Thaldor

And for real, who really needs this level of security with all of the drawbacks of having a >1000$ burner laptop? The amount of expertise and trouble to dig out auths and biometrics and use them in right places is still quite immense. For probably 80% of people a good password is enough security on their laptop and from that 20% group who actually and for real need something stronger, good software based encryption is enough for the most of them. For over 99% of people laptop with burner memory is overkill in scales of shooting a fly with ICBM. And for that probably 0.01% of people who really need burner memories, that burner memory is enough and burner laptops are more or less always too inconvenient for any use (apart from laptops equipped with T2-burnerchip the ones I have seen are A) cheap as hell looking B) can be hardly called even workstations with their performance C) they are meant to store vulnerable data that you don't want anyone else to see, they are not flashy and expensive and made to edit YouTube videos about your Starbucks coffee, they look and seem like those laptops you wouldn't even take if paid to take and definetly wouldn't risk getting caught stealing).

This basicly comes down to the point I tried to say the first time Apple brought out the T2-chip. Who needs this level of security? For real, who and how many users needs it? Like 1 out of 100? 1 out of 1000? Even some huge corporation servers don't have this level of security. To find self-destroying drives needful you are probably going to go to some very specific jobs, even usual CEOs don't actually need that level of security just because tight security is always double-edged sword like with T2-chip (no one can access your data but impossible to recover or repair). The only reason why normal Macbook sold to common people would need to have T2-chip activated to the fullest with encryptions and all would be that the machine is burner (you break it / it breaks -> "Too bad, that would be XXXX$ for a new Mac"). There is 0 (zero) good reasons why normal "Abby Normal" should have a PC with a drive that has hardware encryption to the level of having hardware key and complete block if some part of that hardware is changed or the drives controller breaks. "People fear that their data is stolen" FUCK OFF. If someone wanted to steal Abbys data, they would just dig through her public posts in Facebook/Instagram/Twitter or just that Abby happens to be one of those who uses "password" as password and her data is stolen among thousands of others. You actually need to be quite high profile person that someone who steals your laptop would care enough to even breaktrough your password and quite probably even then it's targeted attack (someone wants YOUR machine, not just any machine). I would say probably 99% of stolen laptops (windows, mac, linux, whatever) are sold as they are or just formated to get the buyer working machine. Literally no one cares what kind of dwarf porn you like to watch and even Apple knows that. What Apple knows better is how to market unrepairable machine to people so that they are even hyped over that they are basicly buying a burner-PC which is 100% garbage after it breaks. And just like in this case, "it has water damage, no warranties" and probably in the part two "It's opened by someone else than Apple licensed monkey, no warranty and whatever it has wrong is made by that third party".

The whole thing becomes asshattery when you think that DD "promises" 10$/delivery whether or not the driver gets tipped out of the goodwill of the customer. That 10$/delivery is 100% surely counted into the prices because no one would be that stupid to leave that huge possibility to run unprofitable business. Now that the driver gets tipped (out of the goodwill of the customer for one reason or another) that tip just raises the profits of the DD and that is probably one huge bulletpoint in their presentation to possible investors because US and tipping culture. I would also guess that the system is made so that those who get tipped less get less deliveries because once again profits and if not tips the DD pays more to the driver. That 10$/delivery is also kind of one reason why this thing stinks a lot. That 9$ "tip" part with US tip percentages makes that probably (out of the ass) 70-90% of deliveries are done with that 10$/delivery pay, because to get more the customer should order with something around +45$ (20% tip) worth of stuff in the delivery (comparing straight to Finnish pizza prices that would be around 5 pizzas (8,5€/pizza and around the same prize in USD)). And this doesn't even matter because the 10$/delivery is already counted into prices and even when the driver gets more than 9$ worth of tips in one delivery, the DD made 9$ worth more profit.

