Had I not seen this, I would have been billed out the wazoo. Thank you. How this isn't criminal beats me

Oh, wait… you mean the same company that, for years, installed Oracle Database Encryption enabled by default even though it required an extra license?

The same company that, during routine audits, aggressively billed customers for having that feature enabled, even when those customers pleaded, explained, and proved it was an honest mistake and that the feature had never actually been used?

That company is now being accused of doing something illegal?

That company?

The lack of warning should make this illegal, but I don't fancy taking on Oracle's fleet of lawyers to take them to court over it. I imagine there will be lots of people getting unexpected charges for their "always free" instances.

I expect there's some weasel words in the contract, but I would expect consumer protection laws (e.g. in Europe) would ultimately favour Oracle's victim/customer.

A few years ago, I applied for a customer service job for an outsourcing company that was contracted by Ryanair. They had a two week unpaid training, I tapped out on day 3 of the training, but until that point, I was given all the training material, including the spiels they train the agents on, which they actually call spiels.

Unless a customer mentions, specific wording (I forget what exactly now) - wording that matches the underlying regulation that entitles the customer to some kind of recourse by law, the agents are instructed to deny and weasel out of it. As in, even though they are legally obliged to give you that specific recourse, unless you demonstrate to them that you have proper knowledge of the law, they will simply act like you have no rights.

It was very slimy, and I literally couldn't stomach it. I don't know how they train their customer service agents now, but I would highly recommend doing a few google searches and some prompting to see exactly, literally, what words one must utter to a customer service agent.

Of course, that alone is not enough, the stars also have to align so that the agent you're talking to commands enough of the English language to have comprehended their training, and what you're saying; and not be bogged down with the 7 simultaneous chat tickets they must handle concurrently, in addition to the calls.

I share the exact sentiment. I unsubscribed once I was done skimming the body of the email.

Volvos also have this. At least my 2021 xc60 did.

I think the reality is much more grim. I believe we are now firmly in the territory where it is incontestable. (My opinion was cemented after reading Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown by Andreas Malm, Wim Carton)

We will be spending much of our upcoming years trying to get people and capital to accept that fact, before we can even start thinking about what little we can even do. By which point, we may actually just be having to scramble to mitigate the immediate sequelae of the changed climate, rather than focus our efforts to fix the underlying cause.

I agree with your sentiment, but I have a hard time imagining any alternative action scientists could take besides publishing and warning.

Science is best when it’s purely that, I’ve seen plenty of living examples and read about past ones where science mixed with politics or overt profit motives don’t end well. Surely there must be examples where the contrary has been the case, but I am biased, and I would wager that it ended poorly more often than well.

I would much rather have politicians that heed scientific results than scientists springboarding into politics.

it’s opportunity cost at least

Are you perchance talking about deSEC? I've also switched to them, and thought that it was too much work to send an email and wait for replies, so I ended up using dummy inboxes for my other, lesser important domains.

Though I guess it's still a good thing they do this? At the time I remember being mildly inconvenienced, but not enough to actually care. I just remember thinking, "How is this nonprofit going to handle all that support volume?".

Yes, deSEC.

They replied somewhat quickly (for humans).

I had accumulated enough hope for them to wait the 25 hours it took them.

And yes, I wouldn't go this way either.

Must be a new thing, because I have a handful of domains with them and I've never talked to their support.

I've used Desec for several years now, and I'm very happy with them. Zero problems, would recommend.

You're right in that money is not the only motivator for people. I would also argue that if you told them the _real_ reason, aka your own actual motivation behind the offer, the number of people who would actually be "playing" would be much lower.

I would be motivated to collect free data if it meant I was helping save lives, with that help not being behind a paywall.

I would be motivated to play a free game with ads just for the fun of it.

I would not be motivated to play a free game just for the fun of it if my playing of the game was furthering some faceless corporation's profit motives.

In fact, in that last scenario, I would feel tricked, and it would take a non-trivial amount of money for me to not feel that way.

Same thing with social media. If they clearly disclosed that the more time they spend glued to their apps the more money the company makes the majority would be turned off.

I would just like to add some cautionary anec-data: there are widespread cases in certain jurisdictions where rightsholders are known to seed the same torrents themselves, just to turn around and send love letters to leechers that connect to them. A good example is Germany with movies and TV shows.

Now, I don't know if, say, Wolters Kluver would/does the same thing, and what the realistic risk of an individual receiving such a letter is, but I think it makes it worthwhile to go over the actual law in your jurisdiction before diving head first on things like this.

I'm not saying it's wrong to seed these things, I'm just saying it might be a good idea to weigh the risks if you don't have a cool 500€ in cash to part ways with.

I had a letter one time when I was with Comcast, so I just spend the $5/mo and use seedboxes these days.

So would knowingly participate in illegal activity to catch criminals? Unless you are the law yourself you cannot do it )

I don't think there's any country where a copyright holder can send you a copy of their work and then sue you for receiving it. If they sent you a copy, they gave you permission to have it.

Look up Prenda Law.[0]

They were a shady copyright troll that seeded porn movies, and then went after people who downloaded them.

Didn’t end well for them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law

Even if there is implied consent this way, they’re probably not doing this- just finding peers sharing the torrent and receiving from them - then they have evidence of actual sharing.