Indeed. Seems that Amazon is doing this more and more. Here in the US, I've just received a used (and damaged) Rode microphone, sold and shipped by Amazon 'as new'. And as you said, I returned it and decided not to order anything valuable from them, ever again.
Still, I wonder if these (arguably illegal) practices are still worth it for merchants and companies, considering that there's no enforcement and the majority of consumers don't drastically change their shopping habits when being abused.
I wonder how they are going to prevent abuse-theft, assuming the products are free or under the market's cost. There will always be someone wiping it all (to sell or whatever), and the vending machines will be always empty. Or, if there's some measure (e.g. limiting supply per person via biometrics), it may turn to be a disincentive for some people that need it.
Not sure about the SP3, but my SP4 (which, btw, had no problems running Linux) was afflicted by the so called "flickergate", and I didn't manage to replace it. Since then, I sworn off any Microsoft hardware. Their software and OS, I had sworn these off years before, which makes these devices even less appealing...
I've always seen Russell Brand -like many street preachers- as something similar to the raw verbal intelligence we see now in LLMs: capable of bringing a stream of words with interesting derivatives, easily interpretable as agreeable and intelligent, and then hallucinating a little. Yet in the depths of those regurgitated concepts that are a mix of things you've already seen, you search for glimmers of any abstract idea that you haven't thought before. Something that tickles your brain. And you find none.
Ha! Somewhat unrelated, but that reminded me of a homeless guy in Portland whose intro line was "do you know how you say dragonfly in Spanish?", to which I responded "libélula" (I knew it because Spanish is my mother tongue). Interesting, he seemed kinda pissed off, as I spoiled his soliciting routine. Maybe he's the human version of those sites!
Yet there are businesses like TaxDown and TaxFix trying to get in the middle (just look at how much they're spending on ads in Spanish TV).
I seriously hope they fail, and also that they're never able to influence the powers that be / the whole process with Hacienda (they surely would like to make it more complex, more like filing a return in the US).
Many people here seem to forget that cookies aren't the only way to track, and fingerprinting a user is easy without having to use cookies (via UserAgent, IP, canvas data, and a myriad other techniques).
Now, I wonder what does the GDPR and similar legislation say about those, but my uneducated guess is that a user accepting the site's policy regarding user data collection would approve the use of fingerprinting as well (and deleting the cookies would only work partially, privacy-wise).
Maybe you were asking if it implements custom destructors? GC?