This is the part of the tipping culture I (as Finnish, we don't tip, if we tip we either expect something extra or you have done extremely good job) can't understand at all. Like Doordash promises 10$ salary to you, except if you get tipped when they don't pay you that 10$ promised salary but only the 10$ - the tip part, like the tip that is for you for extra good job (don't give me that BS tip should be given from good service, if you give me bad service because I don't tip, I go to the next place that offers the same service as you because I had bad service experience in your place, good service should be included in the bill) is deducted from your salary because logic? Like I said Finnish culture (like all of the Nordic cultures) lacks tipping almost completely. We tip the bartender at a nightclub because when doing so they usually skip few people waiting for service at the bar to serve us who paid extra to get to the good side. We tip at restaurant if they offer something extra, like second serving of fries for free (this is extremely rare). Even in these cases tipping is very rare and totally not expected, actually no one ever expects tipping because they are paid this thing called "salary" by their employer because that's is something called "working for someone" (also again the same point, no one forces us to be your customer and if you give us bad service, we can always choose to go to the next place, it's not like you could offer something that no one else can offer).

At least in Finland both of those need very good reasons to be forced on employees and they both need to be in the work agreement, not when you are being fired. Non-compete clause especially needs to be VERY WELL argued like any normal coder or UI-artist can't have a work that would be so critical for company that they can be forced to sign non-compete clause, even middle management jobs are on the verge to not having really that kind of knowledge as whole that they can be made to sign non-compete clause. Also non-compete clauses are always timed and usually less than 6 months (over 6 months and the company really needs to have some actually strong reasons, we talk reasons like nuclear launch codes or skeleton keys for home alarms level of reasons, just knowing the business and how the company runs and how whatever-their-product-is works can't really be that strong reason). Also non-compete clauses come into play only when the person quits, if fired they don't have effect except in very very rare cases and again they need to be valid in the first place and they need to have extremely good reasons (because most of the stuff that companies think that someone could leak are covered with NDAs which again are in place anywhere from 2-10 years and they really don't need any reasons to be put on).

You are basicly describing the game industry also. They don't give a shit and when someone says that they have crossed the line there comes the counter-argument: "You are suppressing our artistic freedom!" like monetization design would be some kind of art. Quite literally game industry is doing everything the same way as gambling industry, except no one is regulating that shit and they still strongly voice for self-regulatory that will come in place "sometime soon" (like they have voiced for the last at least 12 years, still what has happened: nothing the shit is still in freefall towards the fan, or even after the fan). Hell, game industry is using tricks that are forbidden for gambling industry for very clear reasons (AFAIK in most of the world casinos and establishments that use chips instead of real money must have rate 1 chip = 1 real money (€/$/£/whatever) or even that the chips has to be pointed in real money value, so that the players perception of using money isn't clouded as much, game industry laughs at this and goes "1 real money = 1000 gems" just because that clouds players perception of using real money). "Self-impose limits" HAHAHAHAAAAAA.... IGDA and every single bigger game industry association just pats on the shoulders of EA, Ubisoft, mobile whalers and anyone who can give them good donation. So, nope, game industry will never self-regulate anything and only way to stop them is to make laws that regulate it and enforce those laws with iron fists. Game industry is even very much against unions because "they would suppress our artistic freedom of making timetables and release windows". The worst part, game industry isn't even ashamed for the shit they do. You can find hours and hours of presentations and lectures about game monetization from YT and most of them are filled with ways to just to make players pay most probably and they are filled with simple psychology about how do you make a person addicted. Simple things like adding that 10 second timer that you can make disappear by spending 1 gem (which for the first time is given free, but after that it's going to be 1 cent or whatever the value of the gem is made) to "flash sales" of stuff that don't really have any other value because you can't buy that package from anywhere else (even better, make ridiculously prized packages to normal store which no one in their right mind would ever buy because they are stupidly priced, and have constant "-50% to -90%" flash sales which are actually the real prices), extra points for making the game milking machine (designing it so that every week there's an event or season or something that basicly zeroes everything for most of the players making their equipments, skills or whatever rubbish and forcing them to invest into new ones to stay competitive).

Everything can break. Well maintained and treated cars don't usually break, no matter what kind of motor there is. Wear and tear are always present and nothing is forever. The real question is, what can you do when it breaks. Depends on a lot how things break but with electric motors there usually isn't anything you can do unlike with ICEs there's something you can try to do (battery malfunctions and stops giving or charging, you need to get to some licensed garage that has replacement parts vs. punctured fuel tank that you can put a stick to it and/or duct tape or whatever that you hope will stop fuel from leaking and hope it keeps enough fuel to get you to some garage that can weld that hole shut and off you go).

