I posted the linked comment almost a year ago, but the incident happened much closer at the start of Covid. I didn't say it at the time, but I willingly say it now, LiveCode were the perpetrators. They employ the dark pattern of graciously offering free stuff for education during lockdown, because they are such good guys, and then will charge $1500 if someone forgets to cancel their offer. After the dashes is copy of the text from the other comment:

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I treat 'free but remember to cancel' plans as scams.

About 10 months ago I got emails from a company that developed an development environment that was I was mildly interested in. They presented an offer with said it was free so that people could help educate themselves during lockdown. Unfortunately the terms was after 1 year you needed to pay something like $1500 if you didn't cancel, these terms were right at the bottom of the page and very hard to spot. Paid through PayPal and the about $1500 was there right in front of me. I cancelled it on the same day.

A company offering that sort of deal waiting for people not to cancel and saying it is to help people during the lockdowns is just awful.

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Addenda: Unfortunately I don't have the original email for this any more, as I was annoyed and marked it as spam before copying any text like an idiot, and it vanished. Although I may be able to use the internet archive to recover the page the email sent me to. Aside: if anyone doesn't copy the text they wrote in a webpage to a text editor or something before they press the 'submit' button or equivalent, they may regret as I have a couple of times, if an AI or site error swallows their text, it's a good habit to get into.

Here is the relevant about:config settings I have these changed for the URL bar:

  browser.urlbar.suggest.searches false
  browser.urlbar.searchSuggestionsChoice false 
  browser.urlbar.showSearchSuggestionsFirst false

  browser.urlbar.trimURLs false

  browser.fixup.alternate.enabled false

As for the asking birthday for security reasons, relic from the past, getting more useless as time goes by. With so many websites asking for that information, and then they get hacked, sold or leaked. Yes, this said the completely obvious, but it still amazes me that any organisation that I have a financial relationship with asks that for identification over the phone, usually my address as well, but that is almost as public.

Not giving users this information and removing like dislike counts just makes it so that a small number of people at YouTube have even more ability to control what is pushed on that site. With this change users have even less ability to check the validity of a video; validity means different things to different users here. People who stay at YouTube will just have to deal with the fact that they will have videos pushed to their screen for reasons that are hidden to them, that they don't have the ability to check out anything other people think about the video, and can't even signal that there is something wrong to them about the video (sure, they could comment, but any comment can be deleted by the video author and there is the fear of losing your Google account, which can include their email contact to everyone and authentication information also, which can have huge consequences for their ordinary life).

I definitely recall Microsoft killing hardware manufacturers putting Linux on the machines that they sold by mandating that if they put Linux on any consumer desktop they would not get the OEM discount for a Windows licence for any computer they sold. It stopped new non Windows PC sales dead at the time IIRC. This was something like over a decade ago.

  DavidXanatos
  on 16 Aug
  
  Interesting driver,
  is the process termination feature of PH the only thing MSFT has a problem with?
  I mean if its the only thing they don't like, may be its worth moving that feature into a separate tool or a plugin with an own unsigned driver?
  Also changing the name would be an option, if than all the problems can be avoided.
  @dmex
  dmex
  on 16 Aug
  Maintainer
  
      the only thing MSFT has a problem with
  
  MS refused to discuss anything and have ignored every email so who knows what their problem is.
  
      if its the only thing they don't like
  
  It's not the only thing.... There are recent changes to APIs that block and limit features when the caller isn't taskmgr.exe.
  
  Either way this discussion is offtopic from the KPH updates.

The risk of having their payment identifier/address banned from services before significant use makes it very risky for them to use such a thing even if tiny micropayments a worth it to the spammer.

It certainly could have other problems with people getting banned from such a system for things other than: spam and other use detrimental to the service provider. There is also the issue of how the initial buy in fee is distributed.

But a high buy in for a system that many online service providers use would very strongly discourage use detrimental to the services providers (I think; this is only for discussion, as this is posted by someone with little knowledge on this. Micropayment systems have been talked about a lot, but I don't remember high buy-in mentioned).

Edit: Forgot to mention that the idea of this is that service providers can offer their services at lower cost because the risk to them from a account/address with a high buy in is lower than from an account/address with no buy in.

With Win 11 requiring SecureBoot and the Trusted Platform Module turned on, it is a hard no for me. I like having control over my PC.

Just what instantly comes to mind. No recommendations.

