Google made it very clear years ago that they shouldn't be trusted with anything irreplaceable/that would cause major problems if you lost access.
Once it became clear that they'd shifted from "crappy customer service" to (IMNSHO) "we fetishize the complete absence of customer service" it became dangerous to depend on them. Really, what's the worst that could happen? Maybe someone spams emojis in live chat on a game livestream at the request of the streamer on a personal account, it gets banned for abuse, Google recognizes that it's linked to other services and locks down everything? But that's so unrealistic I'm sure it could never happen.
It's not like they also have the ability to identify links between multiple accounts accessed by the same person and have automated processes that might stomp the associated accounts as well. Why, that would probably require something like allowing poorly-understood automated agents to take actions on their own!
Sounds like when I was asked to give minimum hardware requirements for something doing backend processing (receive text submitted as print jobs, massage, send to printers).
The requirements as they went out were much higher than they needed to be, because I decided telling them that we weren't stressing anything on the obsolete NT desktop repurposed as the test system might not please everyone.
Huh, my initial expectation was wrong! I figured (even until close to the end of the article) that the problem was a dramatic increase in the amount of wi-fi or other 2.4GHz traffic in the area leading to interference, some of which was blocked by rain thus allowing more stable local connections.
I still think that's actually what happened here. A tree in the middle of a 2.4 or 5ghz beam would have an effect, but its branches moving by a few inches would not have this much of an effect.
So I guess I should watch out for scams being sent to "soundcloud@" on a personal domain. Oh no, how will I distinguish them from my legitimate banking email???
Clever spammers (there are some!) see the presence of company@<domain> and assume the user will have similar emails for other accounts, so it might be worth trying ebays scams to ebay@<domain> or banking scams to chase@<domain> or boa@<domain>. Sending is cheap so why not, you're not trying to fool everyone, only a few.
I use a unique string per company but it's not guessable in advance, but it's obvious when looking at it and squinting a bit, for example (and these are not the exact ones I use): sundclod@<domain> or ebuy@<domain> or amzoon@<domain>
Sure I have to remember them but it's easy for me to check and my password manager is filling them in for me 99.99% of the time.
I can filter on those emails instead, and I also know that anything coming to soundcloud@<domain> or ebay@<domain> or amazon@<domain> is definitely spam as I've never used those addresses myself.
If sundclod@<domain> appears in a leak I can (hopefully) change my account email at Soundcloud to sondclud@<domain> and then confine sundclod@<domain> to /dev/null
I have three different generations of email addresses associated with United Airlines that all receive spam. Never any disclosed breaches AFAIK, but clearly email addresses got out at several points. At some point I stopped bothering to check.
As for Soundcloud, the password I had saved for it and a tiny bit of profile information tells me a lot - a manually created password saved into a password manager, probably in 2010 or 2011 and unused after grabbing a single track.
Addresses for services I actually care about also get what's basically peppering, and have all had updates much more recently than the days of Blackberry devices.
I can't imagine anyone spamming in such low quantities that they'll notice a pattern like company@<domain> and act on it.
I have regularly gotten spam emails without a to, cc, or bcc field though. So I can't tell which email they were sent to. (my host doesn't bounce/drop them for some reason)
I do regularly do misspellings of the company name though, since that often trips the "invalid email" check on signup. e.g. twitter.
We are the minority of users that had enough foresight to do this. I'd bet that _most_ people on this breach don't even know about the plus/dot trick with gmail (and I am sure other providers, too).
I think the Go stores mostly bit the dust after that reveal, but they were also mostly small convenience store operations. I actually saw one at the airport recently, that's a situation where I can see it making sense as an option.
The Fresh stores are basically a conventional grocery store, with electronic tags for every item and quirky pricing. They also have "smart carts" with built in weight sensing and multiple cameras so you can basically put open bags in, say "ready to go" then shop by scanning a UPC before placing each item in the cart. Unscanned item? Error. Weight mismatch? Probably an error but I've never tried. The carts are running what looks like a Linux-based UI with some stuff in docker, I grabbed a picture of a shutdown screen on one not too long ago.
The Fresh store near me that I stop in at seems to double as a warehouse for some of those delivery orders, so I wouldn't be surprised if some of them just stop having customer access and shift to entirely staffed pick-and-pack for delivery.
The Fresh stores are kind of a weird shopping experience with a mix of normal, overpriced and bizarrely cheap at different times.
I've gotten into the habit of stopping in to wander the aisles and check prices because of it (e.g. I stocked up on a bunch of canned soup when most (but not all) Progresso soups were $0.44 a month or two back, and I picked up some microwavable rice+quinoa pouches for my wife at $0.35 each a couple weeks ago, but the inconsistency and overall not great prices mean it can't be my go-to grocery destination.
I'm sure the one by me will be closing since there's a significantly larger Whole Foods just a few miles away.
There's certainly no reason for Canada to consider significant EV imports from the US - I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla was tainted based on Musk's association with Trump and there aren't really other major US EV producers. For international manufacturers it probably makes more sense to have direct trade agreements with Canada vs possible significant tariffs in response to whatever Cheetolini decides to do on any given day.
Once it became clear that they'd shifted from "crappy customer service" to (IMNSHO) "we fetishize the complete absence of customer service" it became dangerous to depend on them. Really, what's the worst that could happen? Maybe someone spams emojis in live chat on a game livestream at the request of the streamer on a personal account, it gets banned for abuse, Google recognizes that it's linked to other services and locks down everything? But that's so unrealistic I'm sure it could never happen.
It's not like they also have the ability to identify links between multiple accounts accessed by the same person and have automated processes that might stomp the associated accounts as well. Why, that would probably require something like allowing poorly-understood automated agents to take actions on their own!