But can it stand 2 episodes of the old Top Gear and live on? Where we get to biggest downside of electric or hybrid cars: It breaks while in duty, you're in deep trouble because you are not going to fix it yourself with simple tools, let alone make some MacGyver-fixes to get it at least somehow moving and at least to a place where it's easier to get towed. Being able to pull million tons doesn't do much if it doesn't even start.

If the problem is as big as painted I would guess one of the options is to make 5G "boost" network meaning if it's available and the user is moving a big file or other way needs the fastest speed possible, the 5G would kick in and in normal use the phone would use 4G. In "normal" use (let's say small updates, web browsing, listening music and communication) you don't probably even need the full 4G speeds for good experience, so having 5G for them would be around in the same area as having 10Gb fiber connection for paying bills and reading news. Quite frankly I wouldn't really mind if this kind of system would be made for existing connections already. I wouldn't mind if my phones connection would drop to even 3G speeds while not in use to conserve battery instead of running constantly in 4G, hell probably GSM is enough while the phone doesn't do anything else than waits for a ping for new message/email and that tech is so ancient that it probably wouldn't even consume battery.

You must be one of those "funny guys" who finds an item from a store without pricetag and goes "it doesn't have a price, it must be free". For real, if the price is unbelievable good it's either mistake or there's a dog (or whole pack) buried somewhere.

In EU there's always "mistake clause" and this magical thing that usually is scares in the States called "common sense". If you see a 1500$ camera sale for 95$ that is quite clearly mistakenly priced and in 10 out of 10 cases the deal will be nullified because the price is so ludicrous that everybody can see that it cannot be a real sale price.

Paint me surprised, or not. Been following camera stuff (mostly photo but also video) long enough to know that there is always the one company that goes "Oh! Ours is better, trust us. It just is better. NO! WE ARE NOT TELLING YOU WHAT IT IS! IT'S BETTER AND THAT BETTER BE ENOUGH FOR YOU! BUY!" and in the end the basic functionality and hardware are 100% the same as the competitors, just in a different package (krhm krhm.. Sony). And it's not even contained in there, it's everywhere. Apple says their SSDs aren't SSDs but something different, turns out they are quite normal SSDs with different connector that can be easily just pin-adapted to M.2 (except with the newest models with that security chip, because Apple removed the SSD controller from the SSDs to the security chip, because well probably everyone who doesn't care about warranties and wanted to add more memory has bought small adapter and stuck bigger SSD to their mac, also it doesn't take long to google few softwares and do data recovery on mac SSD even on Windows for the reason that Apple Repair doesn't give a shit about it). And quite frankly same shit is just everywhere where someone advertises that their product has some magic inside them that makes them better than the competitor and there isn't a single technical stat included why that thing is anyway better than the competitors.

Quite many corporations today give their products for free and quite many of those products cost a lot more to make than a journal. I would argue developing something like Blender is far more expensive than running a journal and Blenders funding is completely optional for everyone (they take donations, they collect support funding, they sell tutorials, workshops and other training (from which all of the tutorials and workshop video materials are freely in the net) and they sell support), only product/service that costs is the Blender Cloud. Not to even talk about other funding solutions available today, enterprise funding like WinRar is quite good solution (individuals can pay for the product if they want, but they are no way forced to do it, enterprises on the other hand must pay for the product) and then there's use based funding (for private use it's completely free, for any public, enterprise or anything more than you using it for yourself and not making it public, you pay for it) and probably tons of other methods. You are going to say about bias and I will say that any funding method if not 100% transparent and public can be biased, even the subscription can be biased. And quite frankly it's not even about the funding, who makes sure the big boss of company X doesn't call the journal to become biased towards them because the big bosses friend is the chief editor? There is no way running 100% unbiased business unless everything is public and transparent. But back to the real topic. The main problem with G2A and any other key reselling site that is now or in the future is that how do you know where the keys come from. Someone steals anothers CC and buys 100 copies of a game and puts those keys to the reselling site for fraction of their price just to launder the money. The only way for a service to protect from that would be either cooldowns (the key you put on the sale doesn't become public before X days has passed or you cannot withdraw the money before X weeks have passed and the game dev/publisher hasn't claimed the keys "stolen" or any buyer has contacted about their game disappearing because the key was deleted). G2A and probably couple others are far more shittier than that because they allow selling of Steam Gifts. This is really shitty move because it allows the seller not to even have a single key or giftable game. Someone buys one of these "Steam gifts", they just get some shady link to some random site and quite possibly there were no game to be get in the first place, probably just another scam. On the piracy in general. I don't support it, but I do it because some companies are the worst of the worst and they don't deserve single cent for their work. Just like I would so vote and then get some forged documents and vote again if someone was to make one huge change to the human rights law: "Whoever doesn't respect ones human rights, doesn't deserve human rights" and the same goes for piracy, if the company is shithead like EA who doesn't care a shit for the community but only their income and goes out saying shit like "They are not loot boxes, they are surprise mechanics", fuck them, if I want to play their game, I either get it when it's sale for few euros or then I just pirate it, they want to be the shitheads, I will be a shithead against them. I really want to support and buy the games from the developers who stay clear from "surprise mechanics" and other modern day cancer including monetization methods, I even shun people who pirate those games.

