You’re right that a lot of Terms of Service documents and similar agreement documents have language that reserves the right to modify those terms.

At the same time just because something is in the terms doesn’t mean it can stand the test of adjudication and terms as well as changes are often challenged in court with success.

Unity is in a particular tricky situation because the clause that governed modifications in their last ToS explicitly gives the user the option to pass on modifications that adversely affects them and stick with the old terms:

Unity may update these Unity Software Additional Terms at any time for any reason and without notice (the “Updated Terms”) and those Updated Terms will apply to the most recent current-year version of the Unity Software, provided that, if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long Term Supported (LTS) versions for that current-year release) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms (the “Prior Terms”). The Updated Terms will then not apply to your use of those current-year versions unless and until you update to a subsequent year version of the Unity Software (e.g. from 2019.4 to 2020.1). If material modifications are made to these Terms, Unity will endeavor to notify you of the modification. If a modification is required to comply with applicable law, the modification will apply notwithstanding this section. Except as explicitly set forth in this paragraph, your use of any new version or release of the Unity Software will be subject to the Updated Terms applicable to that release or version. You understand that it is your responsibility to maintain complete records establishing your entitlement to Prior Terms.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201111183311/https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService/blob/master/Unity Software Additional Terms.md

I was wondering myself as well so I got you.

Basically what happened was that these were technically two separate cases with two separate jury pools to decide the amount for damages.

One jury pool came to the decision that there were damages and awarded $50k to each individual in couple 1 (totaling $100k) while the other jury pool independently decided that no damages should be awarded based on the same evidence.

Keep in mind that this region is generally pretty hostile towards LGBTQ+ people. The judge had the option to overrule a jury if they find that the decision doesn’t match the evidence in the case.

The lawyer of this lady is actually hoping for that in the case that lead to a $100k damages award as per the quote below.

“Two juries heard the same evidence and the same arguments, and only one jury returned a verdict that was based on the facts and the evidence presented at trial,” Daniel Schmid, senior litigation counsel for Liberty Counsel and one of Davis’ attorneys, told CNN via email. “In the Yates case, the jury returned a verdict of $0.00 because that is what the evidence required.”

“Without any evidentiary support, the Ermold jury reached a verdict of $50,000 for each plaintiff. The evidence presented at trial simply does not support that verdict, and Ms. Davis will be filing a motion for a judgment notwithstanding the verdict next week,” Schmid said. “Ms. Davis trusts that the courts reviewing the evidence presented will see that the Ermold verdict lacks any evidentiary support and will agree with the Yates jury that the plaintiffs are entitled to no damages whatsoever.”

Source

You can still do this if you use https://www.shodan.io/

It’ll let you find IoT devices and cameras connected to the internet if you know what to search for and an alarming amount of them are locked behind an admin/admin login.

I advise against nosying around because there’s a near 100% chance that it’s illegal to do so in your jurisdiction.

Love the fear mongering for something that A) already happens, B) shouldn’t be an issue for people that are in the up and up and C) should be music to the ears of members of the “law and order” party.

I get asking for mercy for family or a close friend, even when they’ve committed crimes, heinous or otherwise. I’ll chalk that up to human emotions.

But ffs, read the room a bit.

His dedication to leading a drug-free life and the genuine care he extends to others make him an outstanding role model and friend.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Danny’s character is his unwavering commitment to discouraging the use of drugs.

His dedication to avoiding all substances has inspired not only me but also countless others in our circle. Danny’s steadfastness in promoting a drug-free lifestyle has been a guiding light in my journey through the entertainment world and has helped me prioritize my well-being and focus on make responsible choices.

Saying stuff like that when he’s convicted of drugging victims before taping them is just nuts. Even by some sense of stupidity you think you’re just trying to highlight that he’s not a habitual drug user, you’re essentially just highlighting how calculated his actions were by drugging his victims.

Cue the nuclear shills that will handwave away any legitimate concern with wishful thinking and frame the discussion as solely pro/anti fossil, conveniently pretending that renewables don’t exist.

ETA:

Let’s look at some great examples of handwaving and other nonsense to further the nuclear agenda.

Here @danielbln@lemmy.world brings up a legitimate concern about companies not adhering to regulation and regulators being corrupt/bought *cough… Three Mile Island cough*, and how to deal with that:

So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?

