There's no easy answer to your questions. It depends on what threats you're trying to defend against. If your primary concern is adversarial law enforcement with Cellebrite et al., a current iPhone, especially with Lockdown Mode enabled, is certainly the next best thing to Graphene that we have.
Personally, I have access to Private Relay, but never use it. That's not because I don't trust it, but because I only ever use VPNs to spoof my GeoIP. And you can't do that with Private Relay.
A mask ROM is a kind of read-only memory where the desired data is directly etched into a semiconductor during the same photolithographic process that actually makes a circuit out of a planar sheet of silicon. It's pretty much hard-wired data storage, with an indefinite lifespan.
Even with Game Key Cards, an actual, physical object has to be produced, at drastically higher marginal cost than what a purely digital license costs in production (basically nothing). And there is a secondary market, which doesn't exist in the digital realm.
Essentially, I don't see the reasoning behind counting them as digital. All the aspects that seem relevant to any publisher (and, to a first approximation, any user that isn't a conservationist) make them identical to physical sales.
Anti-abuse measures such as this are generally designed to not provide that kind of feedback. The website developer is modeled to be an adversary, and you don't volunteer valuable information on what has worked against your countermeasures, and what hasn't, to your designated enemy.
Tello gives you a real (US though) number, E911 and all, for 5 USD a month. You get an eSIM you can activate from anywhere in the world via Wi-Fi Calling. Send and receive unlimited texts and get 100 minutes a month for the odd service that insists on verification calls rather than texts. I've had zero issues.
Ever wanted to call your manager a 🤡 without them noticing? Even if they do notice, there's not a lot of leeway to act on it based on a message like this.
If you only ever use services that let you sign up with arbitrary addresses, then sure, you gain resilience against mail provider shenanigans at the expense of exposing a non-agile identifier — the domain name you bought — to any third party you provide with an address.
However, in a confused attempt to stamp out single-use mail services, some sites are rejecting mail addresses that don't originate from one of the big mail providers, like Gmail, iCloud, Outlook. 'Please provide your real mail address', they'd say.
If you aren't using any such service, you can use your own domain. Be wary of services that bounce messages to your "actual" inbox without rewriting the involved addresses (Cloudflare offers something like this, I don't get why though), as that can lead to deliverability issues due to DMARC.
The IAB publishes some Gmail-specific guidance on how to 'normalize' plus-addresses to 'real' inboxes, so that's something that doesn't really do anything for you anymore. Out of the large mail services, iCloud is somewhat notable for offering single-use addresses under the same @icloud.com domain name they use for standard addresses, without having to register extra accounts or other annoying requirements. So websites that want to lock out single-use iCloud addresses would have to block iCloud addresses entirely, which is something they'll most probably refrain from doing.
Many services block these because, as you are pointing out, standing up VPN tunnel routing on a cloud instance is sort of trivial. Cloud providers publish these ranges specifically so anyone can block them easily. If lemmy.world is not blocking Oracle Cloud already, it's only because they just haven't come around to it.
The Switch catalog was limited in no small part because the device just couldn't give acceptable performance for a lot of contemporary cross-platform games. That, of course, didn't matter for first-party titles.
Switch 2 performance is projected to end up somewhere around a base PS4, with better GPU but somewhat diminished CPU. However, it's going to have more memory than the Xbox Series S that teams had trouble porting their games to.
The Switch 2 might benefit a lot from this generation's extended cross-gen period. Add that to franchises like Fire Emblem, Metroid, Mario, Mario Kart, Pikmin and Zelda, and the average consumer is going to think of Steam as the "limited" platform.
A lot of conjecture, and maybe Switch 2 will turn out to be a monumental flop. I'm cautiously optimistic.
By the way, the old, selective policy that Nintendo exercised is pretty much a thing of the past. Just browse through the eShop for three minutes.
Nintendo has moved over 140 million Switch consoles. The Switch 2 might become more, or less successful, but let's just conservatively assume they'll only sell half as many this time around.
Last time I checked, the entire Deck-like category amounted to some seven-digit number of sold devices. The idea that anyone targeting that level of performance is going to skip the Switch 2… is wildly unrealistic.
IIUC the end goal, for any fusion reactor, is to heat up water and drive a steam turbine.
Imagine you could drive a steam turbine at zero cost. What happens if just keeping that turbine running costs more in upkeep than e.g. solar panels do overall?
Is there really much of an economic case for infinite energy on demand (and that is if fusion can be made to work in not just the base load case) if we have infinite energy at home already?
Apart from that, some payment methods (like crypto) allow transmitting arbitrary amounts. At least, paying for years in advance works without issue. You could pay a few cents and try it out, but be mindful of fees.
Auf der einen Seite: "hm, vielleicht werden dann Teslas in den nächsten Monaten günstiger, wenn sie nicht mehr gekauft, oder sogar aktiv abgestoßen werden".
Auf der anderen Seite wäre es interessant, wenn dann irgendwelche Regierungsorgane und/oder Staatsanwälte darauf hinarbeiten, dass die Firma eines Nazi-Sympathisanten in Deutschland nicht mehr geschäftsfähig ist.
There's no easy answer to your questions. It depends on what threats you're trying to defend against. If your primary concern is adversarial law enforcement with Cellebrite et al., a current iPhone, especially with Lockdown Mode enabled, is certainly the next best thing to Graphene that we have.
Personally, I have access to Private Relay, but never use it. That's not because I don't trust it, but because I only ever use VPNs to spoof my GeoIP. And you can't do that with Private Relay.