Perhaps. But surely there's something immoral about knowingly participating in - and profiting from - a pyramid scheme.

And yet... Social Media companies make it bizarrely easy to impersonate somebody online and spread false information about them that never disappears. Oh, well if you're lucky the companies will take down the fake account after the damage has been done and, thanks to the fast one they pulled on Congress (section whatever of the communications whatever law that shields them from any responsibility for info posted - and spread via their algorithmic choices of what their users see).

So, is there a solution? How about an anonymous one-time token verification system, where you give the company your name, email and zipcode (or whatever info is needed to prove you're you), and the company generates a token that you can then send to a trusted authority (yes, it'd have to be the government, but too bad - they already have your info). You log on to the government site, pass them the token and tell them what info you're authorizing them to supply. Then the company passes the token to the authority and the info you gave to them, which it validates.

Or something... I can't be the only person who's thought of this, so feel free to poke holes. But 'Big Brother' isn't a hole. It's unavoidable. And the companies could still allow anonymous accounts, but just flag them as anonymous, and possibly restrict where info from those accounts can go. Of course, social media companies will balk at anything that restricts what they can do with your info, but hey, that's what laws forcing their hands are for. And the restrictions on anonymous posting would just get them to prod you to get verified.

Does the Twitter (X) blue check thing do any kind of real world verificaton? if so, what?

... as good capitalists do

Yeah, by treating their workers to subsistence wages, and their environment to utter despoliation. The WTO (or whoever) needs to establish global standards for minimum wages and environmental practices before its members agree to open their markets to products from another nation. American workers might not like competing with minimum wage foreign workers, but at least they wouldn't be competing with essentially zero wage workers. Something like that was done with regard to Mexican auto workers. It's not a panacea, but the current state of global capitalism is a race to the bottom, which couldn't be worse - for workers in the US and developing nations as well.

Didn't Google Docs pioneer collaborative online editing of documents? Why didn't that ever catch on?

I assume it's because Microsoft played quick enough catch-up to keep their Office monopoly strong enough to prevent any other document system from catching on. That - and not the damage to Slack - is why bundling of Teams with Office should have been illegal from day 1. And why 'unbundling' them 10 years down the road is a meaningless bit of theater. I assume the cost savings in buying the unbundled version of Office 365 will be minimal, and nothing will actually change.

I knew that - so when I want to go incognito, I open Firefox and use its private mode - and search with DuckDuckGo. Am I being naive thinking that nothing's being tracked in that mode?

I'm kind of fine with the trade-off of 'services for my data - for ad targeting only' during normal search operations. Of course, at some point the inescapability of ads has made me give up on Facebook and the Google News reader (for which I still haven't found an equally simple alternative). Facebook has the most evil of targeted ad business models. And Google News reader would be fine, if it let me open articles in my choice of external browsers to block pop-up ads. But, I guess in 'honor among thieves' mode, they don't let you block ads at all there. In an case, I find ads in search to be actually useful. That's the one brilliant idea Google ever had (besides, y'know, "search that works").

Chrome and Android are also gifts I still kind of appreciate (i.e. deep-pocketed, open-source alternatives to letting Microsoft keep monopolizing the web browser market and extend its desktop monopoly to mobile). I wonder, if Google were ever forced to spin off its non-search advertising business (the one we all hate), what would become of Chrome and Android. If they were not the handmaidens of the non-search ad business, would Google continue to support them? If Google didn't, would they survive as healthy open source projects?

The problem isn't the "Citizens United is a person" aspect. It's the "money is speech" aspect. Money is certainly a form of expression, but not all expression is speech. I'm pretty sure the first amendment is intended to prevent government censorship of speech content - not the way the dissemination of speech is paid for. Money is "speech" in an abstract sense, but it's also bribery in a very real, literal sense. CU goes off the rails in striking down limits on the amount of money groups are allowed to donate to political campaigns. And, well look...

R.F.K.Jr. is hoping to lure the moron vote from Trump. It's beyond embarrassing - unless it's a brilliant ploy... Nope, just embarrassing.

I didn't say the RH clones affected my company's decision. It was mostly AWS's first mover status that made it the 'obvious' cloud choice (made without any involvement by me, but I don't disagree that it was the right choice). Anyway, my only point is that AWS and the cloud are seen as the future, and while IBM could be well positioned for a come from behind RedHat cloud success, I'm not seeing it happening.