So of course the answer to that by @Carighan@lemmy.world is a slippery slope argument and equating a hypothetical disaster with thousands if not millions of victims and areas being uninhabitable for years to come, with the death of a family member due to faulty wiring in your home:

Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, “It’s not as bad as a nuclear disaster” isn’t exactly going to console them much.

At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It’s not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.

Then there’s the matter of misleading statistics and graphs.
Never mind the fact that the amount of victims of nuclear disasters is underreported, under-attributed and research is hampered if not outright blocked to further a nuclear agenda, also never mind that the risks are consistently underreported, lets leave those contentious points behind and look at what’s at hand.

Here @JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works shows a graph from Our World in Data that is often thrown around and claims to show “Death rates by unit of electricity production”:

Seems shocking enough and I’m sure in rough lines, the proportions respective to one another make sense to some degree or another.
The problem however is that the source data is thrown together in such a way that it completely undermines the message the graph is trying to portray.

According to Our World in Data this is the source of the data used in the graph:

Death rates from energy production is measured as the number of deaths by energy source per terawatt-hour (TWh) of electricity production.

Data on death rates from fossil fuels is sourced from Markandya, A., & Wilkinson, P. (2007).

Data on death rates from solar and wind is sourced from Sovacool et al. (2016) based on a database of accidents from these sources.

We estimate deaths rates for nuclear energy based on the latest death toll figures from Chernobyl and Fukushima as described in our article here: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima

We estimate death rates from hydropower based on an updated list of historical hydropower accidents, dating back to 1965, sourced primarily from the underlying database included in Sovacool et al. (2016). For more information, see our article: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Fossil fuel numbers are based on this paper which starts out by described a pro-nuclear stance, but more importantly, does a lot of educated guesstimating on the air-pollution related death numbers that is straight up copied into the graph.

Sovacool is used for solar and wind, but doesn’t have those estimates and is mainly limited to direct victims.

Nuclear based deaths is based on Our World in Data’s own nuclear propaganda piece that mainly focuses on direct deaths and severely underplays non-direct deaths.

And hydropower bases deaths is based on accidents.

So they mix and match all kinds of different forms of data to make this graph, which is a no-no. Either you stick to only accidents, only direct deaths or do all possible deaths that is possibly caused by an energy source, like they do for fossil fuels.

Not doing so makes the graph seem like some kind of joke.

Most doxxers don’t technically release the information, rather they’ve acquired it and point others to where they’ve acquired it or simply disseminate it further.

That’s what I’m saying. In most cases the doxxer isn’t the one who originally provided the info, but rather someone who has found the information online via a Google search or something similar.

Isn’t that a little bit of circular reasoning?

If I doxx someone online then it gets indexed by Google, if someone then Google’s the information it stops being doxxing?

I’d assume most doxxing isn’t done by someone who has unique firsthand knowledge (e.g. “Oh I know John, he lives on so and so road”) and instead is done by finding the information online whether via Google or a different public source.

At least in the US, where a ridiculous amount of private information is deemed “public”.

There are plenty of instances that are open, but it depends on your definition of “censored” if they are what you seek.

Completely “uncensored” instances are rare if not non-existent because most instances will at least try to adhere to the laws of their jurisdiction and in addition will have some rules in place to keep things running smoothly and pleasant for everyone.

Most big instances are run from the EU so they’ll often have rules regarding hate speech.

Depending on your definition your only options might either be Japanese instances due to less strict laws around certain content or right wing instances, but both will be almost uniformly blocked on other instances.

It means no porn, how much that overlaps with anything remotely considered NSFW is up to the admin and you’d have to ask them.

Typically low level attacks such as these is where it starts because they grant access to parts that can be used to learn more about the system as a whole.

This understanding then can be used to find easier to exploit avenues.

A good example of this is the history of exploits on Nintendo hardware.

They almost all started with finding an exploit at the hardware level, which then subsequently lead to finding software exploits and ways to leverage them in an easy way for end users.

There’s not much for him to be concerned about currently, given that he is dead.

As for 16 yo Aaron who wrote that list of hot takes in order of controversy, is it really surprising that a kid that developed an opinion of free speech extremism penned that down?
Especially after being inspired by this article as per his own admission?

The article also helps provide context for the time period this was written in.
Simple possession was still a relatively novel concept and simulated CSAM wasn’t criminal yet in the US.

