South Africa has been the exception.

Well yes, it’s really difficult to switch when government only just managed to migrate to Windows 10 on most machines, and still uses Microsoft’s document formats for everything aside from PDF.

Up until a few years ago, UNISA was still using public-facing IIS servers and SARS was paying up the wazoo to maintain old Flash applets that people used to file their taxes.

One government department managed to waste R5 million on a WordPress website that used a $15 theme.

“He’s out of line, but he’s right.”

Microsoft’s implementation of the feature is called Windows Update Delivery Optimization.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-update-delivery-optimization-and-privacy-bf86a244-8f26-a3c7-a137-a43bfbe688e8

Here’s a short optimisation guide: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-delivery-optimization.html

Fundamentally it’s not like the Bittorrent protocol, even though there are similar behaviours and the result is the same. Microsoft retains the ability to stop the network from seeding updates and has ways of only targeting specific supported configurations to receive new updates.

Ah, Russian boot-licking.

This is the basis of the ASUS warranty issues recently when they had exploding AM5 motherboards and vague text about EXPO support voiding warranty, painting themselves into a corner when they only had unsupported firmware that would technically void warranty.

It doesn’t matter that the company says “Oh we won’t enforce that rule” but they still keep the rule in place.

macOS? You gotta be kidding. Windows and Office is huge.

Just the entrenchment of Sharepoint and Outlook alone is enough to make switching to anything else a difficult prospect.

The launcher isn’t really the problem, it’s the fact that Overwatch 2 isn’t making them any money!

Spez has almost never had the gift of foresight.

“We need to be fair in our broadcasting!”

Yes, but you don’t have to platform Nazis.

FTC really screwed themselves over building their arguments in the courtroom.

Right at the beginning of the announcement, Spencer appeared in an interview talking about it and started listing old ActiBlizz IP that the company owned, but did nothing with, saying that it would be cool to bring some of those franchises back.

There’s no way you can argue against that. Bringing more games to consumers was always Microsoft’s argument for the deal going through.

They probably looked at Facebook’s latest dumpster fire involving hauling data outside of the EU and decided to just not find a workaround.

They don’t want users to be able to wipe their own chats manually or via GDPR requests.

If anyone asks, they will be told that the data is gone, but we all know that’s not the case. They do have backups.

“Off the record” largely implies that an NDA would be involved, considering “confidential information that should not be shared with others.”

Meta’s decision to work towards federation does need to be taken with a lot of salt. Corporations using open platforms or open source to make their money has always resulted in power imbalances that, left unchecked, may become impossible to solve without concessions from said corporation, or else [X] thing just gets hung out to dry.

You have to hope the people running that company understand that these problems exist, and actively work against ruining everything for everyone else that relies on it.