The Omnibus Tech Companies Being Fucksticks Thread

So, short answer. I need a passport. If I go to ‘passport.gov’, that information goes directly to trump. What then? Is he putting it on a thumb drive for commercial use when he’s out of office? I do not think TPTB (i.e. the wealthy) are ready to completely dismantle the US government yet, so, the only think I can think that he would want this information (Which is already ‘out there’ anydamnway). As for ‘The Government” goes, the IRS has had this international on me for decades.

Fuck these guys.

@RickDeckard they're scheduled to meet in Dublin later this year. The IRA could be real popular all of a sudden, if they gave the pricks the same kind of tour Lord Mountbatten got the last time he was in Ireland.

DuckDuckGo, Unable to Resist the Pull of AI, Mistakenly Claims Trump Died of Rabies

https://kotaku.com/playstation-store-movies-digital-studio-canal-terminator-2000711013

Yet it's a big fucking mystery why people are pissed about $80 games that they don't physically own.

I wonder if this can be tested in court.

For Mullvad VPN users, just some bad news: The co-founder of Mullvad donated 5 million Swedish Kroner ($500,000 USD) to a far right wing party (Orebro) in Sweden, which makes up something like 80% of the Orebro party's funding. His donation supplied them funding for election campaigns which helped them gain seats in parliament.

Mullvad claims it was his decision, and that they don't approve or condemn individual actions, but I don't think I can trust my privacy to people who see something like that and choose not to act on it, especially if it's the co-founder of the entire company doing it.


'I don’t like that he made this donation' — Mullvad CEO reacts to co-founder’s donation to controversial Swedish populist party

You can read more here: https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-p...ation-to-controversial-swedish-populist-party

I mean, this is a kick in the ass for someone like me who has championed Mullvad in the past for being vehemently pro-privacy rights, but using a VPN requires trust. If I can't trust the people running it are going to protect my interests, then I can't trust they'll protect my data. It's one thing to understand that both honest actors and hateful extremists will use VPNs to protect themselves, but it's another to have someone in the actual company engaging in acts that support right wing policies, policies from a government party that is bigoted and anti-privacy.

The party likes to call itself a lot of things: essentially whatever gets it footing in politics. It has called itself broadly left but national conservative, and as I've explained in the past, if someone says "I'm not left wing or right wing" they're definitely right wing. It seems that, like the German Free Conservative party in the 1940s, they use left wing terminology to get elected, and then work to enact right wing policies while using left populist language to obscure those policies, eventually just straight up joining the fascist party that comes to power.

If you read up on them, you will find a hodgepodge of platform positions, many of them claiming to be left wing while being right wing in practice, like how Allard (the party leader) claims to be Marxist inspired while also pushing for hard right wing positions that Marx himself would have rejected. Regardless, it's one of those things where you know the guy running it is an absolute chud and can't be trusted.

“Televised Nervous Breakdown”: CEO of Palantir Suffers a Bit of a Meltdown During Live Interview
"This is the voice of American business that is being channeled through me!"

https://x.com/davenewworld_2/status/2073356446712856752?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

Huh. It looks like siphoning off his kid's blood and comparing nocturnal boner numbers doesn't do much good for you.

‘Don’t Die’ Guy Bryan Johnson Says He Has Serious Autoimmune Disease

No One Can Afford to Buy Hardware, So Nvidia Made Trading Cards to Reminisce About the Good Times

What kind of weird tech-sucking freak would even want that shit?
Seems like something that would come as in insert in an old 90's Wired magazine that I'd immediate throw away.
In the grocery store.

Meta Sued For Allegedly Using Discriminatory AI In Layoff Decisions

Trump accounts, "social credit score", mass surveillance, etc.
The usual suspects up to the usual shady shit.

Kalshi Is Set to Start Taking Bets on Drug Trials

‘My Soul Left My Body’: Amazon Accidentally Bills Users Billions of Times What They Owe

I want to point out that companies that aren't greedy fucksticks have systems in place to alert people if there's a sudden spike in their bills. Such systems would have caught this glitch and flagged it before the customer saw anything.

Flock’s CEO Is Sorry for Calling Privacy Activists ‘Terrorists’

It's strange when Tucker Carlson makes sense.

Identifying the Crypto Entrepreneur Linked to Popular Forum Trading in ‘Leaked’ Nudes of Women

So, it's a millionaire douchebag in a suit complaining about a billionaire douchebag in a shirt.

