Some electronics insurance providers will do that in the U.S. I'd say that kind of refund isn't typical otherwise.
But if the RAM was sold with Umart's promise to replace it (or the local laws' requirement that they replace it) if it prooved faulty within such and such a time period, then they owe the buyer a replacement.
If they don't want to provide an actual replacement, anything less than giving the buyer a full present-day replacement's worth of money, or a genuinely equivalent or better product, is breaking their own guarantee and/or the local law (I don't know Australian law).
They can't just say "actually it's more expensive now and we don't want to honor our replacement guarantee anymore, so we'll only give you a quarter of a replacement's worth of money instead". That's absurd.
They just want to shove their own bad luck/the consequences of the RAM shortage off on their customers in any way they can, whenever they think they can get away with it.
Are you suggesting all messaged photos should be scanned, and potentially viewed by humans, in case it depicts a nude minor? Because no matter how you do that, that would result in false positives, and either unfair auto-bans and erroneous reports to law enforcement (so no human views the images), or human employees viewing other adults' consensual nudes that were meant to be private. Or it would result in adult employees viewing nudes sent from one minor to another minor, which would also be a major breach of those minors' privacy.
There is a program whereby police can generate hashes based on CSAM images, and then those hashes can be automatically compared against the hashes of uploaded photos on websites, so as to identify known CSAM images without any investigator having to actually view the CSAM and further infringe on the victim's privacy. But that only works vs. already known images, and can be done automatically whenever an image is uploaded, prior to encryption. The encryption doesn't prevent it.
Point being, disallowing encryption sacrifices a lot, while potentially not even being that useful for catching child abusers in practice.
I'm sure some offenders could be caught this way, but it would also cause so many problems itself.
Sure, but then everyone moved to Facebook. The monopolist changed, but not the monopolistic market and the lack of consumer choice.
And nobody gained privacy in the process (I rather think everyone lost even more of it).
The situation currently permits only a tiny number of winning companies at a time, and the userbase is locked in even as the site becomes wildly unpopular, until some threshold of discontent is reached, and then everyone moves, and then that new site also enshittifies and the cycle repeats.
Federation is a mechanism whereby people would be able to actually choose providers as individuals and at any time, instead of having to wait years for a critical mass of upset people to build up and leave [current most popular social media site], and instead of being forced to go to [new most popular social media site].
Most people couldn't tell you how their car works, at least not enough to fix it. Is that handholding, too?
People can't be knowledgable about everything. There's just too much information in the world, and too many different skills that could be learned, and not enough time.
A carpenter can rely on power tools without understanding fully how the tools work, and it's fine, as long as the tools are made to safe standards and the user understands basic safety instructions (e.g. wear protective eyewear).
To me, making sure that apps don't screw with people, even if they don't understand how the apps work, is roughly the equivalent of making sure power drills are made safely so they don't explode in peoples' hands.
“As long as the user understands basic safety instructions”
Yes, the internet has basic safety instructions, too (and probably just as many bother to read them), number one or two is “almost nothing online is ever really private”. I learned it by the mid 2000s, not knowing it in 2026 is not excusable with “people don’t need to know how everything works”.
And I never said that people should be knowledgeable about everything...
... and this is not what I was referring to either.
Less handholding -> more learning... but even then, what I meant is that you do not have to be knowledgeable to know that your "private messages" are not really encrypted and can be read by the admin (in case of forums, for one), and so forth.
It definitely ignores that many people don't have time. If someone is working over 40 hours per week, plus maybe doing unpaid labor taking care of kids or elders, where are people supposed to find the time and energy to brush up on a million different topics they don't even know they might not know enough about? Especially if they might also have medical issues, or hobbies, or want to have any time at all to relax.
Obviously, one way to improve the situation would be to make sure people are paid fairly and not overworked and have access to good and affordable or free childcare and elder-care and medical care, but corporations don't want that either. If anything, they're incentivised to disempower workers and keep them uninformed, and to get as much time out of them as they can for as little money as possible.
Whether Facebook/Meta can read the plain text of the messages or not depends on whether that encryption is "zero knowledge" or not, aka: does Facebook generate and retain the private encryption key, or does it stay on the users' devices only, never visible to Facebook or stored on Facebook servers?
In the former case, Facebook can decrypt the messages at will, and the e2ee only protects against hackers, not Facebook itself, nor against law enforcement, since if Facebook has the decryption key they can be legally compelled to hand it over (and probably would voluntarily, going by their history).
I'm hardly a fan of Epic, but considering inflation and rising supply chain costs, a price that remains flat may be a price that would have otherwise risen.
They might also direct the money towards funding more exclusives. Epic's funding has enabled some games to be made that wouldn't have been otherwise, or that wouldn't have been as full featured without that up-front cash.
They sell gambling to children via lootboxes; I'm not saying they're the good guy corp. But removing Apple and Google's monopoly over phone apps and app stores would only be a good thing, in my opinion.
Sure but it's not just Epic. I've seen other services, ranging from Netflix to Spotify increase subscription prices.
I don't disagree with your point about inflation, but we also can't really run the counterfactual, and I'm personally not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt here. As an aside we generally have some level of inflation and so while this argument may have been more convincing during a period of rapid inflation, it becomes less convincing over time.
