That was my first thought. My second thought was that maybe the author lumps together all of Europe in the same timezone, but it turns out that even that doesn't work. It could be "former Warsaw pact countries in Europe" at a stretch. Or (and here is where I draw a flamebait mod) it could be a US American who doesn't realise that Europe covers more land area than the USA (even including Alaska).
And this is why you should only buy HDDs, SSDs, and thumbdrives from Amazon themselves (not "fulfilled by Amazon", not third-party sellers on Amazon) or some other reputable retailer. Even if you don't get an outright scam with a much smaller actual capacity than advertised capacity, you may be getting a used product sold as new.
I've been following this story since it first broke and Heise were also reporting where people had bought their affected drives, the sources included authorised Seagate dealers. They did of course tell their readers how to recognise these drives, although I can't remember if they wrote the necessary software themselves or simply stated what it was called and where it was to be found.
It sounds more like legitimate, but used, Seagate drives that are being hacked to present themselves as new drives.
I can read (and speak) German so the original Heise article was not a challenge. Some of the Seagate drives found there were rebranded as different models, does that count as "counterfeit"?
Heise started reporting this problem a while ago, possibly towards the end of last year. Their main computer magazine is called C't and is released every two weeks, recent editions have moved away from this story - rather than report "more of the same" - but before that new details were emerging all the time.
The only other recent story I can think of which generated frequent updates over months/years was Intel's suiciding processors.
I'm done seeing ads.
I have a friend whose greatgrandfather builf a chain of ice cream stands but sold them all to Howard Johnson back in the 1930s, declaring: "The day of the roadside stand is over."
What I like best about private equity is that the all you can eat buffet is basically over
Patron: But the sign says "All you can eat"!,
Owner: That's right, pal. That is all you can eat.
Randomly jerking the business environment one way and then another is not how you encourage a healthy economy.
We're likely losing a meaningful amount of economic growth from this alone. Companies don't know how to spend their money when the rules they have to follow change every week so they just stop spending their money.
Absolutely true. Reduced (or in many cases halted) investment in business growth is likely the primary driver of the poor economic numbers we're seeing. It's probably also helping to reduce inflation, though that effect seems to be offset by the early impact of the tariffs. As the tariffs bite harder I expect inflation to go up significantly even with the slowdown in business. If Trump manages to force Powell out early and replace him with an ideologue who lowers interest rates, inflation will really skyrocket.
Microsoft is famous for never getting any future prediction right.
I have a clear memory of seeing a pile of Gates' book in the Quincy Marketplace. On the front of the book was a sticker: Now revised to include the Internet. I thought: well, that is visionary. (This was years before
Monetary inflation, maybe. Price inflation, no way.
Monetary inflation and price inflation are different things, but monetary inflation (which is a measure of monetary supply) is basically irrelevant to anyone but a macroeconomist, and both CustomBuild and I are talking about price inflation. Monetary inflation is a red herring.
Food has been going up up up consistently, we all have to eat.
Food prices are not going up significantly faster than overall inflation. That would actually be strange, since food costs are a major component of the consumer price index; for food prices to to up more than overall inflation the other stuff in the CPI basket would have to go down (in relative terms), quite a lot.
Rents are going up up up, we all have to live somewhere.
That's very regional. Rents have actually declined a bit where I live, thanks to a massive construction boom. This is an area where red states do considerably better than blue ones, thanks to lighter (though still excessive, IMO) construction regulation. Nationally, housing prices are flat (inflation-adjusted) over the last six months. Also, there's basically no way Trump could affect housing prices in such a short timeframe. The effects of presidential decisions on the economy generally take 2+ years to even be measurable. Tariffs are an exception, but even tariffs take some time to have an effect, and housing prices are a long way downstream.
Medical expenses are going up up up, we all need health care.
AFAICT, healthcare costs aren't tracked on a monthly or quarterly basis, so we don't really know how they've changed during Trump's presidency. Eventually I expect the tariffs to increase healthcare costs relative to what they would have been without the tariffs.
CustomBuild's claims that the economy is improving during Trump's presidency are false, and even if they weren't, his argument that economic improvement would make massive corruption acceptable is both offensive and sad. In fact the signs are generally negative, but let's not veer into fantasy or anecdata in the other direction either.
Though... knowing what the objective reality is may get a lot harder if Trump's strategy of firing statisticians for bad news has the predictable effect.
The phrase "intravenous antidote" is also in the summary.
"Money is the root of all money." -- the moving finger
