Facebook got FBI_README.txt at the root of their DC++ share.

That’s the thing that the person in the made up story doesn’t understand:

Even the majority of “made in america” products are actually “assembled in america”. Just like the majority of “chinese knockoffs” are after hours runs at the same factories that make the real thing. Sometimes crappier and sometimes actually better because they sourced better materials from a different factory.

And… that is why we are so fucked. Because there will be the “Well, product A costs more because of tariffs so product B can sell for more too”. But also? Product B’s profit margins will go down because they are paying for tariffs too. Which gets passed on to the consumer.

I just wish Tuta put more effort into their product than their marketing.

I noped out because of them not letting me have any control over my emails outside of asking them for a dump. But reading the support reddit is just brutal.

Ah, my deepest apologies. I was not aware there was absolutely no issue or threat to anyone because you didn’t connect a kindle to the network either.

And Kindle supports mobi files? It is just that those tend to get preprocessed into azw or the other one files. Much like Kobo tends to work best if you preprocess those epubs into kepubs.

The issue is that Amazon has repeatedly changed their mobi variants to fight against de-drm tools as well as increasingly locking down their apps and even devices to make it harder to get data off (and now on) to them.

There is absolutely nothing stopping Rakuten from doing the exact same with Kobo. And people should be aware of that rather than just stanning their favorite company.

Profitability as reported by companies, especially tech companies, is complex. Also understand that most of that 20 years (assuming that is an accurate statement) was the era of venture capitalism and infinite funding.

But yes. Amazon did spend decades inventing and taking over e-commerce.

But that is not what you described. You described a “bait and switch” which implies that they designed the old keyboard kindles with built in wikipedia support as some long con to get around the eventual invention of a de-drm plugin for the eventually invented Calibre library manager.

The reality is that this is just a case of locking down walled gardens to take advantage of market share. Everyone is doing it. It isn’t some deep conspiracy and is more just the logical end result of a walled garden with large market share.

The “original sale” in that case is not even pennies. So… not sure why amazon would care?

Also: Many smaller authors basically depend on kindle because of the ease of use of the web portal and incentives to do larger discounts for their audiences. One of my favorite guilty pleasures has talked about exactly this (although he IS investigating alternatives).

And, much like with video games: The Sandersons of the world will be pirated. MAYBE a Dalglish will be too. But nobody cares enough to go after a Samphire or Shel.

… a 17 year bait and switch (or however long Kindles have been around for)?

I recommend actually listening to some authors.

The “gatekeeping” back in the days before ebooks was infinitely worse than it is now. These days? Basically anyone who can fill out a webform can publish a kindle book. And other stores aren’t much harder. And those ebooks can be sold indefinitely.

Contrast that with needing to find a publisher who is willing to allocate some of their limited production time to you. And then hope that Borders et al are willing to put you on the shelf. And then realize that you are never getting another penny for that book because the first MMPB run ran out and you aren’t getting a second because you didn’t sell enough to justify it.

That is no different than Kobo. Thus far, Rakuten have been pretty good about not caring more than the bare minimum. But there is nothing stopping them from doing the same bullshit with firmware updates to the kobos and drm updates to the store and apps.

I am finally migrating from kindle to kobo (tried kindle to boox last year and it was bad…) but I am under no illusions that I am just hoping one company is better than another. I mean, the other is Amazon so it is a pretty safe bet. But still.

Different landfills have different policies/procedures.

Like I said, the odds aren’t great. But if there was ever any chance of finding it, this isn’t the kind of system where things are getting cubed every step of the way. And once there is a layer or two of trash above it (making finding said drive nigh impossible), it is going to be pretty protected from even heavy duty constructicons driving over it.

It depends how it was stored. If it is just raw dogging the garbage pile? The odds get very low but, theoretically, it is just a matter of very carefully the drive before booting it up. Think “data forensics”

If it was stored in a plastic bag or box? Then it is about as safe as a drive in your closet that you haven’t spun up in over a decade.

Tumblr was already in a bad place and was further cannibalized by instagram (and reddit).

Reddit still has no meaningful alternatives. Yes, we like lemmy. Most people don’t and won’t. They want corporate social media. Just look at how long it took people to leave twitter. And they only did once BlueSky had open sign ups.

My money is on a bunch of “protest” posts and subreddits to track this and people mostly just sit around and not care. With a lot saying “I don’t need porn on reddit, I have the internet” while completely ignoring things like trans erasure.

…

Excusing what? Someone called out the “free speech absolutist” hypocrisy. You assumed they were talking about Github or Microsoft for some reason. I corrected you.

Maybe learn how to contribute to a conversation?

This is being done by trump and musk.

Microsoft just own the company where this is being discussed because the people actually doing the work are treating it like any other software project.

That is the beautiful part of it. It is a fundamental brain block in like 99.999999% of “The Children”.

In an old life I had to deal with this. Maybe one in every hundred interns we had realized how similar matlab and fortran were. The rest just immediately locked down because it wasn’t python or, in rare cases, C++.

The greatest and most vital of government secrets are safe. Because no chance any of those kids understand fortran or cobol.

They’ll just delete it rather than try to understand or modify it. But small victories.