So in the end do I want to get into arguments with either malicious people or people who already have their mind set, get called names, have people deliberately portray what I am saying as something else and call it stupid when that was not what I said at all. Most of the time I really don't want to deal with that BS. Most of the people want to post about this are reluctant to do so and in many times don't, this is not just extrapolating from my experience, but what I have observed from other sources as well (such as asking whether they agreed with something shown, seeing no hands go up, then asking whether the didn't put there hands up because they were afraid and seeing almost all the hands go up).

Here is what is advised to do to avoid being charged with contempt of court. 1) Know the etiquette and court standards of the court for which you will appear, including dress codes; [1] 2) Avoid raising your voice, outbursts, or any other display of anger or adverse reactions to an order. [1]

Here are some selected things that can get you a contempt of court offence: 1) Criminal Contempt: being rude or disrespectful to court proceedings, the judge, or attorneys in the proceedings, or causing some type of disturbance in the courtroom. [2] 2) Direct Contempt: an action taken in the presence of the court, which is intended to cause embarrassment or show disrespect for the court. [2] 3) Indirect Contempt: actions taken away from the court, which are intended to mock, degrade, or obstruct the court or court proceedings. ... In addition, publishing or handing out flyers intended to cause disrespect for the court may be considered an act of indirect contempt. [2]

Here is an explanation of being imprisoned for contempt of court: Even in cases of civil contempt, jail time is sometimes threatened, though if imposed it is usually brief. In fact, jail time usually ends when the individual complies with the judge’s order. In this situation, the jailed individual is usually placed in the custody of the local sheriff or other court officer and, because he is said to “hold the keys to his own cell,” due process of law is not necessary. [2]

Now from this you can see that someone could honestly criticize the courts and be imprisoned forever until they lie they lie and say that the court is great. If they are too honest and aren't willing to lie or be dishonest then they will stay imprisoned until they die, with no due process.

Now you can imagine how this can translate to a police officer being able to arrest or lock up people for not being respectful enough to them. The different levels of law enforcement are not unlinked, from the legislature down to the police. Scary to think about legal punishments for criticizing the wrong people/institutions. Instead of just looking at police, it may be much more beneficial to look at the whole system (including the police), seriously look at the whole system.

Here is an example of someone getting huge fines and jail time is right here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe2BfdlzwgI (CNN: Judge flips out after getting flipped off). I personally found that disgusting and it stuck in my head, although as from [1] the defendant apologized about the outburst and said she was under the influence at court after four days in jail. If she was unwilling to be dishonest and thought that the punishment was excessive, she could still be in jail today.

Note: It should go without saying but I am most definitely not a lawyer, who has not studied the law in any slightly significant way, this is just what I have observed during ordinary life. And for the 5 people who read this, sorry if this comment was too long.

[1] Contempt of Court: Woman Gets 30 Days in Jail for Disrespecting Judge, https://blog.novakazlaw.com/contempt-of-court-woman-gets-30-...

[2] Contempt of Court, https://web.archive.org/web/20210123193533/https://legaldict...

Experience installing and setting up Linux.

* Installing Linux was trivial, scary to shrink an NTFS partition in the installer, but after a long time it finished and worked really well. Tried Windows built in NTFS resize before this but even with almost all data removed from HDD it wouldn't lower the more than something like 300MB off of a 2.7GB partition.

* The basics worked without configuration. Graphics were fine even before installing drivers, internet was autosetup out of the box.

* There was still some basic stuff that needed searching the internet for to deal with, such as sound volume. The sound was really quiet even putting it to max volume on the desktop. Thing is the graphical control to change it was separate from the master volume, which was set to almost 0%. To change this I needed to run the 'alsamixer' command line program.

* Fonts look different, for some reason the way they were rendered made them look skinnier. Played with the rendering settings and then just accepted it.

* I was hyper sensitive to programs and games running differently and thought that some had problems on Linux (such as micro stutter in a game). But then I compared and they had exactly the same problem on both Windows and Linux. Ended up installing the much newer XanMod kernel distribution before I realised it was my perception and not my Linux install that was the problem.

So the setup worked to a point, having a desktop with internet connectivity was no problem and required no actual setup that I remember. Other things like sound required required me to use the terminal to set it up correctly. There was some other stuff I had to change which I had to search the internet for quite some time for, I wouldn't have been able to do it without looking stuff up on answer sites. Not the smoothest setup for getting stuff working correctly, but not too bad, and it is stuff I don't have to worry about after initial setup. Some of the issues with sound may have been because I was using a USB sound card which I think is not that common. Anyway that is my recent experience, Linux didn't run perfectly out of the box for me, but it was manageable. That was just the setup, running it is very nice, very snappy, and it doesn't have stuff that grinds my hard drive for no good reason.