The grift that keeps on grifting.

If only hacking was as easy as guessing the most obvious of passwords like in War Games and in Hackers. 😅

That’s a fine opinion, but I happen to disagree.

Somehow? Paying to remove ads is rewarding ads thus causing more ads in the world. It’s not mysterious at all.

There are plenty of ways to not make it an all or nothing service, but that is at least the most straight forward. You could potentially give some of it away and then have to pay for the rest. Or have some stuff for free and more premium content is paid for. Or perhaps based on bandwidth with video quality / resolution.

Anything that is not ads is going to be an improvement.

Paying to remove ads is part of the ad business model. Upset your customer enough until they give you money to make it stop. Once you pay to remove the ads you have rewarded them for implementing ads which lets them know that implementing ads was a great way at making money.

So YouTube premium is not another model. It is the same model. Another model is paying for a service that never had ads at all such as NebulaTV or CuriosityStream.

To be fair I don’t think it is possible to come up with a legitimate argument for making adblocking illegal. You would have to argue that people aren’t allowed to own anything such as their computers.

If adblocking becomes illegal I’m done using the internet.

I’ve managed to never pay for Windows my whole life despite using legitimate copies since Windows XP. I guess I probably paid for XP through the hardware OEM, but I got Vista from University and then Win 7 and Microsoft has somehow let me upgrade that version all the way to Win 11. 😅

But if I ever actually had to pay for it I’d likely just switch to Linux forever.

I should really switch over to Linux full time. I basically have no uses cases that require Windows anymore. Not that this activation patch tipped me over the edge or anything. Microsoft is allowed to fix bugs in their software.

My childhood originally consisted of the SNES and N64, but I mostly remember things from the N64. I don’t recall a lot of true horror games for the platform. There was Resident Evil 2, but the scariest things I remember were specific areas of Ocarina of Time such as the shadow temple or beneath the well.

I wish the whole project was a little bit more clever with its names. Matrix and Element are not unique enough names and can cause a lot of confusion.

I like the project though and still hope it continues to succeed.