I think there's a deeper issue around paying customers being assumed to be businesses. I have a paid Google account for just one reason - using a custom domain with Gmail. This lets me have a wildcard email address, but more importantly, it gives me the ability to move my email address to a different provider if my Google account got caught in an automated system and blocked, so I wouldn't lose access to all the services I've used that email address to sign up with.
If there was a way I could continue to just have a regular personal Google account, but pay an extra fee to use a custom domain with it, I'd much prefer to do that than maintain an enterprise Google Workspace setup with only a single user in it, just for this one feature.
I think the lack of activity since the conspiracy theory started could be easily explained by the user being creeped out by the witch hunt and abandoning their account. I know if I was accused of secretly being a hated figure like Maxwell on an account that wasn't connected my real identity, I wouldn't come out and deny it, I'd just ditch my account and make a new one.
It also seems unlikely to me that someone like Ghislaine Maxwell would have the time to be such a prolific Reddit user, and that she would write like a Redditor - for example calling someone "butt-hurt" in one comment.
> I think the lack of activity since the conspiracy theory started could be easily explained by the user being creeped out by the witch hunt and abandoning their account.
The problem there is that nobody made the connection until after the activity on the account stopped abruptly, coinciding with Maxwell’s arrest.
> I know if I was accused of secretly being a hated figure like Maxwell on an account that wasn't connected my real identity, I wouldn't come out and deny it, I'd just ditch my account and make a new one.
If you’re a power mod that has spent years building up influence and control over numerous subreddits, that’s not so simple. You could leave, of course, but continuing with an alternate account wouldn’t really be feasible.
> It also seems unlikely to me that someone like Ghislaine Maxwell would have the time to be such a prolific Reddit user, and that she would write like a Redditor - for example calling someone "butt-hurt" in one comment.
Who knows? It also didn’t seem likely that someone like Ghislaine Maxwell was engaged in a massive sex trafficking operation.
I’m still not 100% convinced the account actually did belong to Maxwell, but at first I scoffed at the idea as ridiculous and insane, and now I’m not so sure about that.
Back in the early days of the internet, a lot of websites were hosted on Geocities, which was popular as it offered free hosting on one condition - you had to embed a small banner into your webpage advertising them. The banner image they provided was 88x31 pixels, and so many Geocities sites would include other external links as 88x31 images so that they matched the dimensions of the mandatory Geocities one.
At the bottom of the stack, the answer is probably either "it fit perfectly in an 88x31 space between some other things on the first page it was used on" or "I drew a rectangle that looked right and didn't bother rounding the numbers".
The irony is, if Google had made their plan for how to handle end-of-life for Stadia clear from the beginning, they might have got a lot more users.
I'm not sure if their strategy ever changed along the way, but when Stadia was first announced, it was a purely cloud gaming platform where you still needed to buy a license for every game. Not knowing what would happen to my purchased games was the main thing keeping me from trying Stadia - I'd have been happy to use it if it was a Netflix / Xbox Game Pass style service where you pay a flat monthly rate for access to a library, or if it was clear that any games you bought would be refunded if the service suddenly shut down.
As it was though, it seemed as though you could drop a ton of money on Stadia games, and Google might pull the plug the very next day, and you lose everything you just purchased. That worry was the deciding factor for me to never give Stadia a go.
Stadia required custom development work from game developers, my guess is that getting them on board was at least as challenging as getting consumers. It's a risk to tell developers "we're already thinking of how to kill this platform that you're investing in".
It's problematic for a company if they have to announce their EOL plans on product announcement to get interest from customers. Might as well not exist as a company at that point
It's problematic for a company to have EOL plans not because people will assume they will go out of business, but because they might not be able to actually adhere to those EOL plans resulting in a much larger mess than what would have happened if they stayed silent.
It's bad, but I'm not sure it's that bad. In B2B land, loads of contracts have a code-in-escrow clause just in case key people die or the company goes under. One of the key attractions of Open Source is that if the people building it die or don't want to support the tool anymore, you can keep going yourself.
>That EFF page is really weird - English text, but right-aligned, with question marks to the left of the text, as if the text had been translated from a RTL language (Farsi perhaps given the /fa/ in the link?)
It's just a Farsi link to an English article that's automatically applying RTL styling, the original version of the page in English looks fine.
From the last time I looked into it (I may be recalling this incorrectly): the script is AI generated text that the writer sifted through, edited, and stitched together to form an amusing, vaguely coherent narrative.
So it's perhaps closer to "inspired by AI" than "written by AI".
"Netflix worked with Keaton Patti, who's done this bot thing before. This time round the bot watched over 400,000 hours of horror movies before penning its great masterpiece, 'Mr. Puzzles Wants You to Be Less Alive'."
If there was a way I could continue to just have a regular personal Google account, but pay an extra fee to use a custom domain with it, I'd much prefer to do that than maintain an enterprise Google Workspace setup with only a single user in it, just for this one feature.