In any case, my real point is people are acting like RedHat cracking down on clones is evil, while conveniently forgetting that their allowing clones up till now was pretty cool. Of course, they didn't have the marketing/legal power to stop them in the beginning, but still... And, yes, Amazon (and to a lesser extent Oracle) Linux are bigger clone threats than CentOS ever was, but they can't do much about that. I, for one, want RedHat to continue to succeed - and pay developers, etc. Whether the clones have any real effect on that is an open'ish question, I guess. But sell to IBM for the deep pockets, live with the IBM legal department's interpretation of the GPL...

SCOTUS... come for then anti-abortion goodness, stay for the oligarchy!!!

Well, since 2019, the company I worked for went from a self-hosted IBM RS/6000 platform to AWS. No consideration of RedHat as even on the radar. Interestingly, the port (of a ton of C code) from AIX to linux was mostly done by me on my home Kubuntu system. But the pull of AWS made it the obvious choice. So, I kind of doubt, RedHat is raking in billions "now" (though I guess inertia could still be working in their favor). And now is when they decided to crack down on clones - making my point that they were fine with it when they were riding high, and well, all parties end eventually. I just can't see that qualifying them as particularly (certainly not relatively) bad actors here.

Yes, please. I hate reading "insects chirping" and wondering why I cant hear it ;-)

Now, if only there were a setting to "read blurry screenshot of a cellphone text containing vital plot points"...

Do you know for a fact that they're (still) "massively profitable"? I kind of doubt they'd have sold out to IBM if that were the case. They were certainly the first profitable linux-based success story, and we all cheered them for that. And, need I add, we all benefited from their ability to pay Linux developers. Since those heady early days, when clones were tolerated, the rug has been largely pulled out from under their business model. Amazon is running a massive cloud based, essentially, on a RedHat clone.- which has decimated (largely to the good) the market for stand-alone RHEL installations. RedHat/IBM should've been well'ish positioned to step in and establish a profitable cloud business of their own, but they were a little late to that game. I guess, to that extent it's their own fault, but I still think the overall Linux community is better off with a stable RedHat business in it than not. Sure, it was nice to be able to get RHEL for free, but really, is it only about the free beer for you guys?

Don't you think it's valid to wonder whether "this one changed its mind" according to a plan it had all along to ultimately not be what they claimed to be. Is fraud simply not applicable in the case of corporations - simply because profit is legal? I imagine your answer to this would be yes. I wonder what stake you have in that answer, though.

There are different sources of tax revenue. Sometimes cities dole out so many tax abatements to lure businesses and rich people that new real estate development does not add much to the tax base. You'd think New York would get more tax revenue from rich foreigners staying in fancy hotels (and paying hotel taxes) than it does when some billionaire buys a $100 million tax-abated condo that they use a few times a year. But Bloomberg spent 3 terms as mayor touting how great all the new billionaires were for the city. Ultimately, the playthings of billionaires don't really add up to the potential contributions of millions of middle-class people who actually pay taxes, but it's not a straightforward million-to-one comparison.

The net loss is more likely to come from the businesses (restaurants, etc) that served the crowds in all those offices. Ultimately most of that should be able to be recouped by other businesses that serve the new residential neighborhoods that replace the empty office buildings - but that's not to say there won't be a lot of pain during such a profound transition.

Apparently that's what Musk wants to do with Twitter too. The problem (well, there are lots of problems) is that WeChat, by virtue of Chinese censorship of all the competition, has a monopoly in China. Nobody would use an intrusive clone of that controlled by Microsoft. Google's already intrusive enough. And, of course, facebook is even worse. But Google actually provides something unique and useful (i.e. search that mostly works). I guess the also want to clone Amazon while they're at it, but again, Amazon is all about free delivery (with the infrastructure to make it work). What would Microsoft be bringing to the table there?

Hard to imagine that there was once a day where Microsoft could sit back and watch the innovators define the market before swooping in and letting their Windows monopoly do the job of forcing their clones on PC users to the point of bankrupting the competition. If anybody still used their PC's for anything but work any more, I guess they could still try...