and what is that going to give them? The information that they have is yes, they have an account, and that's also saying that they used an actual number and not a VOIP number for registration. but if they are asking via phone number, they will already have that information at hand. They won't get any information about what chats that number is part of, or even any info really at all, anything about the account is encrypted and not visible.

If they are able to provide my phone number without knowing the info you said there, there is some other leak already involved, and either way they won't get anything but a "yes he has an account and he was last connected on X"

Photobucket did the same thing I almost lost all of my photos that I had on it from my early teenage years because I almost missed the email(I was two days from the DDay)

Basically they decided that they no longer wanted their free tier and any photos that were stored on the platform as that tier had a certain amount of time before they would be deleted. The platform heavily tried to convince people who are on the free tier that the only way of getting their photos would be to pay for their premium tier for a month and then cancel but I was able to figure out a way to just download it it was hidden heavily in the settings behind multiple paywall triggers.

I'm not really sure why they say that, looking at it the UI looks pretty sleek

This is good news that the instance is back up again. But as an Outsiders pov, I'm going to be super hesitant on wanting to interact with the instance since it's already proven to be shut down once.

Being said, I love to see people monopolizing on better technology that have more feature sets, and honestly it looks pretty dang cool

I went into this article being like yeah this makes no sense why, but reading other comments and the article made me realize yeah it's a no-brainer that developers are skipping on microsoft. They need to get rid of the requirement of if you launch on one you must launch on both, it's basically needlessly increasing the cost of the platform.

I worked retail during the latest generation release and it was very clear that if you wanted to use your system as a system you had to go with the series x. We had customers buying the series s who would come in afterward and be like yeah I returned it, I wanted the ability to have physical Media or I looked up the differences and the x just made sense. The reason anyone ever got the cheaper model was at launch date when the X was not available anywhere.

This combined with the fact that the cheaper model had lower end Hardware which further restricts the games that can go on it and the capabilities basically means that you have to two different branches that have more changes than just changing what platform it's releasing cuz you have to make sure that your defaults are at lower quality for the s.

gamepass is one topic that I was wondering when it would come to light/backfire. It's not an unheard of fact that Microsoft heavily prefers games to go on to their Game Pass Program which in the process of doing so heavily reduces the amount of sales at a game has.

Sales on Xbox (in terms of physical and digital copies) as a whole dropped with the addition of Game Pass becoming mainstream, and while developers are getting paid for having their game on the program, this metric is decided based off a sign up payment, and then based off of how many people actively play the game, so for a developer going on Game Pass you gain a lot of money up front while the game active in being played(which is super helpful for Indie style Developers who really have much money to begin with), there is a steep drop off as the game loses interest which is more severe than if the game had just sold normal game copies.

This drop off in sales while combined with the ever increasing ideology Microsoft Gamers tend to have where if it's not on Game Pass it's not worth playing because they are already paying a monthly subscription for it really makes it so if you weren't planning on enrolling in The Game Pass Program in the first place it's not really all that worth launching on the platform as a whole.

In terms of end-to-end encryption I don't mind if they have my phone number or not, if it's done right.

Let's use signal for example, because honestly they do it pretty decently, the most information that you can obtain from signal in a data information request is the date and time that an account is created, and the last time the account went online.

Actual content such as the user's contact list, the people that user was talking with(including groups), and of course the messages that you sent are fully end to end encrypted meaning that signal does not have access to it meaning that they cannot give that information out in a data information request as they never had it in the first place.

The most that signal is able to confirm in a data information request, is yes this specific account ID has a signal account and this is the last time they went online.

I know you didn't directly say it but it's implied so I wanted to clarify.

telegram chat isn't E2E, the only E2E on the platform is secret chats, which is only available to mobile users of the platform and not enabled by default. It does have client-server encryption but, in the terms of privacy that is worthless if you don't trust the host (and it opens the host up to legal information requests as it has the capability of decrypting the messages)

a good way to balance if it's worth it, look at your order history, and look at delivery costs of items without prime, and then divide the yearly price of prime by the delivery cost, then again by 12.

For example, if the average shipping cost is 7$, that's roughly 1.6 orders small (read under 35$) a month, if you order less than that it might not be worth keeping prime.

that would have been a good buisness plan as well, make the normal tier premium, but have an ad free tier under it that restricted the video quality down to 720p or something, and maybe removed signature content/prime originals.

just wait until you have like 40-50$ worth of items, a lot of the time they'll give you free shipping at a certain price point. Plus some items give you free shipping regardless.

That being said, I still have prime myself cause I order /a lot/ of small orders and it's shared with the house, plus I use the family member feature to give my mom prime as well and we just split the cost. When they do away with that feature is when I cancel my sub, 140-160 a year is not worth it for one person to pay alone, that's roughly 2.5 orders a month

I mean, I never used prime video even when it was as free, it's selection was garbage even compared to Netflix which has been known to have nothing of value for a few years now. I don't see how them adding /more/ ads is going to do anything but make other people come to the same conclusion I did.

Yeah but the two party consent states for recording imply that it's in a private location, there is nothing stopping anyone from recording someone in a public location.

It doesn't matter what the Stateside law of indicates whether it's public or private, it's already been decided by the Supreme Court that recording in a public area is a protection that's given under the First Amendment. This right to record has been challenged a few times by state representatives such as the 2007 case in Massachusetts where it went up to the first district appeals court, and back in 2021 in the Fraiser versus Evan's case which went all the way up to the Supreme Court.

As a general rule of thumb, if you're in a public area there is no expectation of privacy so therefore anything goes, this protection generally includes someone standing in a private area recording an area that is considered a public area, and in some cases even include someone who is standing in a public area recording it supposed to private area due to lack of obstruction from that public area (such as someone standing on the street outside a house recording an unobstructed window)

But as you said IANAL

edit:

That being said, because I realize I forgot to add this to the post. I am super against the entire idea of AI based goggles that's able to identify people in real time. That is such a violation of what should be basic privacy that honestly I think it's too far