Just make sure never, ever to buy from them again. It's the same story as Synology with their forced reliance on specific hard drives. As long as there are still other providers out there...

Synology works with any hard drive. I bought a new unit and installed WD drives in it. No issues.

They did revert this because of public backlash:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/synology-caves-walks...

The point is that Synology tried to vendor-lock their customers for profit, and even though they didn't follow through, they told us what they stand for, and it is now considered ill-advised to buy their hardware because of that.

We tried nearly all vendors, nothing is as polished as their Ui and software.

Yes, could not continue, that was too much.

It is a relic from the time when most countries had kings who could pardon people.

Started using startpage.com for google results without the ads and its pretty good.

yeah its kinda sad.. you have to look at older models. currently im using a Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact with linage os (android 10).

that is by no means an easy way.

easy would be a button on the profile page for example.

Ah well, I guess "easy" is relative. I'm sure if you send them one email, they'll confirm it with you once within a month and then delete the data.

Compare that to Coinbase, which has forms, buttons and seems it's mostly an automated process instead of manual email, but I've tried getting Coinbase to delete my account + data for over 6 months now to no avail, multiple emails back and forward where they confirm the deletion, say it's in progress, I email back after a month and they ask me to confirm the deletion again.

So even with a button, doesn't mean the process is easy, and there is also a lot more to consider than just how you initially the request.

Mind you, Coinbase probably has an obligation to keep your data for x number of years for both tax and auditing purposes.

This is such a grey area. Do emails others sent to me belong to them? Do my HN comments make the entire conversation partially mine? If one of my comments is "well said", and the parent deletes their comment, is not my comment diminished? What do we do about quotes? Etc.

Solved problem already: Hash the username + a salt and change that everywhere. Every comment is from a unique author + the comment body is still there + all the replies are still there but, author name has been removed.

That's a decent solution. But I think simply replacing the usernames with [deleted] is better. It leaves the comment but detaches the user and breaks the link between all the users comments.

It becomes very hard to track conversations with N+2 users though, if more than one has the [deleted] username. Hence the hashing to get a unique [deleted] username for each user.

That's not legal either. If the comment body contains personal information anywhere, GDPR also applies to it.

I have sent such emails for a previous account, the emails were ignored.

It's not one step removed, it's 90 steps out of 100 removed, right? The important part here is the consumption of resources, 90% less land/water/energy also means 90% fewer animals that had to die for the product. (Also we could enforce more environmental protection measures while still being able to feed everyone.)

are there no antitrust laws in the US, so that amazon could be split into marketplace, own products and aws? Thats what should have been done long ago and no need to stop at amazon either.

i don’t think it’s going to happen in any case. it depends on what the USA does. if the position is like in the cold war: "this way and no further" china will probably not risk a nuclear war.

if he was smart, then he said nothing that sounds like blackmail. but you could say, for example, that I have to settle the expense of reproducing it and writing it down properly or something similar.