I think the reality is these services have massive margins and so there was never any intent on the part of Epic at least, to lower prices. It was always to just capture more value for their company. I don't blame them for doing that, I just find the "we're the good guys" approach to be suspicious at best.
Apple's monopoly (because I have an iPhone) has been of incredible value to me so I prefer that the monopoly continue to exist. As we remove that monopoly I see more consumer harm done than good.
> considering inflation and rising supply chain costs
I just can't for the life of me figure out where this money goes. People bought the same type of things 10 years ago, and the cost now isn't proportional to the cost 10 years ago.
You can buy a domain name for like $10 per year; I recommend getting it from porkbun.com.
Cloudflare.com is good too, EXCEPT if you buy your domain from them, you'll be required to use their nameservers until and unless you transfer your domain elsewhere (which you won't be able to do for a while). Though to be fair, their free DNS is good and lots of people use it anyway. It makes email setup slightly more complicated, but it's still doable.
Spaceship.com also has a pretty good reputation, but I think their customer service isn't as good, they're quite new, and they're owned by Namecheap (a bigger domain registrar with a much worse reputation).
Whatever you do, DO NOT buy from GoDaddy. Do not even search for the domain you're considering on GoDaddy. Literally any option is better than GoDaddy.
By far the most reliable TLD options are .com, .net, and .org. These will look relatively trustworthy for email, and the price stays very very stable from year to year. If you don't want to think about it, just get one of these. You can even still find single dictionary word domains for .org or .net relatively easily.
Do not buy any domain marked "premium". This means the owner of the TLD can change the price at renewal as dramatically as they want, for any reason (e.g. if you have a website hosted at that domain that becomes popular). Your $20 per year domain might suddenly become a $300 or $3000 per year domain for no reason but greed, and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
Non-premium nTLD's (.club, .horse, .rocks, .theater, etc) can increase quite dramatically in price, BUT the price is required to be set the same for all domains using that nTLD, so they can't target any individual person for having a successful website or whatever. Also, you can pre-buy up to 10 years, which locks in your price for those 10 years. I'd still not recommend them for a primary email, but it's better than buying a "premium" domain. Just be aware that the yearly price might unexpectedly increase in the future.
Some country code TLD's are also good, but for email, probably stay away from the ones that spammers like to use.
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Anyway, what I actually originally meant to comment about is: if you set up forwarding from gmail and don't check that account regularly anymore, I recommend setting up a gmail filter rule that forwards all your gmail spam to you (their regular forwarding setting leaves it out and just sends it to the gmail spam folder). It's a little annoying to have to re-flag some of the spam as spam in your new email, but gmail has a habit of marking non-spam as spam for me, and if you're not regularly checking that spam folder you can easily miss important email.
Porkbun have started demanding ID verification for registrations, which depending how you feel about current events might make you reconsider having them on your list
When I started using them, they did this by checking against Paypal, with whom (admittedly to my regret) I had already verified myself. I wasn't asked to provide a copy of my ID to them directly, at least, or to provide it anew to one of those random ID verification companies that are popping up out of the woodwork.
It also just bothers me less in this case than in most because, no matter who you buy from, if you ever need to verify ownership of your account/domains, you may eventually be asked to show ID/verify your identity anyway, and if you can't prove you're the person who bought the domain then you risk losing it (say, by not being able to regain control of it after it is stolen). And if it's a domain you've tied your email or business to, and you've pre-payed 10 years, that would suck majorly.
So I feel about it more or less how I feel about my bank needing ID, personally. But I definitely get why others may not agree/may have a different use case to begin with.
I think also there is a big problem with scammers using stolen credit cards to buy domains, which they use to send phishing email or operate malicious websites. Preventing this at least makes way more sense as a motive than "protect the children by identifying all of them".
If you buy from elsewhere, you can find a way to avoid the ID verification, but most places will only take digital payment, so they still probably end up with your card number and name.
I'm not a fan at all of age verification laws and websites requiring ID, but this one I tolerate, personally. But I won't blame anyone for not doing the same.
> Your $20 per year domain might suddenly become a $300 or $3000 per year domain for no reason but greed, and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
Google also takes the lion's share of the ad revenue. They're the reason youtube creators resort to sponsorships instead of relying on youtube's inbuilt ads. They even put ads on the videos of new youtube accounts and profit off them while telling said new accounts that they can't get any of that revenue for their own work until they hit Google's arbitrary threshold of subscribers/views. And they've been abusing the hell out of their chokehold monopoly on ads, via adsense, at every level of the system.
Point being, the fact that google ads currently don't yield much revenue per click/view for most people isn't necessarily just because they are ads.
Even so, corporations will never voluntarily conclude that they're making enough ad money. Line must go up, forever, because reasons.
But if the RAM was sold with Umart's promise to replace it (or the local laws' requirement that they replace it) if it prooved faulty within such and such a time period, then they owe the buyer a replacement.
If they don't want to provide an actual replacement, anything less than giving the buyer a full present-day replacement's worth of money, or a genuinely equivalent or better product, is breaking their own guarantee and/or the local law (I don't know Australian law).
They can't just say "actually it's more expensive now and we don't want to honor our replacement guarantee anymore, so we'll only give you a quarter of a replacement's worth of money instead". That's absurd.
They just want to shove their own bad luck/the consequences of the RAM shortage off on their customers in any way they can, whenever they think they can get away with it.