Spectacle8011

Just disable Javascript; it will load fine.

It's the fault of copyright. Restricting what shows you can stream to your users instead of, for example, being required to pay a royalty, inevitably leads to this situation. Netflix being the sole company allowed to stream every show and film would result in a monopoly that would be bad for everyone as they progressively sought to increase profits year over year. One company having all that power would not be a good thing for anyone, including content holders.

The solution is simple: every streaming service should be allowed to stream every show/film in every country. Then, piracy can only compete on price. That requires significant copyright reform, however, and is very unlikely to happen.

In case anyone was wondering what TorrentFreak thinks of this whole thing: https://torrentfreak.com/you-cant-defend-public-libraries-and-oppose-file-sharing-150510/

Public libraries started appearing in the mid-1800s. At the time, publishers went absolutely berserk: they had been lobbying for the lending of books to become illegal, as reading a book without paying anything first was “stealing”, they argued. As a consequence, they considered private libraries at the time to be hotbeds of crime and robbery. (Those libraries were so-called “subscription libraries”, so they were argued to be for-profit, too.)

British Parliament at the time, unlike today’s politicians, wisely disagreed with the publishing industry lobby – the copyright industry of the time. Instead, they saw the economic value in an educated and cultural populace, and passed a law allowing free public libraries in 1850, so that local libraries were built throughout Britain, where the public could take part of knowledge and culture for free.

Normally I would retort “But we paid money for it - so they need to support it”

For how long? 15 years? 20? 30? Should they still be supporting Windows 95?

Windows has the longest support period of any commercial operating system. iOS's longest support period for a phone was 8 years, Android is now 8 years for the new PIxel, macOS supports computers for anywhere between 5-10 years, averaging about 7, and Windows 10 will support computers for 10 years. Previous Windows operating systems have supported computers for even longer, but 10 years is still longer than anybody else. I've paid for a few Windows 10 licenses in my time, and I don't think I'll ever pay for another one. I don't use it enough to care about the limitations of unlicensed Windows.

Mind you, we wouldn't even need to be having this conversation if Windows was free software and some other organization took on the duty of maintaining it. That would be a lot less work for Microsoft and keep Windows 10 users happy. While I'm at it, I'd also like a pony.

When they rugpull Win10 I will just complete move to Linux. The only thing holding me back is some industrial software that I use for work and they’re in the process of multi-platform support.

I'd love to do that. I already use Linux for most of my work, but Adobe not being there means I need to fall back to macOS or Windows for some projects. While Photoshop is coming to the web (someday), After Effects and inDesign are unlikely to ever end up there. I can hope, but I'll likely be stuck on one of these other operating systems for a long time to come, I suspect.

Maybe Wine will some day support Adobe's terrible DRM...and maybe hell will freeze over, too.

I don't see a problem with this business model. They're doing work maintaining software they don't want to maintain, so charging for it makes sense. It's surprising to me that Windows doesn't already charge a yearly subscription fee for OS upgrades.

Many people aren't going to pay the annual fee and will keep using Windows 10 without the security patches anyhow, so obviously this will weaken a lot of people's security, but, well... Microsoft needs to make money. And it's not like they need to worry about their customers defecting to another operating system. You can't just download and install macOS on an old Dell machine. If they're going to buy a new computer, it makes sense to get a less expensive one than what Apple's offering, ergo they'll get a new Windows 11 computer.

And if they wanted to and could use Linux...well, they'd already be using it. Overall, I'm completely nonplussed about this announcement. If you weren't going to pay Microsoft money, nothing has changed. If you need a longer support period, you now have an easy option. And hey, there's always the chance Microsoft will backtrack and provide free updates anyway. Especially given the lack of details on pricing, it seems like they're sounding out the idea rather than fully committed to deploying it.

The TorrentFreak article might have more information; I skimmed it. I don't live in India, so I don't know. Apparently, only the raw.githubusercontent.com domain was blocked, so Indian users should have still been able to access the main github.com domain. It's the direct link to the files that was apparently blocked. But cloning repositories probably wasn't affected?

The main Github.com domain was still accessible but raw.githubusercontent.com, where code is typically stored, was blocked.

Some days, like today, I regret commenting TorrentFreak out of my RSS feed reader.

It's kind of funny, but it's also kind of scary that not having access to Github would probably significantly impact a lot of companies and services. It would definitely impact me.

Oh well. We can always move to Sourcehut, right?

Maybe a different perspective could help?

YouTube advertising works a little differently to, say, Facebook. For advertisements longer than 30 seconds, the advertiser doesn't pay if the user hits "Skip". Ad-blocking users are far less likely to watch ads to completion, so I can imagine this having almost no impact on conversion.

I believe this change, if it is successful in blocking ad-blockers, will generally be detrimental to advertisers. It means advertisements shorter than 30 seconds (so, unskippable ads) are now shown to a larger proportion of people unlikely to be interested or paying attention to the advertisement. It's beneficial to YouTube because they can claw back some of the money they spend serving ad-blocking users videos—that ain't free. That being said, YouTube is still probably one of the most friendly big platforms to advertisers because of how flexible they are. While it uses the Google Ads system, it's more friendly than Google search ads...

I missed an opportunity to ask someone who did a lot of YouTube advertising whether they noticed any impact at all from the recent ad-blocker blocking change recently, so this is all speculation.

Microsoft Exchange. For running an email server. It's easily the most popular use for Windows servers.

In fairness, it's so there's a log of why the machine was shut down. It's for the sysadmins in charge rather than Microsoft. In practice, most people just choose "Other" as the reason so it's fairly useless. I have no idea if there's a way to turn it off, though.

Exchange.

What’s next? Hopefully, Microsoft won’t start injecting a poll at shutdown demanding to know why I’m turning my PC off for the day.

Well, if you decide to run Windows Server, I have news for you...