Technology

Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable.

Being a little bit melodramatic there. Streaming is nowhere near as expensive, confusing or hostile to consumers as cable was, unless you want access to every single service and show all at once. Anybody with a modicum of intelligence would only subscribe to one or two services at a time based on what they were watching in that period and still pay several times less than cable.

It has become more pricey but that's mainly because shows are fractured across many services now. Everybody and their fucking mother are now working to build their own streaming service after looking at Netflix's meteoric success with dollar signs in their eyes and while it's worse for the consumer, it's also led to a lot of failure. Disney have hemorrhaged their profits due in large part to how much they're diluting their brands with shitty DIsney+ spinoff series.

When Disney, HBO, Netflix, Amazon, Paramount and all the other major players start locking you into lengthy multi-year contracts, hiding every single 'cancel subscription' button, forcing ads upon everybody (not just those on the cheaper ad-supported tier) and training entire call centres of outsourced wage slaves to make it as difficult as possible for you to unsubscribe, then we can talk.

Ubers cost as much as taxis.

What many forget is that Uber (and other gig-economy apps) skirted past loads of employment and safety laws to undercut their competition by doing shady shit like classing their drivers as 'independent contractors' to avoid even paying them the minimum wage. Earning potential as an Uber driver was basically nonexistent before the law caught up.

AWS is set to start charging customers for an IPv4 address, a crucial internet protocol. Even before this decision, AWS costs had become a major issue in corporate boardrooms.

Perhaps this is because IPv4 addresses are in limited supply and we're very close to exhausting this supply, hence why IPv6 was introduced?

What about security? Last month, Google, the third-largest cloud provider, started a pilot program in which thousands of its employees were limited to using work computers that were not connected to the internet, CNBC reported.

The reason: Google is trying to reduce the risk of cyberattacks. If staff members have computers disconnected from the internet, hackers can't compromise these devices and gain access to sensitive user data and software code.

So, cloud services connected to the internet are great for everyone except Google? Not a great cloud sales pitch.

Google's strategy to restrict internet access for work devices is actually pretty clever, and honestly using this as a reason to doubt confidence in their cloud services is a stupid take.

The difference is that these machines would otherwise have elevated levels of access to Google's servers when compared to the end user. All it takes is a Google employee clicking a dodgy attachment or link.