Social pressure on some matters is kind of mindfully handled in Wikipedia, they lock the page to the last "non-pressured" state and after that every edit will be going through moderation (who are those who have shown quite extreme amount of interest and devotion to edit Wikipedia and who do it as volunteers) check which to pass the edit must be neutral in language and extremely well sourced. And what really isn't disregarded by people who don't like what they get? Like we really have people who really think the Earth is flat and no amount of proof can make their mind change. That is the level of disregard in the world currently. If even donations are seen as bias, isn't also that seen as bias that quite many scientific journals do get some amounts of donations from companies and academies and they usually collect higher subscription fees from organizations? Also it probably wouldn't be that hard to make it with fixed amounts, like one donation is even 5, 10 or 100$ and no one with a single donation can donate more. Or just publish the full list of donators, that way it's quite a stupid move to start leveraging because everyone can see that you donated quite a significant sum of money and now probably try to use that to bias things and if bias is seen and proven and it helps you, well talk about easy case to find out who introduced that bias or at least has quite deep their hands in it. There are quite many scientific journals that require you to be in profession that journal is aimed at. Mainly these are medical journals because, well, there is a lot of shit in the world of medicine (and I mean stuff like varenicline as a "good" medicine to help to stop smoking (you wanna see shit, go through that things "scientific trials" sponsored by Pfizer, which clearly doesn't have any bias towards their product, and IIRC they have also flooded the field to the level that any meta-analysis to the side-effects finds that from X amount of analyses only couple analyses found side-effects, while the rest were more or less paid by Pfizer directly, in-directly or for some magical reason the maker has been working for Pfizer in the past or after or even while doing the paper) or the still quite close to the dark-ages in brutality area of medication: the mental disorder medication (oh, the great unbiased trials you find from there and the safety of those pills)). Of course in case of medicine and medical stuff there is the argument that people will read them and blow things out of proportions and more or less shit will hit the fan harder than with all of the anti-vaxxers around and the internet would do what the internet does best, find information and dig out every reason to not trust the papers ("oh no, pharmaceutical companies couldn't make their own unbiased research and trials anymore" what a shame [/s]). And usually those journals don't also sell individual papers for those asking, because members only. Of course there is that "you wouldn't understand any of it" but then again is that a valid argument? As a sort of antic: Do I need to know how internal combustion engine exactly works to drive a car or to change its tires? Do I need to be a doctor to be able to do research about what are the real numbers behind the "(<3%)"-approximation or to write an article about some medicine and I would like to make sure that the papers are really unbiased so I don't end up writing about a drug trial that was knee deep in private funding by the manufacturer as an unbiased drug trial? (Dr. Google is bad, but there are other reasons why somebody could like to take a look at those papers other than trying to prove their doctor wrong or to find some magical alternative, which are all valid reasons to leave medical papers behind paywalls and "professional walls") So I still say that one place where piracy is actually saving the world (or at least making it more transparent and quite many sides standing on their tip-toes) is scientific papers.

