Don’t forget that selective regulation can be worse than none.

The stage is already set to use regulatory capture to protect tech monopolies in the name of security and safety.

Can’t have these useful tools in the hands of citizens who are not engaged in maximizing shareholder value.

It’s been a heavy rainy season here, lots of wind, power and net issues.

Meanwhile, the LAN works on a UPS, solar, and no Internet.

(Sure is nice being able to put on a movie or music playlist, and work on documents, or sort though old vacationphotos when it’s a rainy day with out a cloud failure blocking it.)

Pulling up the stolen ladder before anyone can steal it to use to steal more stuff while it’s still enforceable to do so.

Mabey just make all ladders illegal, unless you have a government contracted monopoly.

The entire idea of copyright is going to be tested at many levels, and most people don’t even understand why yet.

Interesting times.

Something something, national security, builds a regulatory moat.

I

Also, I want most of the services they want to move to the cloud to still work when the net is down.

I may want to use a computer to watch my media library or play a game that I already own with out an active internet connection and ID card. Or, just use a word processor or tax program, or image editor.

Sorry, please provide your ID to log in to the cloud to do basic daily tasks, citizens. This is for your own good, trust us.

Here’s a crazy idea, spend the money on power/network infrastructure now, and build more renewable power generation as we go.

That way, in the worst case scenario, you have cheap renewable power for a generation rather than warehouses of depreciating and unused silicon.

Wonder why they decided to run them on NG… Hmmm

Same for Roku, and worse now that they were bought out. Sorry grandma, the Roku is getting cut off. Lol

You do realize PayPal was just as involved in this as the rest right?

PayPal didn’t send Valve any written content demands either, its acquiring bank did the enforcing just like MC, but PayPal was a named target of the campaign, got its Steam payment rail severed over the content issue, and ended up in the FTC’s crosshairs alongside the card networks.

Also, PayPal’s aggressive posture toward adult-adjacent businesses predates this.

The Erotic Review piece described PayPal freezing a subscription business for six months with “no appeal process, no recourse.” So PayPal cracking down on Steam over adult content wasn’t out of character; it was the largest-scale demonstration yet of a practice smaller publishers had already been living with.

How do they manage to keep millions of other accounts uncompromised for over a decade, yet somehow it’s only you getting 2FAs? Seems unlikely.

Why not just let MC deny the payments if they have a “policy” about it?

Let the free market decide. Other payment methods do exist.

That would only matter if they weren’t a monopoly. If there were viable alternatives then this would not be an issue, as users could just go buy dirty cat girl pokemon clones with their baiter cards and not use master cards.

Control. Can’t black mail people if this sort of thing is generally acceptable and it’s easy to be anonymous.

What good is a surveillance state if you can’t threaten troublesome elements with purity laws.

I run on old PCs also. Though, I use Proxmox (proxmox uses ZFS, and now that I have expanded to 3 old mini PCs, they can cluster). Not claiming it is superior, it’s probably slightly more complicated, but it works for me. (Also, given the RAM situation, 3 essentially free mini PCs can hold more old salvaged RAM dimms, for more VMs, and redundancy/availability.)

The Proxmox is on the bare metal, then VMs run the heavy applications solo, or docker for stacks of lighter apps like *arr.

(VMs prevent kernel panic from hitting the host, but containers are lighter, it’s a case by case thing depending on the application/risk. I have had a container take down the host, but for most of us it’s not like we are running critical applications, it’s not a huge deal if you just run containers.)

Different person. But I have proxmox on multiple mini PC (Lenovo and HP600). They max out at 65w but pull less most of the time. I suppose I should check the weekly average, but my power monitor is on the other side of the UPS and there are multiple mini PC, devices, switches, modem, wireless AP… All on the monitor. If I had to guess I’d say the router/pihole pulls <30w and the media rig with its HDDs pulls ~100 but only when it’s read/writing. The full stack idles <100 including AP/switches, way less then my gaming PC just on idle (>700 when the GPU is GPing).

(Power efficiency is nice, but the ROI for a new ARM / RISK system is probably not great now. Better to use a recycled rig pulling 40-100w now and upgrading in a few years. It’s not like you need a server rack pulling over a kilowatt, and the efficiency gain from 5-10 year old x86 vs ARM/RISK is less then swapping out an old incandescent light to an LED.