Don’t misconstrue my own position on the matter, I originate from, and was legally trained in, a jurisdiction that criminalizes hate speech, imposing a significantly broader limit on free speech than the US currently does, and I think that’s the better path to take.
So I personally don’t adhere to free speech extremism.

Nevertheless, while not agreeing with his take, I can see the logic that persuaded him.

It’s essentially the facetious version of “Why stop here, why not also ban hate speech/guns/drugs/etc?”
All of those can be argued to be gateways to the harm of others, perhaps even disproportionately children.

To me it reads as him challenging the logic, not condoning the outcome much less the subsequent consequences. Very edgy indeed.

As for those who bring up that he reinstated his blog multiple times and with it this particular post from when he was 16, as a way to posthumously attribute this to a more older adult version of him; I’m not sure it’s that cut and dry.

As a fundamentalist such as himself it could also just be an exhibition of his free speech extremism perhaps combined with an effort to maintain transparency.

After all, it could suggest an eroding of his beliefs on free speech if he would remove it “now” with little benefit to him since the cat’s already out of the bag, even if he disagreed with his former self at the time of restoring the blog.

A better indication of his opinions later in life would be comments that reaffirm the prior expressed beliefs or, if the suspicion is that he practiced what he preached, one would expect this to have come out during the FBI investigation, considering they went through all his data.

Do I think it’s healthy to consider him a hero, or anyone else for that matter?
No not really, if only because the likelihood of heroes having irreconcilable blemishes is extremely high just by the very virtue of their, let’s say, unique thinking producing the things we love about them but also the things that might cause pause in many.

Most likely different incentives and platform culture.

Customization isn’t that big on iOS, other than the occasional viral fad, so there’s less interest for custom keyboards and in return less development spent on it.

Monetization of custom keyboards is also really hard and due to limitations on tracking and collecting data the incentives that Android has don’t really exists on iOS.

So what you end up with is a handful of custom keyboards often by big players that have bags of money to throw at it or as a companion to a regular app (e.g. Grammarly, GIF apps) to fulfill a specific function.

They’re right about browsers, but jumped the shark on keyboards.

Custom keyboards come with some rules and limitations for obvious reasons, but they’re by no means the system keyboard in disguise like how browsers are all WebKit under the hood.

Here’s documentation on custom keyboards: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/General/Conceptual/ExtensibilityPG/CustomKeyboard.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014214-CH16

@mrmanager@lemmy.today was talking about European companies doing fine despite strong unions in Europe and there being a lack of companies toppling over due to the strong unions.

They actually undersold it, because in many Western-European countries everyone benefits from union negotiations, even people that aren’t members of a union because the collective bargaining agreements unions manage to negotiate will affect everyone working in the relevant industry by virtue of laws deferring to those collective bargaining agreements.

You in turn decided to reframe the discussion at hand from companies doing well to unemployment numbers and not just general unemployment numbers, but youth unemployment numbers because you felt it would serve your argument best.

But if you look at the trends for unemployment then the story isn’t as bleak as you’d make it out to be. For starters general unemployment averages under 6% with only two countries being above 10% (and below 15%).
Average youth unemployment sits at 13.9% with a hand full over 20%.

However, both general and youth unemployment are on a steady downwards trend since 2013.
One exception to this trend for general unemployment is during the pandemic, where it shows a bump and for youth unemployment there’s an additional minor bump in 2022, which suggests a correlation with the influx of refugees from Ukraine. This is the European source on these statistics.

There will always be a higher unemployment rate in the EU compared to the US, especially when it comes to youth unemployment.

This lies mainly in the fact that most European countries have a civil registry system that automatically keeps track of certain data, unemployment being one of them, whereas in the US this data is collected by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics by conducting a survey of roughly 60,000 households.
Another factor is a difference in definitions. A good example is the one from the website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Garrett is 16 years old, and he has no job from which he receives any pay or profit. However, Garrett does help with the regular chores around his parents’ farm and spends about 20 hours each week doing so.

Lisa spends most of her time taking care of her home and children, but she helps in her husband’s computer software business all day Friday and Saturday.

Both Garrett and Lisa are considered employed.

Neither of them would be considered employed in most European countries. There are other such discrepancies, for example the US doesn’t include people under 16, whereas Europe looks at 15-24 for youth unemployment.