"At the same time releasing information to the public and educating masses through it has never, in human history, been as easy and as cheap as it is today. But there has also never been so much monetary greed involved in information as it is today" (I remember reading that from some place) I am the kind of guy who reads interesting article or watches interesting documentary and can sink for hours to the world of Wikipedia reading about the matter. Without that kind of free access to the information I would probably be a far less "educated" (I didn't even finish my engineering degree because fuck school and it's need to brown tongue its partners). Without watching Chernobyl (and even far earlier being interested about the incident) I would have probably said "oh my god, Iran is starting to make weapon grade nuclear material" but because "education" I just went "WTF? How fucking stupid the media is. Iran is going to produce 5% pure uranium instead of the global agreements 3.65% pure (which actually is just above the low end of usable purity), that is not even near weapon grade uranium which is over 80% pure. It's just provocation that hardly has even marginal effects". I use this to provide context how free access to information, may it be as specific as possible, can change how person can read the news. I don't know how to enrich uranium, but I don't need to know it, but probably after this or couple of days I find myself reading articles about how to enrich uranium just because I can and it sounds quite interesting and what kind of effects that 5% pure uranium would have in generating electricity because if the whole world is using just pure enough to generate power I would guess purer could be more efficient in it, but that kind of information is probably behind paywalls because peer-review... You probably remember when Wikipedia was just starting and it was doubted as "the place to spread mis- and false information that isn't curated enough"? Well how the things are now when Wikipedia has been proven to be more correct than most of the old encyclopedias and far more up to date and mainly because it can be peer-reviewed by everyone instead of some journals or encyclopedias couple to tens of selected professionals (this does mean even those who has lesser knowledge can edit it but almost always it's quite soon edited by someone with far more knowledge and understanding). That something costs isn't any kind of quarantee that it is by any mean better or more correct than something that is basicly free. In modern light that subscription (paywall) to a scientific journal needed to read more about some matter in hands can be also seen as filtering information from the public or straight out banning public to see the information. What stops scientific world from building Wikipedia like system for their papers? Hell, someone from Kazakhstan already did all the ground work for them and the site is running just fine without any paywalls or ads.

Just want to point out, originally Minecraft wasn't sold "because community", it was sold as updates. Markus Persson actually kept quite long speech about "Piracy is not a crime - games as service" at GDC 2010 (or around that time). Point was that the Minecraft was easy to pirate, but by paying you don't need to pirate it after every update and every update was more or less feature update meaning if you wanted to keep playing the current version but don't want to pay for it, you would have needed to pirate Minecraft at least once a month. I think piracy is okay, in some cases. And those who say piracy isn't okay in any case are dumb. For example scientific papers and fake news: How can we notice fake science news from the real ones when basicly both of them have just as good sources? "Fake news" having almost non-existant source paper while real news having source that is in best case behind paywall and in worst case not only behind paywall but behind academical paywall that not only requires you (or someone else) to pay for the access but also requires that you are in academic position where you need that access. By trusting the news site? It's not once or twice even the most strict and fact based news sites have been fooled. By trusting that Dr. Blablabla is a real person and has actualyl writen the paper (that you cannot access)? You know, you can actually buy a paper that says you are a "doctor"? Not to mention it's not even that hard to pose as a "doctor" for years without being noticed that your real profession is janitor. So in this case isn't piracy actually helping the society? Because Sci-hub in it's base is piracy even when quite often the uploader is the actual author of that paper, that paper usually isn't owned by the author but by the one who paid for it. Publishing scientific papers is mandatory so piracy of them doesn't change a thing? Nahh... You only need to publicly publish the summary of the paper and those are starting to be more marketing texts than actually summaries or then they are just few lines like "Blablabla and Balbalbal researched a thing, the result was not good" (excellent summary, full 10 points, did answer every question and doubt we had) and then the rest of it are behind a paywall. You just need to trust? Trust someone I have never met, someone I have never seen, someone that isn't my friend and who I don't know, someone I have never heard of? Not gonna happen, give me that paper so I can see the actual data and the testing methodology so I can build my own conclusion whether or not I trust you. Just as if I want to play some game but the developer (or usually the publisher) is asshat named EA, Ubisoft or tries to bring console exclusivity to PC in form of Epic Games Store, I'm going to press my "do what you want 'cause the pirate is free"-button. Just because those developers/publishers don't do any favors for the gaming community, more or less they make the whole gaming community rot even faster. Also in case of EA, it's not piracy - it's just surprise demo access.

