akabul0us

"Won't somebody think of the poor San Francisco AirBnB owners who spy on their renters through Ring cameras??" Everyone in this story is a complete piece of shit. Zero sympathy for any of them.

When i saw the headline I briefly allowed myself to hope that DNS settings would no longer be set universally (requiring manual intervention when switching networks if not using DHCP) but of course it's nothing useful and only "Apple is breaking stuff because they can"

This is why when the price of oil goes up, so does the price of gasoline, but when the price of oil comes down, well... When's the last time you remember gas suddenly costing a whole lot less?

which could expose the internet giants to further financial damages and force changes to their products This is so wildly untrue, it's either downright deception on the part of the NYT or they simply don't know how to do math. In this case the judgement was for $3M. To keep the numbers simple for the sake of this comparison, let's not get into the 70/30 split of this amount and just imagine that YouTube (Google) ((Alphabet)) had to pay the entire amount. Their revenue (again, keeping it simple, don't @ me) for 2025 was $350B. Humans don't typically conceptualize the difference between millions and billions very easily, so let's knock everything down a few orders of magnitude. At that rate they take in around a billion dollars a day. So imagine this as a person who takes in about a thousand dollars a day, and has a yearly salary of $350,000 (quite comfortable to live on, while not being obscene). Now apply the same math to the amount they have to pay, and what do you get? A grand total of $0.03. You'd have to do it with a bank transfer (or use a nickel and overpay considerably). I make considerably less than $350K/yr, and I can still confidently say that if I had to pay a fine of 3¢, that wouldn't just make me not take the fine and the court that issued it seriously, it would have the opposite effect it's intended to. I would now see that it costs me next to nothing to keep doing things the way I always have, whereas if I were to change things like the very nature of my business to avoid the fine, that could have a potential serious effect. What the court has done is demand that when Google and Meta spit on their customers, they also throw a few pennies in their change cup to show how sorry they are, while changing nothing and going full speed ahead.