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.

If I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die historic on the Fury Road!

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.

I have a great business idea - sell a roku-like device for half the price and a .99 cent subscription fee. Then when I’ve captured the market I force them to accept draconian new terms that cost way more or I brick the device. By then it’s too late and I can suck all the money out of it from the people that can’t switch.

And if they don’t like it? Too bad; they signed away their rights to sue.

It’s a foolproof plan! As long as I don’t get shot in the street but justifiably angry customers.

They do, but Google reduced their utility. Ads from YouTube get through my uBlock Origin, and I see ads in my search results. This was a fairly recent development, as maybe a year ago I didn’t see any ads at all on Chrome. The day I got ads punched through my blockers, is the day I quit being lazy and migrated back to Firefox.

Google has no incentive to block ads when that’s part of their revenue stream, so they nerfed third party extension’s ability to actually work at intended.

Correct, but Chrome recently allowed ads through that weren’t block-able by uBlock Origin or any other blocker at the time. That’s when I switched back to Firefox, so I don’t know if anyone figured out a way around it.

Speed almost doesn’t matter for me, since Chrome allows ads and Firefox actually lets me use adblockers and privacy badger. The time wasted on ads are way larger than the time spent loading a page.