$18/month would be a good deal if they still had all the content they used to have, but they’ve been removing content in favour of their own shows for a long time now. It sucks. You used to be able to find practically anything on Netflix, and if they didn’t have it available for streaming, they’d lend you a DVD (included in the subscription price).

That and the $18/month tier only goes up to 1080p. In 2025, you still need to pay more for 4k content?? It used to be 720p though, so I guess it’s not all bad.

Yeah it’s part of their overall strategy to be seen as a core part of the internet / the web. Same as Yahoo in the 90s and early 2000s.

The more people that use their free services, the more appealing they are to advertisers compared to competing ad platforms (broader reach), and the more paid subscribers they get.

Products like Visual Studio, some Jetbrains IDEs, VMware ESXi, and a lot of SaaS products, are (or used to be) free for individuals or for open source usage for a similar reason - people get familiar with them at home, and end up recommending them and buying them at work. A few individuals liking the product can result in large companies signing paid contracts for tens of thousands of users.

People don’t realise how much the storage and bandwidth costs are for a site as big as YouTube, and it keeps going up due to the huge number of videos being uploaded. People think that Google are making huge amounts of money from YouTube. In reality, they’re not breaking even and rely on other, profitable business units (like their Workspace and cloud services) to subsidize it.

There’s no way the ads fully cover the cost, and more and more people are blocking ads. Advertisers don’t pay for blocked ads, and YouTubers don’t make any ad money from your views if you use an ad blocker. (this is the main reason YouTubers say they make less money from ads than they used to - ad blockers)

Oh yeah, I had one of those a long time ago for my PayPal account, before smartphones were widespread.

I’m using a Yubikey with my password manager (self-hosted Vaultwarden) and it works well! The Yubikey is a USB device - you can get it either as a USB-C or USB-A. It should work with any desktop PC as long as USB devices are allowed. I’ve got one on my keychain, and a second one stored somewhere safe. Good to have a spare one as a backup just in case the main one dies.

FIDO2/WebAuthn hardware tokens don’t use a code. That’s why they’re phishing resistant. You have to press a hardware token (usually plugged in via USB) to authenticate, but it doesn’t do anything obvious on the screen like type a code. On mobile, these tokens usually use NFC, so you just tap the Yubikey or whatever to the back of your phone.

FIDO2 tokens (like Yubikeys and passkeys) can’t be phished.

My guess would be that a 2FA app from the government is likely using PKI (private + public keys) or something similar, rather than a basic TOTP algorithm. There’s not really a generic app for something like that. Many services are moving away from TOTP since it’s not phishing-resistant.

Scary what the government can do

Requiring 2FA is a good idea though.

FastMail has been around a long time and they’re very good. MXRoute is good too and lets you have unlimited email addresses at an unlimited number of domains (they only limit it based on storage space)

since in terms of MAU, Southeast Asia probably represents over 70% of that

US & Canada is the biggest region for revenue though. This is public info if you look at the slides from the most recent earnings call: https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-events/event-details/2024/Q3-2024-Earnings-Call/default.aspx

It’s going to take a while since all the software that uses kernel-level code has to adapt. Windows has very good backwards compatibility, but this would be a non-backwards-compatible change, so it’d require a lot of planning.

I’ve always preferred w3m or links over lynx.

Microsoft are going to significantly limit what can run in the kernel (including anti cheat) after the Crowdstrike issue. A side-effect of that should (hopefully) be better Linux compatibility.

“Ultra96” sounds like it could have been a codename for the Nintendo 64.