Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. I've been watching this one develop for a while now, and this week it stopped being speculation and became a permission dialog on your phone. 9to5Mac spotted a new popup showing up in both iOS 26 and the iOS 27 beta — it appears when you use shape generation in iWork,...

3,200 jobs. Five studios out the door. And a CEO who opened her memo by admitting the business is, in her own words, "not healthy." That's not spin from a leaked internal doc some outlet had to fight for — Sharma posted the whole thing publicly, on Xbox's own newsroom and on X, on a Monday morning, to a team that was...

We are gathered here today — no, wait, that's too morbid. Let me try again. Sony just scheduled a eulogy eighteen months out, filed it as a corporate blog post, and had a Senior Director sign it. January 2028: that's the date physical disc production ends for new PlayStation games. Most deaths don't come with a press...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. A class action lawsuit was filed in California on June 25th against Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, the three companies that dominate global DRAM production. Counterpoint Research puts their Q1 2026 revenue share at Samsung 38%, SK Hynix 29%, and Micron 22% — roughly...

Part of the Big Tech's War on Users series and the Insert Coin gaming arc. Tim Sweeney gave an interview to PC Gamer last week pitching a grand unified theory of gaming he's calling "Team Open." Sounds great. Also sounds familiar. The pitch is that platforms should connect their social graphs, economies should...

Where We Left Off Part 16 was DNS redundancy, a floating IP, and the XRDP detour from hell. Heavy stuff. Two servers that can lose either half and keep answering. The infrastructure is, for once, genuinely resilient. So naturally I spent an evening making my dashboard cosplay as the bridge of the Enterprise. This one's...

I've spent a fair amount of time on this blog documenting what Bitwarden has been quietly doing to erode the trust that made them the default recommendation after LastPass started falling apart. That's a story about opacity and greed — price hikes buried in feature posts, a new M&A-specialist CEO they didn't announce,...

Let me explain — and to start with, no, I'm not thrilled it's starting at $1,049. But I'm also not surprised, and the discourse around it is missing the actual story so badly it's almost impressive. When Valve announced the Steam Machine back in November 2025, the internal target was reportedly around $749. That was the...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Eric Brandwine, VP and distinguished engineer at Amazon Security, told The Register something this week — picked up by The Next Web — that should be obvious and somehow still isn't, in most boardrooms: humans are bad at watching things. Not bad at judgment. Bad at the...

Part of the Big Tech's War on Users series. Apple announced this week that Brazilian developers can finally distribute apps through alternative marketplaces and offer payment options outside Apple's own system. Cue the fireworks. Cue the press release. Cue Epic Games and the Coalition for App Fairness — whose membership...

While Paramount and Netflix were busy trying to buy each other's content libraries, Fox just bought something different: the box sitting under your TV. Fox Corporation announced it's acquiring Roku for $22 billion Monday morning — $160 per share, $96 in cash and 0.9693 shares of Fox Class A stock for each Roku share....

Part of the Big Tech's War on Users series and the Insert Coin gaming arc — because this one started as a game and ended as a surveillance pipeline, so it earned both. Remember Pokémon GO? Summer of 2016. People were walking into traffic, trespassing in cemeteries, and wandering into strangers' backyards — all to catch...

Sam Altman went to Michigan last week, stood next to Governor Whitmer in a tent on a former cornfield, and said the quiet part out loud — except this time it wasn't an accident. He was proud of it. OpenAI, Oracle, and Related Digital held a groundbreaking for the $16 billion "Saline Barn" — a 1.65 million-square-foot...

Back in February, I wrote about the ad blocker war and Manifest V3 — specifically how Google's MV3 framework wasn't really about security, it was about surgical removal of the capabilities that made ad blocking effective. I said that Chromium-based browsers were the most exposed, and I said Firefox and its hardened...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. We all know the basic deal by now. Meta wants your data to sell ads. Google wants your data to sell ads. A dozen other companies you've never heard of want your data to sell to the people selling ads. And we know Apple tried to draw a line with App Tracking...