I was thinking to upgrade to the AE-5 from Z, but the one thing I want to have in internal soundcard (how useless it might be to the audiophiles) is now removed from SoundBlasters also. The one feature why I didn't get Asus Sonar but went with the SoundBlaster even when Creative has driver problems from time to time and quite many things are more or less scam and not really done with the sound processor, but still the one feature: front panel audio connection. Those four extremely cheap pins where cable that still usually resembles fruit salad connects and runs through your whole case to provide you headphone and mic connectors so the twice a year when you need them, you don't need to spent 10 minutes trying to guess which hole in the soundcard is for mic and which one directly understands that they are headphones that are connected. But no, "lets use those 4-pins for RGB lighting"...

I edited that "in away" part because that law is quite a huge maybe for practical E2EE ban just because so much is written in "could have done" and so much is resting on one government official. Nothing is ever 100% effective, but quite often when some internet laws pop up their effectiveness in scales of 10-30% (at most) and mostly that is the part of population which is completely tech illiterate and usually not even the part of population which the law should affect. Like the UKs porn pass which is bypassed so easily that when, at last, it comes every minor can bypass it without any problems and the ones who suffer from it are mostly a lot older people who have hard time even turning on a PC and even then probably only fraction of the internet really cares for that law and there will be porn available without the porn pass with only a single google search (there probably will be porn sites marketing that they can be accessed without the porn pass); And basicly so the whole porn pass is just wasting public funds for something that really couldn't work even in the beginning. Don't take me wrong here. I do share the opinion that in quite many cases the "it's not 100% effective" argument is bad. I just draw the line probably around when the thing is at least 50-70% effective the argument is stupid, but when the thing is as effective as homeopathic medicine scientifically (if you trust in homeopathic treatment then this is very bad comparison and I apologise), it's quite a good argument.

Well, you are free to move to UK and (probably soon) buy your own porn pass, or Australia which is probably the first "western" country to ban E2E encryption (in a way), or take the wildcard China with it's great firewall and other great laws or even the North-Korea with it's completely own internet. Or then just US with it's "capitocracy" where companies are completely free to do what ever they find profitable, even if it would fuck up every user they have and those users couldn't even have any other option because monopoly. Also there is this modern thing called "internet" that has greatly helped for governments to be more open about their decision making and who is lobbying who. It's extremely hard to be corrupt when every decision you make is free and open to be inspected by the public who can also see who has been lobbying you and in the most open countries public can even see how much money you have made in the past years and in which companies you have had or have decision making seat.

EU has shown to be quite good with it, even if quite often they get misunderstood and blown to whole new levels of extravagancy (mostly by Americans because law in EU isn't written with Crayons needing a lot of more laws to be written to make exceptions). Hell, they have kept UK with all of their mad ideas about "how to protect kids from the internet" in lease for quite some while (like the porn pass fiasco that UK tried first time around 2008(IIRC?) to get the whole EU commit to it, but they were laughed off because the whole idea is A) unmanageable B) too hard to implement right C) easily bypassed and D) stupid). EU has even shown that they actually know something about tech when they forced ISPs from collecting crazy amounts of money out of roaming data usage while traveling and stating that the internet access is a human right and enforcing that privacy is more important than corporate business (the GDPR and later basicly putting stop to copyright-trolling with a conviction that with only IP-address and some test pieces from a torrent companies aren't allowed to get user information from ISPs) and also enforcing net neutrality. With that kind of track record I would say single countries should not try to make any kind of internet laws, ever. There should be maybe some global board or something far more bigger to make those guidelines and laws so that there would be less probability of silliness and corruption. And no, UN isn't a place for that, thanks for extremely stupid veto rights for certain countries which will never let each others ideas even to be considered. Just completely new organization where every country would be represented equally and helped by actually hired professionals (and I don't mean hired by tech companies, but by the organization so they would have the knowledge but no ties to the tech companies from which 80% will try to fuck everything up).

"This is like the Shelfinator 5000" I see someone is watching HPC. Now we just wait couple of months and we probably hear Linus realizing how "clean" metalworkshop actually is (even with fancy small vacuum and all)

Hahahaa... ISPs not able to fulfill laws made by idiots and crying over companies that put privacy over "oh no, think about the children". HAHAHAHAAA! We are hitting the illegal levels of incompetence. ? I just worry how police in countries that don't use internet censorship and actively scan everything people do in the net can solve crimes [/sarcasm] For real, UK just leave already. Anything related to UK is just getting more and more silly and I fear the worlds #1 nanny country award is soon given to UK.