And then there’s the cultural difference between the two markets about when people are expected to start working and subsequently the jobs that will be available.

Which makes sense. Companies still need people, but if it’s more expensive to get low-end workers you just won’t hire entry level workers unless they’ve proven themselves beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Your hypothesis is quite lacking.
As stated, the trends have been going down for a decade now, if your hypothesis was true we’d see an upwards trend.
Additionally, these labor protections, including protections against being laid off, have been around for decades, your hypothesis doesn’t offer an explanation why, despite these protections, unemployment is going down.
Also, minimum wage, as is often paid for these kinds of jobs, is lower in most EU countries than in many US states, making it comparably cheaper to hire those kind of jobs in Europe than it is in the US, your hypothesis doesn’t explain why, despite this, the unemployment rate is higher in Europe than it is in the US.

In short, your hypothesis nor the unemployment rate is relevant to what @mrmanager@lemmy.today was positing, so lets refocus to the topic at hand: the lack of companies toppling over like domino bricks despite the copious amounts of employee protection facilitated by strong unions.

Perhaps afterwards, we can talk about the lack of landlords, corporate or otherwise, going bankrupt despite the strong tenant protections as well as the lack of companies selling merchandise to consumers pulling out of the market despite the strong consumer protections, and so and so forth.

And then, maybe, just maybe, we can afterwards all come to the conclusion that these QoL improvements are attainable without some kind of economic doom scenario.

The scandal didn’t lie in following court orders, it lied in the marketing and the fact that the French ToS lacked any nuance to indicate that it would even be a possibility that ip would be logged.

Furthermore, even when dealt with court orders, other companies that don’t tout privacy to be one of their core values, have chosen to fight such orders in court.
Proton could’ve at least tried to show that they were putting their money where their mouth is, by challenging the order.

Between this and the IP logging scandal, it seems that they’re going downhill fast.

ts obvious you have some strong feelings about this and it sounds like they come from you wanting Mastodon and the fedivserse to thrive. I respect that. I’ve enjoyed my time here so far. It would be a shame if it got torpedo’d by a big corp (especially a shitty one like Facebook).

Of course, I wanted Mastodon and the fediverse to thrive, if only because it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to dethrone corporations that have a complete disregard of people’s wellbeing as long as it turn them a profit.

Mastodon’s figurehead in particular has squandered the opportunity and if not outright self-sabotaged himself.

My main focus thus far has been Mastodon as oppose to the fediverse as a whole, because Mastodon has a unique challenge that other fediverse projects don’t have, namely the social graph.

People visiting Lemmy don’t care and don’t know who the person above and below them is, at most they might care that they’re not straight up Nazi schmucks and preferably they’re someone who has an interest in the topic of the community they’re posting in, but that’s about it.

On a “twitterlike” the identity of the people present is of more importance. Which is why I think in particular Mastodon will suffer the most, without knowing exactly if and how the other fediverse projects will be affected by Threads.

That said, I don’t think anyone has rolled out the red carpet.

I fail to see how this is the case.

Even if we ignore everything else, ignore the severe lack of transparency from the side of Rochko, his refusal to deny that he has received funds from Meta and his refusal to pledge not to accept funds in the future, ignore what could’ve transpired during the meeting with Meta, literally pretend like we are in a vacuum and the only thing related to Meta from his hand is the blog, then the blog alone is a perfect top of the line red carpet that has been rolled out.

I mean he hails it as a victory and ends with a tacit invitation for other corporations to do the same.

Just this quote alone is enough of a red carpet being rolled out:

This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.

How much more does someone need to be inviting to be considered to have rolled out a red carpet?

I’ve also seen a lot of jumping to conclusions and fantastical strawmen at the bottom of everyone’s slippery slope arguments. A few of your numbered points would fall into that conclusion jumping bucket, and some of your other points are based on an, imo, misunderstanding of the users of the fediverse.

For instance, #3 and #5 don’t give this community enough credit. The bulk of the people on the fediverse are big proponents of free and open internet, privacy, foss, etc. Most are refugees of Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook to begin with–they aren’t just hopping back in bed with Facebook.

And to that point, why would they all of the sudden care about the social media all of their friends are on? I can almost guarantee that their “normie” friends aren’t on the fediverse. The core crowd on Mastodon aren’t going anywhere. The crowd that Threads will attract were never coming to Mastodon to begin with.

