Look up microg, with that you can use apps like that without play services

https://microg.org/

In the Register article they didn't copied from the source that the scientists were from Egypt.

Flow3D has different academic and research licenses: https://www.flow3d.com/academic-program/

• There is a free research license available, but it's only for 4 months. It's short, researches can take much longer than that.
• There is a free teaching license, but it can have limitations for using the software outside education. It may be forbidden to use outside classes, so it's possible that they had a teaching license, but they couldn't use that for research?
• There are licenses for full departments, but it's available for selected countries only.

It's strange that they went after these scientists. In 2nd and 3rd word countries software privacy for work is still common. Everything is cheaper, but software prices are the same as in the US, so they pay relatively more for the same tool. I found that a normal license for Flow 3D can cost USD 100k. According to a quick search civil engineers get USD 2000 yearly in Egypt.

Usually American software companies don't really care about piracy by individuals in these countries. The rationale is that it's better for them if they use their software without payment instead of using a software from another vendor without payment. They go after bigger companies, at least that's my experience.

That's why this story is strange to me, or at least something else should be behind it.

They love to do this. 2 years ago they renamed Office (the online, browser based version) to Microsoft 365 https://www.computerworld.com/article/1614302/office-to-be-rebranded-microsoft-365.html

They can present the "new" apps to shareholders

Simply noone ever looked and it's not documented. And the api is locked to work only on google domains so it wasn't usable to anyone to accidentally notice what's going on.

The code doesn't do anything on non-Google domains.

Luca says this - I'm inclined to agree:

This is interesting because it is a clear violation of the idea that browser vendors should not give preference to their websites over anyone elses.

Follow up question: How many other parts of the chromium codebase limited to work on (maybe other) specific domains?

He says "powered by or funded by Google". Firefox depends on Google financially, most of the income of Mozilla comes from Google paying for being the default search engine.

They try to diversify their income (Firefox VPN, email alias service, etc.), but anything they try gets a huge backlash from the community, and still small compared to the the money from google.

RSS is not even enabled on the Newz page on the website.

For those who don't remember the original of this was an ancient meme:

Edit:

Just how old this meme is: OSX 10.9 mavericks was the first free mac update, it was released in 2013. The meme should be created before that. Iirc Windows 7 was the first win with forced and annoying updates, it was released in 2009. So this meme should be from that era, 11-15 years old.

Edit2:

I found the original post, my calculations were correct, this is from 2011: https://www.stickycomics.com/computer-update/

No, they are called metallophones, glockenspiel is just one of them. Other common metallophones are the tubular bells and the vibraphone

Very useful video. I miss that you don't list the Chromium browsers. A lot of people, the target audience of this video don't know that edge, opera, vivaldi, brave are all affected some way.

Here: https://kernel.org/