The big question is, who is this time behind YTs move? Every time YT starts something stupid there has been corporations behind it but this time it would be odd because any good anti-virus/firewall/other cyber security company doesn't really have anything against this kind of content, more like they support it (IIRC quite few companies are funding DEFCON just because it's good for them, not for advertisement but for education). [tinfoil] I can only think some cyber security companies whos products are more scam than security not wanting this because from time to time their products have been proven to be shit and, thanks for spreading information, every kid could hack through them. Second one coming to mind would be just general corporations who are pissed off because security costs and their investors hope with this kind of move they can make... spare few dollars thinking the real black/grey hats get their knowledge from YT (yeah, corporations are stupid and even if you think they wouldn't be that stupid, they always give you their beer and manage to be more stupid than you could imagine).[/tinfoil]

I find the bigger problem is that single countries aren't allowed or can't tax companies by their real revenues. Like in Finland the corporation taxation is flat rate 20% from revenue, which means multi-nation corporations like Google have some investments just a day before financial year ends and somehow those investments are exactly the same amount as their revenue would be, so in the end they don't have any revenue to be taxed (even if those investments were paid to the parent company). It would be a big change to better if the countries were allowed to tax by the total revenue of the multi-national corporation (like in the case of Google Finland, they would be taxed by some portion of the revenue of Google LLC or better the Google Ireland). Of course there should be safe nets so that companies not doing this creative bookkeeping would be excepted, but that would open huge loopholes. One global currency on the other hand is a one terrible idea. Just look at euro already, it's a huge mess where one single currency has hugely different value in different countries (30€ in Finland is around 3 hours wage, in Latvia that same 30€ is more like days wage or even more (not really sure)), now think when there was a global currency that would include countries like China, US, Norway and Iceland and at the same time African countries with hyperinflation where it's actually cheaper to warm the stove with the money than buy wood. Only whole Europe under one currency would be a mess, currently we talk "only" about average incomes from ~800-2,500€/month within countries using euro, with other geological European countries coming in the difference would be ~250-5,200€/month, you could easily go to work few days in Monaco and live the rest of the year in the Ukraine without working a minute. Now with hyperinflation countries included, work couple of hours in Monaco and live like a rich in Zimbabwe the rest of the year, while in Monaco hour wage would be around 20€/hour in Zimbabwe we would talk something like 0.00001€/hour. Also making one single currency strong and stable enough to be used would eat tremendous amounts of resources (money). US dollar is quite global currency and almost everything is bound to it and IIRC quite a big bite from yearly new US national debt goes to keep the dollar strong (today US dollar is only by very small portion backed with gold, mostly it's backed by the US bonds) just because if USD was to fall, that would be bad. With global currency we would need to really stabilize it, meaning emptying the gold reserves and backing it with gold and a lot more concrete than debt bonds and for it to succeed it would need to be quite the same valued as USD and EUR or even be more valued and that would be some great magic trick to be seen (IIRC EUR was made stable by both backing it with gold and bonds and also tying it to USD which then looked a lot more stable than today, with global currency you really couldn't bind it to any other currency which would require a lot more backing). And before someone says it, without backing we get a currency like Bitcoin, basicly deemed to fall because only thing keeping it valued would be how much people are ready to pay for it and when the price gets high enough, people stop paying for it and then the fall starts. Just like some social media stars whole career is build on following and when people loose their interest, well shit happens, good luck trying to get a job with qualifications like "making a duckface" and "having ass implants" [a bit of sarcasm included]

Making Ireland and Luxembourg change their laws and taxation wouldn't change a much because the tech giants would just move their "headquarters" to the next lowest taxation country or even worse, go to countries that don't give a shit (like Malta). With more global rules that would bound every country equally it would be impossible to just move the headquarters. Personally I'm all in for this one. Done enough research on taxation and how much big companies pay taxes and it's more than clear that some global rules must be set so the megacorporations will pay their taxes where they are due. "Creative bookkeeping" is such a curse word that I rather hear 4 year olds run in the streets screaming "fuck" all day long rather than "creative bookkeeping", and it's even worse when everyone knows that "creative bookkeeping" is just a synonym to legal tax evasion.