Epic Games (lolwhat?) bought it in 2022, but sold to Songtradr in 2023. The latter seems to be some kind of music license broker.

If you are using Paypal, log in to Paypal and go to Bills. Select Spotify and scroll down - there should be a link to cancel the subscription at the bottom.

I really hope there’s nothing dodgy going on there

In 2023 they got a 1.1 million SEK fine for breaking the law that regulates working hours. To “allow” (strongly encourage) your employees to work nightshifts you need a collective agreement approved by the union, which they didn’t have.

More recently, they got a 500 million SEK fine for skirting the anti-money laundering regulations in Sweden.

But at least I’m not giving them interest on anything I buy. Always make sure I’m paying my stuff on time, and no postponed payments.

The whole “buy now, pay later” deal is a credit loan. They are most likely paying the merchant directly and using your loan as collateral to speculate on the market, until you pay them back for that loan. If that’s true, they are making profit on the interest gained from your loan.

I’m guessing their business model is to exploit people who have issues paying on time and to collect interest and late fees, as well as receive convenience fees from stores implementing Klarna as a payment option.

Correct. Like all credit banks they promote the “buy now, pay later” option before direct payment, which is becoming a pandemic on our society. Hardly any user interaction needed. They also offer their own payment plans which encourages buying even more expensive items you cannot afford.

Maybe it’s the matter of vinyl consumers being a larger group than floppy disk consumers?

I enjoy going to music concerts, and in the case of smaller scenes/bands i always buy a vinyl (and most of times a t-shirt) to support the band directly. I don’t even have a vinyl player at the moment - long story - but I have a collection of 300+ records.

If I recall correctly it is also very cheap to produce in terms of tools and machines needed, the pipeline being all analogue and mechanical?

I am also a retrocomputer nerd, but I guess the number of indie game developers that target floppy disks as the distribution medium for their next game are fewer by number compared to the musicians distributing on vinyl?

There’s probably some military shadow contractor in a clandestine factory somewhere…

Thank you for leading me down this rabbit hole of looking up Wega, which was a German manufacturer of hifi equipment bought by Sony. They apparently made tapedecks for the Sony Elcaset format, which became an even deeper rabbit hole… TIL!

Security. The more popular a piece of software gets (including operating systems), it becomes a bigger attack surface for malicious actors to use.

Fundamentally, Windows security is not really that much of a swiss cheese people usually say it is. It’s just that more people (researchers and malicious actors alike) are actively looking for vulnerabilities in it.

Hadn’t heard about deSec until now, seems to be run by some cool privacy minded folks in Germany:

https://desec.io/

I guess you already know about the options, but for others:

Find the cheapest VPS out there and have a Wireguard tunnel between it and your home network. Run ddclient or similar on the VPS in case the public IP changes.

Comments aren’t normally accessible unless you (independently) open and read the source code file as you would with any arbitrary file.

For the same price and power usage as the Pi?

If you’re looking for single people, Tinder or Grindr is probably a better place

+1 for Voyager! Writing this comment using it :-)