For months now I have been using youtube-dl to preserve all the concerts and workout videos I like on YouTube because I don't expect this content to remain available and unencumbered. My original plan was to store just the IDs on GitHub so I could recreate the video libraries without backing up the video files, but already some of the concerts have been removed. I expect the exercise videos will be hidden behind a subscription at some point since they provide utility.
What if they lied about how much music was worth though? You can stream 10,000+ songs in one month for the price of one album today, in the early 2000s we were asked to believe that was $10,000+ worth of music and their suffering was relative to that...
About 400 million people pay monthly for access to music instead of listening to radio, occasionally buying albums or piracy so idk if anything really backfired...
I host mine too because I'm not interested in paying ~$100/year for the rest of my life to access music, this is like welfare for tech giants and record companies and very little even trickles down to musicians. I got a Synology NAS and these days I just run the Synology operating system in a virtual machine and it's accessible via web UI or mobile apps and backs up to the cloud, this has served me very well for years now.
I wish the technology existed so they could just correctly bill you when you get back to your car and you drive away with a receipt instead of a fine... the idea that you have done something wrong and you deserve a financial punishment for it is ludicrous.
I have maintained my fitness and saved so much money by switching to videos on YouTube. I think this stuff should at most be a category on Netflix etc it's not worth $9.99 separately. The trainers are all good, the only thing missing is being able to superimpose your Watch metrics when you want.
Every major operating system has this regardless of whether they force you to download software through one marketplace. You're not less-secure if you use two marketplaces as long as both those marketplaces are kept secure. iOS is kept secure independently of the App Store as well.
In real life on the iPhone we have had apps secretly uploading your address book, copying your clipboard and listening for tones embedded in television ads. And "The Fappening" where many people's private photos were leaked.
But what's really amazing is Google, Amazon and Microsoft have all been sued for the same thing too and it still not illegal to have games where kids can spend unlimited amounts and conduct unlimited transactions using obfuscated virtual currencies.
It is absolutely a deliberate decision by Apple to pressure people to use iPhones and to pressure people not to convert to using Android. Hopefully this will be one of the items on Congress' agenda as they disempower 'big tech'.
> “When I asked a senior Apple executive why iMessage wasn’t being expanded to other platforms, he gave two answers,” reports Mossberg. “First, he said, Apple considers its own user base of 1 billion active devices to provide a large enough data set for any possible AI learning the company is working on. And, second, having a superior messaging platform that only worked on Apple devices would help sales of those devices — the company’s classic (and successful) rationale for years.”
Nobody's saying Facebook and Amazon won't get charges too. They and Apple were all part of the same investigation. The investigators say all four companies are abusing their positions but they haven't given a lot of detail yet.
They could have a Screentime-type system just for being transparent about what you or your family spent in the last week on subscriptions, apps and in-app purchases, what free trials are ending, what apps have active subscriptions but no usage etc.
They could make virtual currencies show the real price if they were bought with real money. They could require 'free' transactions with virtual currencies to go through the same payment authentication.
They could make subscription apps require an ongoing service or value being added, aside from fixing their own bugs or trying to improve their software to attract new customers.
Apple has been sued for games defrauding children thousands of dollars, but what's really ridiculous and amazing is they are not alone. All of the tech giants have gotten in trouble for defrauding children with deceptive in-app purchases.
So far we know Facebook recognized it as fraud and referred to it as fraud internally so it's a bit hard to believe it is innocently occurring again and again wherever platforms permit games to bill unlimited amounts and players to perform unlimited transactions and developers to obfuscate transactions with layers of cash substitutes like gems and virtual currencies.
Why do you think GitHub does not have this problem? There are actual "hello world" apps on GitHub but literally nobody is adversely affected by it even when they download popular software by other developers.