Comment by xg15
8 days ago
Sorry, bit this is just the standard "boil the frog" playbook that tech companies always use for user-hostile features. It's usually:
1) There is this new entirely optional feature, but it's not relevant to you, so feel free to ignore it.
2) The feature is now active by default, but no worries, there is a simple button for you to opt-out.
3) The feature is active by default, but because we value our users, there is an option in the advanced settings to deactivate it.
4) Our data shows that 99.9% of users activated the feature, but if you belong to the handful of diehards who still refuse to use it (rolls eyes), you can use this obscure command line flag or about:config entry to turn it off
5) Managing opt-out infrastructure for the feature has significant maintenance and security cost that we feel, we can no longer justify. Therefore, effective in three months, the opt-out flags will stop working and the feature will become mandatory. According to our metrics, this will affect 0.0001% of our users, so no disruption is expected.
The "there is something wrong with you if you are at all off the beaten path" has cropped up a lot more for me recently; two examples both from 2026:
1. You can't use Firefox with our website (when I got this popup, I thought I had been transported back in time 20 years, but with Chrome substituted for IE).
2. You can't sign up for accounts with an e-mail from a "custom domain"
2a. I ran some tests; it's the domain itself, not the host, so e.g. foo@gmail.com is allowed but not a foo@somewhereelse.com, even if hosted by google).
2b. After a bit of back-and-forth with support: "No, we won't tell you the list of allowed domains, but gmail and hotmail both will work."
Vote with your wallet. I've only experienced two instances where systems wouldn't accept my custom email domain. One was a bank. I proceeded to close the account.
Unfortunately the most recent one was required for a kid's after school activity :/
> 2. You can't sign up for accounts with an e-mail from a "custom domain"
I remember debugging apple account creation because of that for a few hours. It wouldn't even tell me that my email domain/host was the issue, simply fail at the last step.
The same thing exists for phone numbers. About 90% of my calls with US banks go like this:
"Ok, first, to verify you, what's your phone number?" (oh no, it's one of those, because why do they need to ask...) "<my phone number>" "Ok, you'll receive a te— oh. Oh no. This is not a real phone number. What's your REAL phone number?"
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Reddit used to allow that till last week and now they started rejecting those emails. RIP temporary mail services and throwaway accounts.
Reddit didn't even require an email address up until a couple years ago. Throwaway accounts are getting more and more arduous to create.
>2
Incredible... if I ever get that I'll enjoy pointing out I've had my domain longer than gmail has existed.
They don't care about how much older, more secure, more trustworthy and so on your domain is. That's not the issue they're having. The issue is that you are 'abnormal', and it is in the common interest of tech companies to make any signs of abnormality (read: not-total compliance to their whims) to be inherently suspicious and nefarious behavior that needs to be curtailed.
Which sites were these?
Most recently band.us
I started a typical registration process: enter e-mail, click on confirmation link, but the confirmation link showed a generic error the first time and then a "link expired" afterwards. I tried again a few hours later and then contacted support when the same thing happened. The response after a few days:
> BAND currently permits sign‑ups and linking only with certain email domains. If you want to create a BAND account using an email address, please use a more public domain such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.
Strangest one still was the answer my mom got from Macy's. She is very persistent and was eventually told that Macy's does not support domains that have been registered with GoDaddy (note that the e-mail is not hosted by GoDaddy, just the domain is registered with them).
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> The feature is now active by default, but no worries, there is a simple button for you to opt-out.
How I wish this were true for (US) banks. They usually force whatever new hell on you they just came up with without asking, or in fact even telling you about it.
The most bizarre instance I've seen so far: "We have unilaterally added this phone number we believe to be in your name (surely cell carriers have better KYC than we do!) to your account as the only SMS-OTP authentication method and are choosing to disregard the one we've had on file for years since it's an evil VoIP number. Please do not contact us again without access to the former number for authentication."
This is a great comment, and yes, the entire industry seems to keep doing this over and over.
My computers and devices feel less and less like tools under my control and doing my bidding, and more and more like something controlled by faraway tech companies, to do their bidding.
Oof, this comment convinced me to go from loving passkeys to "maybe I should be careful". However, I don't think these are technological issues, I think they're policy issues. We need to vote for freedom of computing, and against corporations doing whatever the hell they want.
Your choices affect how policies affect you. When the government starts receiving copies of all card transactions, the person who habitually uses cash is unaffected, as is the person who habitually uses Monero.
The number of places one can reasonably use cash anymore is rapidly shrinking. Some places it’s truly impossible.
I do believe this is a policy failure and that a law should exist mandating cash acceptance “for all debts public and private”, but there is nearly zero chance of such a law ever passing in the US.
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> the government starts receiving copies of all card transactions
This is a particularly American view, a sort of extreme pessimism about the risk of their government collapsing into fascism; while I can see the point in the Trump era, from a practical point of view I'm much worse off with corporations seeing my card transactions. Which includes the card issuers themselves, censoring certain types of locally-legal business.
Average American is more at risk of hassle from Equifax seeing their transactions than even ICE seeing them.
Even worse with the alt payment systems. There's a long list of things it's dangerous to say in a Paypal transaction description. Venmo make transactions public by default, which is insane.
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Heh. This is exactly what happened to me at stackoverflow sites. I had been using OpenID to log in. Eventually they eliminated it.