcoding they have to do, specialized for YouTube. There’s a lot of effort that goes into maintaining things that are unique to this particular service. But in the end, what matters is if they could make more money by spending their resources elsewhere.