This is the entire idea behind the concept of "assassination markets" - "prediction" markets on assassinations that are just thinly veiled ways to crowdsource murders by taking bets that you expect to lose against an "insider" (the killer).
It doesn’t need to be as high stakes as assassination. Any public figure could have a free-money loophole with all the stupid bets on things like whether a certain word would appear in a speech.
If I were famous I could start a pool betting on whether I would post a picture of a my lunch this week. I could stake whichever side has the biggest payout and then just make it happen
And we already have laws against this stuff when it is traditional gambling. For example, a couple MLB players[1] are currently facing 65 years in prison because they would occasionally waste a pitch at the directions of gamblers netting them a few thousand dollars each time they did it. For those not familiar with baseball, a starting pitcher generally throws between 80-100 pitches a game and a reliever throws roughly 10-30. This is basically as low stakes as a sports bet can get, so it makes it all the more attractive to attempt because it feels less like a compromising of morals with the less the participant actually needs to sacrifice.
These prediction markets are now giving even more people the opportunity to make a small ethical compromise in exchange for non-trivial amounts of money without any of the potential legal repercussions of traditional markets or gambling. That type of ubiquitous corrupting influence can't be good for the health of society.
I think a lot of people are simply sick of seeing "HEY NEW AI FEATURE LOOK AT ME" popups everywhere. Shove something into people's faces often enough and it becomes like a red rag to a bull. That's probably not the only thing, but it's one big motivation why some people want it.
Aren't the companies also expected to do revocation checking, essentially creating a record of who identified where, with a fig leaf of "pseudonymity" (that is one database join away from being worthless)?
The revocation checking is implemented in a way where the government doesn't know who you checked and you can even cache the information (if that's good enough for you) so they won't notice at all.
It's cheap to do, some people like it and it can be sold to them as a premium feature, and it enables future enshittification with subscriptions and other revenue opportunities.
Ignore the security issues for a bit, because most buyers don't know/think about those. If it wasn't for the enshittification, having your dishwasher online would be useful. Not groundbreaking, but being able to look up how long it still has without having to walk to the kitchen, get a notification when it's done, be able to look up error codes or check the status of consumables would be kind of nice if it weren't for the downsides that come with it. But those downsides are not something people think about.
Fair point, I was going off the "quoted suspension email" in the OP. If it's only the AI service and not the full account, that is definitely not as bad. Either way the zero-warning policy though is a big issue IMP.
Maybe its the tism but I also read that sentence as neutral. You expected very little and you got very little. Why would that be positive or negative? Maybe it should be positive because you got what you were expecting? But I would call getting what you expect something neutral, if you expected little and got a lot then that would be positive. If you expected a lot and got little then its negative. But if you expected little and got little the most clear outcome is that its a neutral statement. Am I missing something?
It's still ok to destroy products if (among many other reasons) "the product can reasonably be considered unacceptable for consumer use due to damage, including physical damage, deterioration or contamination, including hygiene issues, whether it is caused by consumers or occurs during the handling of the product [...] and repair and refurbishment are not technically feasible or cost-effective;" but cost-effective means "the cost of repairing or refurbishing a product not outweighing the total cost of destruction of that product and of [all] expenses of replacing that same product."
So essentially, they have to offer all the clothing for donation first, if nobody wants it, it can still be destroyed (that's one of the other exceptions).
Unfortunately another exception is if "it is technically unfeasible ... to remove ... labels, logos or recognisable product design or other characteristics that are ... protected by intellectual property rights". So a luxury brand can probably still go "well our design is protected and we don't want the poors wearing our fancy clothes".
I don't buy it. The actor running the website likely gets paid for every user that installs the app or possibly even every user they direct at the app.
Even in the unlikely case that they get paid for achieving some later payoff, the "work" on the way there is almost certainly 100% automated so there is no harm in spraying the attack more widely (as opposed to Nigeria scams where pre-AI, pre-slave-farm, the scammers would have to invest significant amounts of a very limited resource - their time - on each victim).
> instruction manuals ... often have useful information ... A surprising number of my peers don’t realize this.
That's because instruction manuals always have a lot of useless information, and many of them have only such useless information. One of my computer mice came with guidance to avoid prolonged contact with skin and I'm pretty sure nothing in that manual was of any value.
Manuals used to have tens of pages of useful information, if not more. These days it's just tens, if not a hundred pages of (mostly meaningless) warnings, in different languages, and sometimes only that. If you're lucky there's a single page of mostly pictures and a few lines of text, and typically just the obvious parts.
I went through some old storage boxes yesterday. Found "manuals" for a number of items. One had four manuals. Turned out it was just that they could only stuff half a dozen languages of warnings in one manual, so they made a bunch of them, all just the same warnings, in different languages. More paper for the recycling centre.
I particularly miss the spec page that used to be standard in every manual and is now increasingly rare.
Of course, the really old/good manuals also had schematics, and there were a few cases where those were really help when we actually had to repair stuff like that. For some simpler things that would make sense even today but it ain't happening...
Instruction manuals often only contain legally required information, making them particularly useless.
You've happened upon the difference between compliant and capable. See also, any military technology, which costs 10 times the normal price to meet strict compliance requirements, often while completely disregarding capability.
My favorite response to the issue is the AcessiByeBye plug-in (https://www.accessibyebye.org/) which blocks accessibility compliance overlays that make web pages difficult to use with keyboard navigation and accessibility tools like screen readers, but are needed to meet accessibility regulations.
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