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If you haven't already, you can ask Google for a refund on that (the second, recent) in-app purchase:

https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/15574897?hl=en

The policies are "up to 48 hrs after purchase" but I'm sure "purchase does not work at all" is an exception. (It is on iOS)


I've never succeeded on getting a refund with Google. There were a few apps that tricked me into buying a subscription (namely Musescore and Yazio), I immediately asked Google for a refund because I didn't actually get what I thought I was getting, and they denied me both times.

Now I just don't buy anything on the Play store that I can't afford to just be outright scammed on.


Two that I lost on play store:

1. World of Goo. Bought by Netflix, sunsetted, can't install old versions anymore

2. Monopoly. Bought by EA. Sunsetted/renamed to zzzMonopoly. Can't install old versions anymore.

FDroid has my attention since these happened.


This is how I find out that I can't install World of Goo anymore. Man.

The Musescore app is just a minefield of subscription farming, it was somehow miserable even with an existing subscription the number of times it tried to get me to also get their weird AI learning platform. Now I've left it entirely.

Strange and not normal. I've never not gotten a refund within the allotted terms.

Was you able to eventually unsunbcribe from Musescore?

Yes, I could unsubscribe from both easily, but I wanted a refund because I couldn't use the subscriptions.

> I'm sure "purchase does not work at all" is an exception

Nope, a Play store "support specialist" just told me: "I tried to create a refund request but its not allowing to create one since the date of the transaction is out of our refund policy as we can only process refunds for up to 120 days only after the transaction was charged."


Your credit card company will reverse it for you. A non-working product with unanswered emails will allow you to easily get your money back while also giving the middle finger to Google.

I believe that will result in Google locking you out of your Google account, including Gmail, YouTube, any Google Cloud projects, etc.

This is exactly what will happen, you have no recourse. Technofeudalism is real.

I've done it in the past (~2015). Honestly if Google locked me out of all of those other purchases it'd be great grounds to sue them. If everyone started doing this it would prevent them from doing this in the first place and may be additional fodder for (hopefully) continued anti-trust losses in court. If your life is tied to Google in that way then it's a risk no matter what you do and you should probably think about how to reduce that risk. I don't have anything other than purchases tied to my Google accounts anymore.

It's likely down in the ToS somewhere that they are free to close your account if you do a chargeback, otherwise they wouldn't be so eager to do it.

Peanuts to an elephant.

I hadn't gotten around to it yet, but just requested it and it got instantly approved. At least that.

It could also just pretend to encrypt your drive with a null key and not do anything, either.

You need some implicit trust in a system to use it. And at worst, you can probably reverse engineer the (unencrypted) BitLocker metadata that preboot authentication reads.


No, that would be trivial to verify with any other operating system.

Key ring contents (and what is done with them) are typically much harder to verify as they’re encrypted.


BitLocker recovery keys are essentially the key to an at-rest, local copy of the real key. (I.e., they need access to the encrypted drive to get the real encryption key)

When you use a recovery key at preboot, it decrypts that on-disk backup copy of the encryption key with your numerical recovery key, and uses the decrypted form as the actual disk encryption key. Thus, you can delete & regenerate a recovery key, or even create several different recovery keys.


No, you can just revoke and regenerate the recovery key with `manage-bde`.

Not anymore, modern hardware running Windows 11 Home now also has FDE, technically running on BitLocker, just that it's called "Device Encryption" and doesn't have the same options:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/device-encryptio...

> For reference, I did accidentally login into my Microsoft account once on my local account (registered in the online accounts panel)

Those don't usually count as the "primary" MS account and don't convert a local account. For example, you can have a multiple of those, and generally they're useful to save repeated signins or installing stuff from the Microsoft Store that require a personal account.


Yes, Windows 11 Home has FDE and I used it, but no password unlock. Attempting to switch to password unlocking will result in an error saying that password unlocking is not available in the current Windows edition. TPM based unlocking did work on Home for example. (but required entering the recovery key after every reboot to Fedora for some reason).

> so they can never target just one individual

You assume the binary can't just have a machine check in itself that activates only on the target's computer.


Yes, they can do that. But they can't select who gets the binary, so everybody gets it. Debian does reproducible builds on trusted machines so they would have to infect the source.

You can safely assume the source will be viewed by a lot of people over time, so the change will be discovered. The source is managed mostly by git, so there would be history about who introduced the change.

The reality is open source is so far ahead on proprietary code on transparency, there is almost no contest at this point. If a government wants to compromise proprietary code it's easy, cheap, and undetectable. Try the same with open source it's still cheap, but the social engineering ain't easy, and it will be detected - it's just a question of how long it takes.


That's for Entra/AD, aka a workplace domain. Personal accounts are completely separate from this. (Microsoft don't have a AD relationship with your account; if anything, personal MS accounts reside in their own empty Entra forest)

That's actually a misunderstanding that blew up to an outright lie:

The Start Menu is fully native. The "Recommended" section (and only it) is powered by a React Native backend, but the frame & controls are native XAML. (I.e. there's a JS runtime but no renderer)


Just Teams in a browser tab instead. Does it actively require running as a full app to do anything?

No, but you have to use a Chromium browser on Windows, otherwise your life will be miserable.

This is all paraphrasing. The closest paraphrase of the original statement to Forbes, from Forbes' article, is:

> Microsoft confirmed to Forbes that it does provide BitLocker recovery keys if it receives a valid legal order.

I suspect the FBI part was added editorially since this specific legal order came from the FBI.


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