Say 5% of the free tier users converts to a paying customer within 5 years. And user growth is constant. Then over time, you will get a much larger free tier user base, compared to your paying customers (in absolute numbers).
At some point, it must become tempting to charge all free tier users a little bit to continue, because the group got so big, so there is a lot that can be earned there.
And they have become quite infamous for having aggressive sales tactics for anyone going over their internal metrics for the free tier (still under the public metrics for free).
Like I’ve said a few times on HN, if you have 10 friends and ask them what they want to eat for dinner and 6 say “let’s go to a Mexican restaurants” and the other four say “let’s kill Bob and eat him”, it still tells you a lot about your friend group. It tells you even more of the person advocating eating Bob is made the leader of your group and decides where you are going to eat dinner for the next four years.
Especially after you have already seen what your friend has already done for four years
Because it doesn’t matter if you or even 60% of the population doesn’t approve of what Trump is doing - including posting a racist meme showing the Obamas as apes yesterday - this tells you about the country we live in
However, they do contribute to security: Chrome was first to implement Site Isolation, sandboxing too. These are essential security features for modern browsers. They are also not doing too bad with patching and security testing.
There are some errors in what you write, and despite that, it is not clear to me what the supposed ‘realization’ would be.
1. The famous 2016 San Bernardino case predates Advanced Data Protection technology of iCloud backups. It was never about encryption keys, it was about signing a ‘bad’ iOS update.
2. Details are limited, but it involved a third-party exploit to gain access to the device, not to break the encryption (directly). These are different things and should both be addressed for security, but separately.
Evidently, after this case ended, Apple continued its efforts. It rolled out protecting backups from Apple, and the requirement of successful user authentication before installing iOS updates (which is also protecting against Apple or stolen signing keys).
Honey, wake up, we’re living in the finance capitalism era. Also in this part of history, the majority of the goods you consume are NOT produced by your overlords. The goods are produced by labour. Not by speculation or by private ownership of the means of production.
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