Respectfully, this is difficult to read with a straight face after having experienced first hand the effects the Threads launch have had on my Mastodon timeline.

I follow close to 2k people on Mastodon and it used to be that at any given time I could open my timeline and 400+ posts were waiting on me to peruse.

It’s completely dead now, no more than 20 or so posts showed up in total for the entire day, this after a day where there was a sea of people posting a link to their Threads profile.

Safe for a few holdouts I can count on one hand, nearly everyone created a Threads account and they’re more active there than I’ve ever seen them on Mastodon.

If anything, it seems like I gave the people on Mastodon too much credit and I’ve underestimated how strong the network effect is, since I thought it would at least take until the actual “embrace” phase of it all i.e. until Meta would be ActivityPub compatible.

And it’s not like the vast majority of people I follow are normies or anything.
About 90% of them are software engineers like myself not afraid to tinker with things and deal with the “difficulty” of making a Mastodon account.

Hell, about a 100 of them run their own instance, one of which is the one I’m on and a good chunk of them are very active in the FOSS community themselves.

Sure, some of it might be because of the hype and novelty, so some might come back, but if anything that proves my point that they’ll happily jump ship if Meta does decide to nix the compatibility in the future.

And this is me being generous, like I said activity by people that moved to Threads has skyrocketed, not only did entire social graphs migrate to Threads, they were made whole again.
People that weren’t seen for ages since leaving Twitter popped up there much to many people’s delight.

Most people that migrated to Mastodon wanted a 1:1 Twitter replacement first and foremost and took the ideology as a nice bonus.

These are people that built a support network on Twitter, people that built a professional network on Twitter, people that built a network of peers, in short, a network that was important if not essential to them.

If I take myself as an example, an indie iOS dev, before I left Twitter I used it to stay in touch with friends I had in my industry, other indie devs, engineers at Apple, journalists covering and reviewing apps, local organizations and affiliated people working towards social justice, national organizations and affiliated people working towards social justice and then the rest was purely to ingest information and news.

The purpose of being in touch with these people varied, from comparing notes on how to best do my work, socializing with friends, arranging collaborations on projects, keeping track of what others were working on, promoting my own work, getting help from Apple engineers when I hit a snag, helping people get a job at places that were looking for someone, staying in the loop in case I wanted/needed a job, staying in the loop about local organizing and coordinating with organizers, etc. etc.

I was lucky that I happened to work in a field that is tech savvy and so most of my social graph, but not all, transitioned to Mastodon.

Many people weren’t this lucky and even the people in my social graph that transitioned had a considerable chunk of people that wasn’t entirely enamored by Mastodon.
Personally I welcomed the change of pace, but I couldn’t deny that their gripes were valid.

So to circle back to your comments about the core crowd and the crowd that Threads attracts:

The core crowd on Mastodon aren’t going anywhere. The crowd that Threads will attract were never coming to Mastodon to begin with.

Unless you by “core crowd” you refer to what Rochko called “nerd circles”, then I’m afraid you’re wrong on this.
Just as you’re wrong on the crowd that Threads attracts, because not only “were” they coming on Mastodon, they literally were on Mastodon until recently.

Somehow this statement by Rochko is now even more laughable in hindsight:

Well, even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now. XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.

Not only was Mastodon already heavily slanted towards “nerd circles” at the time these words were published, but it will only become more of a “nerd circle” from here on out.
ActivityPub hasn’t even been enabled on Threads and Mastodon isn’t “where we are now”.

edit: Oh for what its worth: https://jogblog.substack.com/p/facebooks-threads-is-so-depressing Thats a hilarious read about Threads and why its already pretty lame.

While a funny writing style, it comes across as uninformed.

As much as I wish it was the shitshow as depicted in that blog post, I’m sad to say that those were for all intents and purposes just placeholder posts, as soon as you start following people you won’t really see those anymore.

Call it Chicken Little-ing, call it FUD, call it whatever you want.

My timeline is dead and pretty much my social graph is happy they’ve found their precious Twitter replacement, so other than a very niche group, I’d say Mastodon is dead.

I might not like it, but I’m not gonna pretend like the blog you linked is based in reality while I stare out the window at the cool kids having fun like I’m Squidward

Yup, and very little people realize that almost all RCS implementations are by Google (often via their Jibe service).