I’m speaking mainly of the distrust against the public having access for fear that we’d abuse it and not give them a cut. We can’t have access to these things now, but we used to. Regardless of form, regardless of piracy.

It’s more of a move to restrict ownership when you make a purchase, that has a farther reach than just games. I could see this being applied to cars, houses, etc. In that you only rent a license, and don’t actually own anything. I see this as just a first step, and the logic they use to justify it doesn’t make sense.

We used to rent these games from Blockbuster Video! On DVD when we had DVD burners and little to no drm! How did it suddenly not become acceptable?

I bought a cheap Vizio, and never connected it or let it connect to anything. All it does is power on, and go to HDMI-1. My pc it connects to does everything else.

If you’re concerned about privacy on your tv, I would recommend migrating away from Roku as well.

Walmart.com didn’t work for me on FF for about a week, and it did work on edge and chrome (still broken on FF when I disabled all my add ons). However, they fixed it and it works now. I think it was just a problem with the build of the website, and wasn’t intentional because it definitely works now.

I think that’s what’s more likely - temp problems that could affect any browser until their web dev fixes it. Not anything malicious like intentionally blocking a browser.

And then, it’s just Walmart. It’s nothing that really mattered.

To add to that, I very much doubt any big company tests and verifies anything anymore.

Boeing ships planes with missing bolts and proper software, Crowdstrike pushes updates with no testing, we’ve all seen Microsoft push updates that break stuff because there’s no testing, and that’s just what comes to mind.

That’s how they maximize profits - get rid of testing environments, do minimal checks, and have the one guy doing 3 jobs at once just push it to production.

I’ve been in IT for the banking industry for over a decade and I promise you, we’re all a missed cup of coffee or a comma away from another massive outage due to a program or network misconfig.

As long as business culture is set to maximize profits for one quarter, I wouldn’t trust a sales website about “verification” or “disaster recovery backups” any more than I trust a used car salesman.

That goes for Crowdstrike, but also all of their competitors.

It died in my area when they dropped the amount of spawn nodes to the point where you couldn’t really walk around. You had to drive pretty far at that point, and that kill let most people’s enthusiasm.

I don’t know if it was complaints by local businesses or what, but after that I never saw large groups walking around again.

This could be a case of them cutting multiple covers at once.

I had the same problem with jeans. I order the exact same style and size, but they don’t all fit the same. When I spoke to a Levi customer service person, they said they have multiple layers of fabric piled on top. Then the cutting blade presses down, and the fabric bends. As the top one is to short on measurements, the bottom most one is to long. So you want one in the middle.

I know paper isn’t fabric, but it could be something similar. It’s speed and efficiency over accuracy.

Interesting, because the inability of people to understand basic concepts continues to disappoint me.

Shoplifting is actually stealing. You’re taking something away from the vendor. Piracy doesn’t actually take anything physically from the vendor.

Besides, if I can’t actually buy it (only a license to use it), then it’s not possible to steal it.

Additionally, most of Oklahoma is still various reservation lands. That was a recent court ruling, so I suspect this is a few years old.

And even worse, insecure. Google Adsense used to allow ads from unvetted advertisers, who someone allowed malicious scripts to run. That’s when I got much more stern with blockers.

I don’t know if they still do it, but I’m not going to expose myself to find out. And it could happen again in the future, even if they did fix it for now.