Don’t look up!

deleted by creator

Lesson for next time, use the text part of your post to define what you are asking or are interested in hearing.

Right, I should’ve seen it coming. But as long as the discussions are healthy, instead of mudslinging, I’m kind of okay with it.

True that.

Oh yes, I’ve heard about this. Thanks for reminding.

Adding more details for others:

Founded in 2003 by then 19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos raised more than US$700 million from venture capitalists and private investors, resulting in a $10 billion valuation at its peak in 2013 and 2014. The company claimed that it had devised blood tests that required very small amounts of blood and that could be performed rapidly and accurately, all using compact automated devices which the company had developed. These claims were later proven to be false.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos

Surprising that no one noticed the double prime symbol for inches instead of the single prime symbol for feet. The scammer was like “well, I didn’t lie, you weren’t careful enough and it’s not my problem!”.

Took a glimpse at the article and it seems they could’ve gone uncaught for longer if they were a little more careful with the dates!

You’re free to have your own opinions. But please note that your tone is not helpful and you may be just doing what exactly you’re speaking against. Let’s keep the discussions civil and healthy instead of labelling people.

Yes, I’m looking for more specific cases.

I am an atheist and I believe the world would be much better without religions. Having said that, I don’t conisder it as a scam in itslef. Instead they must have been something evolved over the time due to our ignorance, fear and helplessness. The very same factors that still keep them going.

But hell yeah, people are exploited in the name of religion. I’m from India, one of the largest so called democracies, currently under the governance of a fascist hindutva party that thrives on polarizing people in the name of religion.

BTW I was actually looking for specific instances of scams carefully plotted by known people, companies or even countries instead of broad answers like religion.

Thanks for sharing.

Thanks. Power to the people.

Sorry, I’ve been hearing about this for some time and I don’t know the story behind it. Can someone please explain the enshittification that happened with digg? How good was it before and how bad was it after?

Tildes is AGPL licensed Free Software. But yeah, the author has no plans to add federation support.

The question is why the term “Open Source” was coined when “Free Software” was already there. You can refer https://opensource.org/history for the answer.

The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label “free software.” Brainstorming for this new label eventually converged on the term “open source”, originally suggested by Christine Peterson.

In short, Open Source is more about business than user’s freedom. They didn’t want the philosophical and political baggage that comes with the term Free Software but at the same time want all practical benefits that comes with it.

Apart from this, people also confuse Free Software as “copyleft” licensed software and Open Source as software with “permissive” license which aren’t true. Almost all Open Source software are also Free Software, there are only a few exceptions.

Similar to the political differnece between the terms Free Software vs Open Source, I also see a political issue in using the term “permissive license” instead of “non-protective license”. Non-protective licenses don’t protect what “protective” (copyleft) licenses protect, user freedom.

As an ending note, I want to emphasise that I don’t encourage splitting the communities in the name of political and philosophical differences. While I believe it’s good to understand the hidden meanings and motivations behind using different terms, it’s more important to work together for the common good. Whether you prefer Open Source over Free Software or Permissive over Non-protective, if you value people and freedom over profit, we should stand together.

“Freedom-respecting software” is another less ambiguous term.

Whether many of the answers here count as a blunder or not, I’d like to say that I got way more replies than I expected and came to know about a lot of stuff I would have never heard otherwise. Thanks for sharing.

But… but we wouldn’t be having this conversation if our ancestors hadn’t done that! 🤷‍♀️

Thanks for sharing. This is exactly the kind of blunder I had in my mind when asking the question, a seemingly silly mistake like forgetting to do something causing way too much trouble!

At least something we can all cheer about :)

This also reminds me of Yahoo turning down the offer to buy Google in their early stage! https://finance.yahoo.com/news/remember-yahoo-turned-down-1-132805083.html