But now? There are tons of scammy and fraudulent apps on the app store. If you try to search for any popular app, you'll be presented with a dozen apps that look similar with similar names and logos.
> Speaking to reporters Thursday night, though, Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said he believes those should be “super super minor fees,” on the order of “tens or hundreds of dollars” every time an iOS app update goes through Apple for review.
Wow, one step forward, and one step back. Good job, Epic.
The outcome is obviously going to be that Apple's store will have the most apps, with the most up to date versions, and with the most free apps/games. I'm sure Fortnite will do just fine though.
Unless I'm misunderstanding this, why would the court allow Apple to act as a gatekeeper for their competitors?
Let's put the blame where it belongs. Monopolistic companies destroyed the internet.
> This is the media ecosystem we live in now — a supercharged shopping system that thrives on outrage, dominates the culture, and resists any real scrutiny because no one’s really in charge
That's the media ecosystem you've lived in your entire life. The internet, as always, just scaled up what we already had.
This is also true for more than just the internet.
They should switch to open-source for sovereignty. Not "cost". The fact that they mention "cost" as motivation and to secure buy-in is very worrisome. If you really want to switch to open source permanently and secure your sovereignty, you should invest more (making LibreOffice Calc as good as Excel? One can dream, but it's not cheap). Cost-savings show a lack of seriousness. How long until another government switches back?
How to know when they're serious: when the federal government hires an in-house team of (well-paid) programmers, and sysadmins. Not consultants. Put them in charge of public-facing and internal-use digital infrastructure, serving both the federal and state governments. Make them work to tailor a distro, or LibreOffice, to government needs. Invest in workforce training to keep their productivity up despite the switch.
And then, one day (let's dream for a second), that team could also pick new projects that serve the public interest, like a vulnerability research team (like Google Project Zero), or helping out with all those underfunded core pieces of digital infrastructure out there with only a single maintainer. Creating public goods is the point of a government.
Approximately 9 million, according to the article:
> In contrast, there would be one-time investments of nine million euros in 2026, explained the Ministry of Digitalization to the Kieler Nachrichten. These would have to be made for the conversion of workplaces and the further development of solutions with free software in the next 12 months. Given the annual savings, this sum will pay for itself in less than a year.
Dead Comment
However, there's some interesting things going on in WSL 2 versus a "normal" Hyper-V virtual machine. For example, a Linux distro running on WSL can (and will) use GPU partitioning (aka PCI/GPU passthrough) and a special implementation of DirectX enabling the installed video card to accelerate graphics within X and/or Wayland.
Although this feature can be enabled with a lot of hacking in both the Linux guest and vanilla Hyper-V on the host (the latter through Powershell) it is officially unsupported on Windows 10 and Windows 11, and is only supported on Windows Server.
Imagine licensing and installing Windows Server to run Linux software through WSL
Unless Microsoft is directly supplying the software which surveils instead of just “general purpose compute” this isn’t as big as Norway would want you to believe. They can just terminate the accounts as violations of terms of service and claim that millions of users use azure cloud to serve websites and content, the dance will go on.
I don’t think punishing the steel maker for a gun maker who sold it to a distributor who then sold it to a nut job should be liable for the nut job. This is the same for tech. Sub contractors for Israel government got Azure hosting and subbed it out to Palantir to plant their platform inside (gun maker) and then sold it to Israel (nut job).
Palantir on the other hand…
Nobody thinks that, because it's ridiculous. This is a false equivalence. Isolated crimes are inevitable, and impossible to solve with any single thing.
But when it comes to genocide, you can stop or at least limit it by going after the suppliers who equip the group with the tools to carry it out. Microsoft is one such supplier, and they know exactly what they're doing. If our government isn't going to do something, an activist shareholder is a decent alternative.
No matter what you decide to do, they're going to profit off of you. The only remaining question is "how much".
Personally, I don't want to make it easy for them. That's why I like to use alternative YouTube frontends that limit data collection and block ads. I sure as shit don't pay for premium. Whatever effect that has on their business is likely negligible, but it at least makes me feel better about the situation.