Article note: It's the union of a bunch of bad shit.
Hosting wikis is ...not actually very difficult or expensive.. but somehow the fandom folks attracted $40M of investment and the investors want returns, leading to a shitstorm of ads and tracking.
Leaving is hard not just because Fandom will use hired admins to prevent mass deletion, but because search engines - especially google - treat site-size as a positive indicator, so even an abandoned fandom wiki will be hard to out-rank.
I miss the old Internet _so much_.
Article note: Ms. Pac-Man is probably my favorite classic arcade game, and I knew about the weirdness about it being a GCC game adopted by Midway rather than a Namco product, but this is ..extensive and weird.
Article note: This is a scam I'd like to see addressed more aggressively.
Adobe are pretty high on the list of offenders, so it makes a good case.
The US government is suing Adobe for allegedly hiding expensive fees and making it difficult to cancel a subscription. In the complaint filed on Monday, the Department of Justice claims Adobe “has harmed consumers by enrolling them in its default, most lucrative subscription plan without clearly disclosing important plan terms.”
The lawsuit alleges Adobe “hides” the terms of its annual, paid monthly plan in the “fine print and behind optional textboxes and hyperlinks.” In doing so, the company fails to properly disclose the early termination fee incurred upon cancellation “that can amount to hundreds of dollars,” the complaint says.
When customers do attempt to cancel, the DOJ alleges that Adobe requires them to go through an “onerous...