At the start of July, Sony announced that they will be stopping the production of physical discs for their PlayStation consoles. Which while not surprising given the decade long decline in physical game sales. Has led to an online backlash, with critics arguing that Sony’s decision effectively ends the ability to own and trade games.
Something that was made very apparent after Sony removed movies and TV shows from various UK PlayStation Network accounts. Which included titles such as John Wick, Terminator 2 and Paddington. So we are talking about content that you probably would want to watch multiple times.
While Sony argues that the deleted content was because a licencing agreement with StudioCanal had expired. They did not offer their customers refunds for that deleted content. Those customers now have nothing to show for the money that they spent in good faith. Which has led to fears something similar could happen to digital games purchases.
So the gaming community has decided to send a message to Sony, by having a boycott in the final week of August. The aim being to encourage gamers, not to log in, play or purchase anything for one week. However at their recent shareholders meeting Sony said that they did not believe the backlash will impact sales.
Apple announces Apple Upgrade
Last month Apple announced that it was retiring its iPhone upgrade programme, and replacing it with an all new leasing option. While this is technically nothing new, other than a shift to leasing computers as well as phones. It does offer us a hint at the state of the tech consumer market, and to me indicates that Apple is looking to continue its pivot into finance.
So Apple’s new Upgrade programme, which is currently exclusive to the US. Will let you lease an iPhone, Mac, iPad or Apple Watch. With the scheme allowing you at the end of the subscription. To either return the device and upgrade to a newer model on a new financing agreement, or just keep it with a final payment.
While this is more than likely a response to the increasing RAM and storage prices caused by AI companies. When you see new phones announced by Samsung starting at prices between $1200 and $1900. Along with Apple increasing the prices of most of its product line. It sort of makes sense that Apple would look at creating alternative options in order for users to continue to be able to buy its products.
However, as Apple’s market value briefly tops $5 trillion, and because the idea of leasing computer hardware has been bandied about on tech podcasts for years. If Apple is successful with its new Apple Upgrade program, then we will most definitely see other companies follow suit. Leading to a future where no one ever owns the electronic devices that they use, or the digital media they play off them.
UK government abandons age-gating VPN
British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once famously said “that a week is a long time in Politics”. So with the introduction of a new government, plans to expand age verification to Virtual Private Network technologies have now been abandoned.
After the Online Safety Act was introduced last year, and young people discovered that they could bypass age verification by using a VPN client. It was feared that the UK government would start to legislate against VPN technology.
However it looks like Mozilla, the makers of the popular Firefox browser, along with other security minded organisations. Have been able to persuade the UK government that blocking the use of VPN’s would not be a good idea.
Partly because it would be very difficult to implement, but also because VPN’s do have legitimate uses. For example, a VPN will help to keep a device secure when used on a public network. They are also vital for businesses in order to help to establish secure links to a server, and then from a democracy perspective, VPN’s help to avoid censorship.
Content release for this month
Due to the continuing warm whether, actual video production has been incredibly difficult. So last month we decided to focus on cleaning up our website, and moving our video hosting away from Vimeo and over to a service called Livid.
For anyone not aware of Livid, this is a relatively new video hosting service offering similar features to Vimeo, but at a little over half the price. Sure we could have used YouTube as our video host. But as YouTube did once bar the Mydoodads channel, we felt we needed to use a video hosting platform that we ultimately controlled.
However the problem with Vimeo is they don’t offer good value for money, particularly for a small blog like mine. So when Vimeo added age verification, that was the final straw and I decided to switch to Livid.
For anyone interested, actually switching all our videos from Vimeo to Livid was incredibly simple. So after copying everything in our Vimeo account to our Livid account, we used a Livid plug-in to swap the embedded videos on our website.
We then checked every page to make sure that they all look and render correctly. Removed old content that was no longer relevant, and have started to update posts that are out of date. Our next step will be to start optimising the site to make it faster by adding caching and lazy loading.
Regarding this months new content releases. As its still incredibly hot, its still very difficult to actually get work done. So we will be posting on a reduced schedule, and working in the early morning so as to avoid the heat. This means that for August, we will be posting only two videos.
The first, a video on how you factory reset a Amazon Echo Dot or an Echo Dot Max. Then for our second video, which is a request from a YouTube subscriber, we will be looking at how you reconfigure the Synology Photos app so that it works through Quick Connect.
