Pema

I concur with the two above posters re: NordVPN. The product often comes out in the top five of recommended VPNs. That said it just did not work for me. It was easy to set up and connect but with the exception that every site that I was blocked out of due to geographical boundaries I stayed blocked out of. I would connect to a site, sign in and within seconds I would be advised of a error along the lines of 'We can see that you are using a VPN, please disconnect and try again'. 
And this went on for nearly every site excepting the ones that I could log into and access with/without a VPN. 
There is one program that I eagerly wanted in 4 parts for my PhD research. No way I was able to login. And this was via a major streamer!
Eventually I located the program on a local site and happened to feature the 4-part series. 

When I attempted to explain all this to nordsec b.v. they were completely disinterested. All they could come back with is 'your money back guarantee expired last week. sorry'. 

You would think that a company of this size and spread would be very keen to work with me to fix the issue. Nope. They kept coming back with some lame excuse as in, 'try this server, try that server, try this server, try that server'. I don't have all bleeding day to sit around and f**t arse around trying over 1200 servers as far as the Kingdom of Mongolia to finally land on one that may/may not work 

I would have thought that their tech support would have come back and asked me for the URLs and they would at least attempt to debug the issue. 

In the end, after a great deal of lengthy arguing they relented and gave me a full refund. Not a good company if you should happen to run into problems. 

There mantra: give us your money and don't bother us. 

If I had to give them a review, it would be 2 stars. Easy to install and setup but of no value if you should happen to run into problems. They are plainly not interested. 

9secondkox2 said:

By now, AI is a known quantity. Reverse engineering and IP theft are not new either. This is just the tip of the proverbial "iceberg" as relates to an incoming swarm of products / services like this. yawn. China is not new to knockoffs, software included. AI is no different. Easy to develop something rapidly when you're copying the work of pioneers who put much of their lives into the work. Should software controlled by a hostile nation be on American's devices? It's an interesting question. But outside of government officials, members of the military, or those with security credentials, probably not too big a concern. But it's worth investigating. It's not like we didn't just have the chinese surveilance devices surveying our nation from the air last year. The less information an adversarial nation has on another nations citizens, the better. It may not be a WMD or whatever, but it's definitely not something to be dismissed.

I am not so sure about this. 

Recall how back in the late 60s and early 70s we used to mock the Japanese, especially their cars. And then gradually they upended the industry and forced us to up our game, in cars, electronics and cameras.

I would not suggest that the Chinese are ripping anyone off, it is just that they are doing it the smart way and we are doing it the hard and unwieldily way. 

Much as Mr Trump wants to make America great again and resurrect the American Empire, going forward it is going to be the Chinese Empire. 

You only need to read books like 'The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbons)' or Barbarians at the Gate and realise what's happening with the US. We have become fat and lazy; too much booze and too many drugs; let our guard down at our borders which is exactly what happened with the almighty Romans. 

The Chinese have captured the EV market; they have sown up the manufacturing of just about everything and now they are showing us how AI is done. Marc Andreessen of Mosaic fame calls this the 'Sputnik' moment. When the Russians orbited the earth before we even knew how to build rockets. 

It forced us (remember JFK's famous speech) to wake up, commit billions of dollars, create NASA and land on the moon in 1969. 

Perhaps Trump and this event will force us to wake up and take the reins and rise up out of the ashes or we will continue to sink into oblivion: a nation of lazy drug users who can't get their game together. Our problem is not that we have too many undocumented migrants. Even if we round up and evict every single one of them it won't restore our boldness, vision and greatness. 

That's what is happening here. Blaming the Chinese for stealing our IP is just nonsense and short viewed. 

Once again the Chinese have upended the market. This time with AI. The whole Western model has been debunked.
Kind of reminds me of the 1990s when Oracle and other big name tech titans committed to spend trillions to create the information superhighway with the mantra the first and best would control it. When a little canary in the coal mine tweeted 'hey we have just such a model an it costs nada' it is called the internet and it was invented in the 70s as ARPANET bringing the whole proposed model crashing down. And the rest is history as they say. 
The reason that the Western model is unwieldily is the gargantuan amounts of data and the nuclear processing power required to deliver even a smidgen of info that it becomes like the Russian wristwatch: a clunky face with a car battery required to run it. Not to mention the fact that the smidgen of data is woefully inadequate and wrong most of time. 

China is the future: manufacturing, EV and now AIs. 

That's brilliant. Now we need to round up roster of users from Antartica and Upper Mongolia who actually use the Apple equivalent of Office. In my entire time in IT and as a Uni Phd student I have yet to see anyone using other than Word, Excel, Powerpoint. 

Without getting into Kuo's assessment or numbers, I wholeheartedly agree as I have been saying from day 2 after the purchase/return of the iPhone 16 Pro. It is not a hit. I am holding out for the iPhone 17 Pro SLIM. 

I hope and pray that Apple does NOT make Samsung's catastrophic mistake or even Google's by releasing a fold. They are a total failure. Google has tried to flog theirs since last December and they have failed to pick up any traction. Samsung I can see from my weekly visits to my favourite retailers they are gathering dust alongside transparent toasters for $700. Nobody wants a toaster for $700 and nobody needs a bulky, foldable phone at $2500. 

That aside this line from the article makes no sense:
 
The rest of that overall 10 million drop is from 4Q24 dropping from 84 million to 80, 1Q25 down from 48 million to 45 million. And for 2Q24 dropping from 41 million to 39 million.

1. This for 4th Quarter for 2024 - the quarter that the 16 was released in = The rest of that overall 10 million drop is from 4Q24 dropping from 84 million to 80,
2. This is for 1st Quarter 2025 - 1Q25 down from 48 million to 45 million.
3. And for 2Q24 dropping from 41 million to 39 million. Huh? 2nd Quarter 2024. Are we doing a flashback to 2024 Second Quarter?