From Pluralistic: “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing” (08 Dec 2023):

When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit

Great read. We’re seeing the worst of SaaS; tech companies becoming so powerful that they can defraud their customers in broad daylight. The worst part is, not a single politician has any interest in regulating the companies they hold stock in.