But he's still correct.

AWS *does* have those systems, that’s what caused the reports. The headline is misleading, Amazon didn’t bill anyone for this, just misreported spend and projected spend. Speculation in the industry is that this was a vibecoded experiment at increasing revenues that went wrong.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jul/21/amazon-tactics-prices

Apple Plans to Defeat RAM Prices by Letting You Lease a Mac

Welcome to the future where you never own anything, and are expected to always pay for everything.

Is buying into a prediction market OK if you're voting in Wisconsin?

Kalshi’s New Midterms Hub Comes With a Felony-Sized Asterisk

I’m not seeing the problem, unless the money factor is exploitive. You can always sell it to someone else to pay off the lease and get money at the end if it’s worth more than the residual, same as a car, and if it’s not, you turn it in and it definitely gets resold or recycled. Meanwhile you’ve had use of the phone for less money than buying or financing it. Gizmodo has always had a stance on lack of ownership in *software* which I generally agree with. But this isn’t software.

Yeah, man, it’s the money. Do you not get how shitty it is that companies want you to basically rent everything? That consumers have less and less money available to them? That with a constantly unstable job market, taking on additional debt is a massively risky gamble?

Not the money, the money factor. As in the thing that corresponds to the interest rate in a loan. If the lease MF isn’t much higher than the financing cost and you already upgrade your phone every couple years or whatever the lease term is, you’re getting a good deal. But that aside, your concerns are two completely different things. A lease puts you in less debt (principal) than financing (whether with Affirm or a CC), and should increase the supply of used phones on the market, making them cheaper. Thats entirely separate from corporations wanting people to rent everything. Honestly, I don’t really care when it comes to big depreciating capital expenditures. I *hate* it for software and media and for durable goods that largely hold their value. But phones and computers aren’t that.

Yeah, no. For starters, in the short-term, we're looking at two possibilities: 1.) We're in an AI bubble, which will massively implode the economy when it pops. The fact that the majority of Americans are drowning in all kinds of debt means that there's going to be an even larger problem than just the fact that the thing that has been propping up our economy has imploded. Like, what happens if the majority of people who have a leased machine are forced to default? 2.) We're not in an AI bubble, and the tech bros are right that it'll eliminate most jobs. Which means that folks who are leasing their computers will have no way of paying for them.

And, yes, it is the money factor as well. I've paid cash for most of the PCs (regardless of the OS) that I've owned over the years. The few that I've had to put on a credit card, I knew that I had, roughly, 12 months of equal payments for the thing, and then I didn't have to shell out any more money for it. Certainly not a balloon payment I had to cover at the end, just to be able to own it outright, once I finished the payments.

I've got a machine that I paid something like $1500 for (over time, as I built it) a decade ago. It still does everything that I need it to. Sure, it can't run Windows 11, but what does that offer me? Nothing, other than security improvements. Oh, it can run AI programs that a Win10 machine can't? I don't fucking care. I don't run AI programs. Presently, I'm typing this out on a Mac Mini with a first-gen Apple silicon processor. The only issue I have with this machine is the amount of RAM it has, and that's a limitation of Apple, because I bought it, new, with the most amount of RAM one could get. If it dies before Apple stops putting out security updates for it, then I'll be upset. Otherwise, I don't foresee a need to replace the machine just because a newer one can run AI software.

I also want to point out that in times past, what Apple has done, when they've realized that they were facing a potential component shortage, is they've gone to their suppliers and said, "If you build the factory, we'll pay for it, provided you sell us the bulk of the production for X number of years, at such-and-such cost per unit." That they're not doing this now, means something. I'm not sure what. It might mean that they don't expect the demand to last as long as it would take to build a factory and get it up to production. Or, it might mean that they'd rather just rent you hardware, and that when they decided you need to replace it, you have to replace it. Even though you personally don't feel the need to do so.

Finally, if Apple pulls this off, then other computer companies will do the same. Which means that you won't be able to abandon one OS for another to save money.

Oh, and if you're at all familiar with Leo Laporte's podcasts, you'll know that he tends to be very slavishly approving of almost everything Apple does. He, and his cohosts, spent the first 30 minutes of this episode on Apple's leasing plan, and none of them would come out and say it was a great idea (even before they found out it was being done by Klarna, which is a giant red flag). One of them even said that they were going to have to use an AI to understand the deal, to see if it was a good idea for them (and they routinely upgrade their devices every year or two).