I enjoyed gamemaker a lot. Especially the ease of adding small snippets of code when you wanted to do something slightly more advanced than the normal editor allowed.
For me, Minecraft was amazing. I started on real logic with its redstone logic system. I started getting familiar with server management & Linux while trying to create a multiplayer server. I wrote my first code by writing plugins in have and interfacing with existing plugins. I learned how to solve problems by combining different components that other people made. It was truly amazing.
I don't know if it is still that great. I think the technical community is definitely smaller now, and the game itself is more of a game than it was back then. However, I still think it is really cool, and definitely different from all of the shooter games.
$99/year is literally nothing for most companies. Furthermore, Android has competing app stores, yet by far the biggest one is still the Play Store. Lots of developers (and users) did not and would not chose other distribution methods.
"A potential audience of millions of users" means less than it implies. If I just put my work online, have I got the audience of billions of Internet users? Probably yes, but it doesn't mean much - I still need to tell people about my work somehow so they would be interested in it.
If we think about how App Store can actually actively help us in promoting an app, without specifically buying ad in the App Store - which doesn't cost $99/year, it costs much more - it's not exactly appealing. Epic's CEO showed how bad the App Store search is in finding apps that users specifically search for: https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/101985252700794470...
And why wouldn't it be bad? Iphone users don't have any better.
Single European datapoint, I'm currently in university.
In my country we have different levels of tertiary (?) education, as far as I can tell, lower levels of education have way more Snapchat use than Instagram. For most students of higher levels Snapchat is only used to share your night out with friend groups, but pretty much nothing else, while Instagram is used way more.
Stories are only partly chronological. The stories are grouped per user and in these groups they are chronological. However these groups are not chronological.
Secondly, posts are not for old people. Posts serve a different purpose than stories. The barrier to post is a lot higher, and they are definitely not used (anymore) to share that you are going to a restaurant/movie/etc, because stories took over that niche. However something like a (single!) post with (multiple) photos of your last holiday (with at least the first one including you) and some fun caption is still totally done.
I'm not even anything close to a climate expert, but I can imagine that this is because most of the world lives in places that are livable in our current climate.
Most of us don't live in Siberia or Greenland. Sure these places might become great because of climate change, but it doesn't matter, since barely anyone lives there.
In the places were we do live, the temperatures are already (semi) ok, meaning that increasing these temperatures will bother more people than it will help.
Furthermore, most people live close to water, which means a rising sea level will be bad for them. Maybe (probably not, but just imagine that) after the sea level has risen we have more viable land that is close to water. However, at that point all the current cities have been ruined by it, because they were built for the old water levels.
These skills are not that special. As far as I understand it, there are no exploits being used and editing the hosts file is not particularly hard. I expect that the executable is voluntary run by the user, since the user expects to run a real application/installer anyways.
If you can do this, you can learn more advanced stuff. Society has bigger problems than getting some free software, and it's not just a lesser problem - it's scraping the bottom of the barrel of justice.
If someone needed to write this to pay bills, I get it, but they should immediately take this and use it to get a better job.
I'm going to agree with the others here, this doesn't sound very complicated at all. This is week 1/2 of many programming courses: basic network request, write to a file and fill your app with a bunch of text. For many languages, this is often their intro tutorial. I wouldn't use this as an example that the person can do more advanced stuff.
But I do agree with your sentiment, people doing things like this should apply their talents to better causes.
The fastly monitoring/status page says: "Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return". Which sounds like the increased traffic is to be expected.
If that is the case though, you are not really enabling SMS 2FA. It is just SMS (1F) authentication.
Real 2FA would (theoretically) never make your account less secure than 1FA, because even if the second factor has 0 security, it shouldn't decrease the security of the first factor.
However, it is true that this may not always be the case for imperfect implementations, like your example. I can aldo imagine that social engineering might have a higher succes ratio if the intruder can say "it really is me! I have the correct second factor, I just lost my first factor...".
