Will it actually impact the legal landscape, though? It seems like there's enough money being thrown at this that it'll be deemed legal no matter what.

I gotta say, though, that my experience with trying to get them to sort out any kind of issue with their services makes me reluctant to spend any money with them.

I bought a Pixel phone. As per the sales terms, the phone came with one year of Gemini AI Pro service. Except, the redemption process to get the year of service didn't work for me. I contacted Google, they never fixed it or offered any solution. I simply didn't get the year of service I was promised.

My friend, who bought a Pixel around the same time, also wasn't able to get the year of Gemini they were promised.

That same friend has a Google One subscription, billed through their phone carrier. Recently, Google (or the provider?) discontinued that specific Google One plan, as well as the option to bill via your carrier. This was all covered in an email sent to my friend. As consolation, the email explained, my friend was given the option to switch to a different plan, billed monthly by Google (instead of their phone carrier), with 6 months free. Except, the new plan, and the 6 months free, wasn't selectable as a plan type for their account. So my friend emails Google about it and, to my complete lack of surprise, Google was unwilling/unable to provide any resolution.

At this point, I legitimately don't understand why, unless I had no other option, I would pick Google for services. They clearly put no real effort into resolving any service issues for any customer that's not spending millions with them.

If they made an M4 on a card that supported all the same standards and was price competitive, though, that might be a good option.

I've always understood doxing to be PII, which aliases aren't, AFAIK, unless they're connected to a real person. And, to my knowledge, everyone is contending that the names in the blog post are all aliases. And, regarding aliases, I've never understood it to be doxing for someone to say "FakeNameX and FakeNameY appear to be the same user."

So, to me, the thing that makes it not look like doxing is that it simply doesn't meet the basic definition of doxing. It provides no PII.

It's still nothing concrete, though. Their CEO basically said that they'd found one and that they couldn't say much more about it due to an NDA.

His take was that it was very unlikely that it impacted exclusively Supermicro, though.

It was covered various places, including The Register https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/09/bloomberg_super_micro...

I understand it's still more than most console makers do, having dev mode at all, but it's maddening to me that Microsoft made dev mode so annoying and limited. I'd honestly just rather a hack be available so we have the option of using the entire memory or repurposing banned consoles.

But at least one poster says they're reusing addresses.

I completely agree that it's malicious, but I'm thinking the people actually responsible for implementing it (the software, procedures, etc.) probably weren't themselves malicious. I think the technical people responsible for implementing it were intentionally put into a position, by their bosses, where they'd basically be the fall guys and provide a reasonable technical excuse for their boss's maliciousness.

On the other hand, now that the "we need to undo all this" use case actually needs to be used, they've gotta go back and solve the problem after the fact. Unsurprisingly, it's going to take a while to develop that solution.

I'm not excusing it, but I do think it's interesting to think about the technical and political issues.

Funny enough, I've known some people over the years who have explicitly viewed litigation as a reasonable alternative to regulation. Their logic was that we should just let people and companies do whatever they want. Then, if it turns out a company is dumping mercury in the river or whatever, you litigate based on the damages. Better than regulation, they assured me.

I mean, it does sound like it was a bad decision, but not so bad that it could retroactively be responsible for 10 years of decline.

Also, Apple (and I assume others) were building stuff with non-replaceable batteries before they were building stuff that was waterproof. Clearly they're not sealed off in order to make them waterproof, because they were sealed off back when they weren't waterproof too.

One of the really strange things about all of this is that there is a public forum post in which a guy claims to be the site owner. So this whole debacle is this weird mix of people who are angry and saying "clearly the owner doesn't want to be associated with the site" on the one hand, but then on the other hand there's literally a guy who says he's the one that owns the site, so it doesn't seem like that guy is very worried about being associated with it?

It also seems weird to me that it's viewed as inappropriate to report on the results of Googling the guy who said he owns the site, but maybe I'm just out of touch on that topic.