Companies like Amazon seem to be betting on the AI taking over theory. It's probably the only explanation that makes sense now, because their reputation among skilled technical people will be permanently damaged by moves like this. It won't suddenly repair itself whenever the pendulum swings back to being an employee's market, if the great AI revolution turns out to be just another hype cycle after all.

Working at a FAANG used to be attractive to a lot of highly skilled technical people and having employment history inside that bubble used to be a positive thing on your resume. I'm not sure how true either of those things is any more. Maybe those who are still there and making premium TC in a big US city are still getting a decent deal out of it. For others, most of those big brands seem to be increasingly unattractive, and having history there seems to be increasingly regarded as neutral or even negative when employers outside that bubble are hiring.

FWIW, I'm a little more optimistic. In the UK, we don't have the kind of pork barrel politics that is endemic to some other western democracies. The ICO are, like many government regulators, under-resourced, but they are basically trying to do a decent job and I think moves like the one we're discussing here today are going in the right direction.

Which is exactly why it's vital for governments and their regulatory bodies to step in and protect the ordinary citizen who isn't an expert on these things from the abuse that the big companies who are will otherwise commit in the name of profit, just as they already do with financial services, caterers, healthcare providers, and so on.

Fantastic. Then we can go back to having dumb devices that just do their jobs and don't have all the other junk attached competing for the market instead. That worked for a few generations before all the 1984 stuff. I'm betting it will work just fine for generations after it too.

And please spare us the rhetoric about how nothing could possibly be affordable if it doesn't violate our privacy to help pay for itself. The difference in pricing in a competitive market is likely to be pretty small. The only reason they can get away with intruding as much as they do right now is that market competition has failed because everyone is lapping up the free money. I, for one, am glad the ICO has other ideas about how things should be .

Perhaps if it had adequate funding... ?

AIUI, your costs can't (or couldn't) generally be passed on when using the small claims system. Has that changed? It's been a while since I went through the process, so it's possible that my information here is out of date.

There is obviously a personal data angle here. There might also be a defamation angle if the system works as implied by TFS, since it appears that someone's reputation has been affected because someone else lied about them and this has demonstrably caused harm? If there was more than one relevant incident then there might also be a harassment angle.

Please be careful with that advice about requesting compensation in a Letter Before Action, though. There are fairly specific rules for what you can and can't claim under our system and just going in with claiming some arbitrary figure of a few thousand pounds in "compensation" for vague damages is far from guaranteed to get the result you're hoping for. If someone were serious about challenging this kind of behaviour, they might do better to consult with a real lawyer initially to understand what they might realistically achieve and what kinds of costs and risks would be involved.

white-space: pre-wrap;

How about this, then: It fills a niche, but it is full of bad decisions (and fragmentation), and survives mainly by its existing momentum. It's crap in the same sense that Unix is crap: the founder effect has made its flaws impossible to dislodge or rethink.

A popular solution to a problem is not necessarily a good solution to that problem.

There's nothing much to doubt. The evidence is always the same: "our web server logs show scrapers originating from IP addresses owned by someone who didn't pay us."

The Verge article is a little clearer. 100,000 threads pilfered over the past year with scraping! Oh no!

(See also: the actual legal filing. I have to admit the headings sound a little unstable.)

Just you wait—they're way more over-represented they are in subreddit moderators... and in the accelerationist movement.

"Actually" read them? Are there a lot of people running around purporting to have read TSR novels, or to have credentials that require doing so?

There are no real downsides to saying the 2026 version is 26 and the 2126 version is 126. It's just [year - 2000]; you can even imagine this is release 026 rather than 26. Personally I'd worry more about what happens in the year 3000 when they have to release version 1000.

Moreover—these are just version numbers, imitative of dates, rather than actual date fields. It's not like someone is going to be charged for unpaid bills because their iOS version number was accidentally parsed as being in the past. Take your damn pills, grandma!

And yet you registered on Slashdot. Curious.

(The social credit system isn't real. See here for debunking.)