I think this is a common business model for most international charitable organizations. Once your charity is linked to high profile donors they will help you in defending fraudulent activities because of the "good work" they do.
Keep some. FEMA, Coast Guard, and the Secret Service are good ideas. (They don't overthrow governments, spy on everyone, siege civilians, nor habitually seize things without warrants.) Some kind of border protection is necessary for a functioning state, but all those agencies seem staffed with sociopaths on power trips.
Sounds like a great way to attack a target and destroy their life. Most people have no idea how many or what photos are on their devices.
1) Either get photos on their phone with the correct HASH, or get some photos that are already on their phone into the HASH list.
2) FBI will be quietly informed by Apple.
3) FBI shows up one day at the targets home or work. They confiscates all electronic devices and ruins that persons life.
I am sure the product people at Apple are seeing $$$
1) Scan devices for copyrighted music, to play your music you need to have it purchased on Apple
2) Scan devices for copyrighted videos, to play your video you need to have it purchased on Apple
3) Scan devices for copyrighted photos, purchase an Apple license to use this photo
4) Scan devices for copyrighted text, purchase an Apple license to use this text
"Banks haven't been allowed to monetize their KYC data"?
I work for a major US Bank and they are most definitely monetizing KYC data, in fact we have made several billion dollar acquisitions just to scoop peoples data.
The convention in Canada was there were limits on how much customer PII banks and the payment networks could collect, use, and share or sell, and how. "Monetize," in my comment means "sell to others like a social platform / ad-tech company," whereas I would agree it could be monetized in other ways.
What I see is that Stripe doing IAM for platforms and services that people use daily sets them up to dominate retail and small business banking services if they wanted to go there.
The platform being used for organizing potential mass murder of targeted groups. If the screenshots are correct of what I have seen then AWS had no choice. They would have been liable if something really bad happened and was made aware of this before it happened. Parler has no monitoring of this activity and that is why everyone shut them down once it was exposed.
Note that in the past AWS has been more than open to hosting platforms organizing potential mass murder of targeted groups, to the point of issuing a lawsuit after a competitor was chosen to host the platform. [1]
I had to replace my pair of $250 shoes every 3 to 4 months once I started running 50KM a week. The waste factor of having to throw those shoes out every time. Seems like I went though much more rubber than the 4 tires on my car over the lifetime of the tires of around 60,000KM
your shoe rubber is going to be a totally different makeup than car tires. I'm not a rubber chemist so I can't say which is worse. Running in car tires would be like running in hard soled work boots. Also I'm betting that < 1% of the population runs as much as you, whereas > 1% of the population has a car or ridses in motorized vehicles using rubber tires.
My kids have access to some of the best games in their Steam library, but most of the time they prefer to discover new games on Roblox. I just hope they don't force advertising into the Roblox worlds, that would destroy the experience.
My daughter did that at first - now she has a private server where she and her friends (all 9 years old) build their own games to play with each other. They all build 3D models in the world builder, and even some Lua scripting to alter mechanics.
It's a pretty neat way of getting kids into game dev.
That's awesome. Feel like there's a new revolution of user created virtual world building unfolding. And the kids today are surfing the wave.
Dreams, Vrchat, Roblox, neosvr and probably many others...
I hope there will be much more innovation in this space because it feels like powerful interactive content could be created in much more user friendly way than with lua scripting. Is it finally time for a visual programming language revolution?
The owner of a "place" (game saved from the editor to the Roblox cloud) can set the permissions for who can participate in the live, collaborative, editing environment (invite basis), and who can play it (public, friends, or editors).
The only problem with the collaborative editing (which is very very cool) is that it's really easy to click and delete/move/duplicate huge chunks of the game without realizing it. But, if you save often, the built in version control is really nice.
It's pretty neat though, except for the marketplace is absolutely filled with assets that contain malware. A script can be linked with any object in the game, used to give the object life. But, that script has nearly global control.
I think the scripting and standard libraries would really benefit from a huge overhaul, but it's pretty neat. There's quite a bit of friction getting started though. Much of it isn't intuitive, with magic undocumented names required, and you'll usually find well meaning, but very beginner, game developers providing colorful information in the forums.
If I had to guess, they're using the "places" that every user gets allocated. You can have a bunch of them, but only so many active at once. Maybe you can adjust the privacy settings for a place to allow only your friends. Roblox does all the hosting and provides the IDE (Roblox Studio) and everything. All the games on Roblox are somebody's "place" that they've made public and developed into a fun game.
This is from my own experience >5 years ago, so it could be outdated.
I recently had a director reach out to me about joining their team to work on rebuilding an ad system from scratch, so unfortunately your fear may very well be valid.
Correct, they used to display regular ads on their website (but never in the actual games) for those users that did not purchase the Premium subscription. Users with the premium subscription would then see only user-created ads for user-created content.
It was honestly quite jarring and this new approach is better for developers on the platform, as they can reach way more people.
I think it would be naive to not imagine advertising as part of the long term strategy for a platform like this. After they go public, it's going to be a big tool in their toolkit for profitability.
exact opposite, they've made a 180 on advertising. there used to be external offsite ads shown on the website, which were removed. there used to be a developer API to show video ads for revenue within games, which was removed. they've cut down heavily on event promotions from companies (think movies that appeal to kids)
they have an extremely high revenue business model off actual customers, so they don't really need to do advertising, there's plenty of other ways to get more profitable.
for example, they're at the scale where they might be able to do what Dropbox did by running more of their own infrastructure to save big.
Sadly that’s true. I’m very careful with the screen time of my 6yo kid, but the pandemic made it very hard. Many of his friends in the school started to use Roblox.
So I played with him to check it, it ended with me uninstalling it: First time use and you’ll see tons of in-app purchases to build your character (all optional but kids that are starting to read cannot tell the difference), then the app is like the Wild West of ads and special offers.
The Apple store classifies the app as 12+, and I think they are right (as a father I started to see the appeal of the closed App Store and Apple Arcade).
The sad part is that it could be a great platform to experiment creating games and coding, is like the Alan Kay vision of Croquet but perverted by ads.
Minetest¹ is one game that I think in theory could be a great creative platform for kids, it’s kind of Minecraft + Roblox — a Minecraft clone except everything besides the most basic engine functionality — even mobs — is implemented as a mod — which is just a Lua script + (3D model, texture, and/or sound) assets. Edit: and each server can have any mods it wants and the client will load any it doesn’t have locally.
Honestly, it's not all that different from something like the Play Store. There's a LOT of games that are trying to get people (who don't know any better) to spend money. But there's also a lot of real quality games, too. Many of the best games have the option to spend money, but don't shove it down your throat.
As an example, I played Bee Swarm Simulator with my daughter and I really enjoyed it. I decided to buy some robux and spend it on the game.I did this not because it gave me something I needed to enjoy the game, but because I felt the developer deserved it for creating something that entertained me.
Why? Because of two things: you do not need to re-learn a UI (the same way people would play mods in W3, CS, etc.) and because it is hard/there is friction in starting a new game. Think about it, why do you spend hours thinking about what movie you're going to watch on Netflix just to re-watch a movie you've already watched? It's easier for your brain.
