You’re not missing anything. There was a period of time where a lot of patents were granted for “basic idea, but on a computer!” The USPTO stopped doing it and these patents, which should have never been issued, have been systematically invalidated, including most of this guy’s. He’s a classic patent troll suing over patents that were then invalidated.

1. This is advertising. It's not the most worst example, but it's still fundamentally an ad.
2. Revenue is absolutely the wrong metric to use. If you had $100 of revenue and $99 in costs, you have only $1 left to pay your fines. Amazon did not earn enough to pay its fines in 1 hour and 50 minutes because most of that that money was used to buy and deliver the products, plus various other expenses. The blog post is misstating the numbers by over an order of magnitude for some of the companies. If you're going to do it, do it right at least. The profit numbers are just as easy to come by as revenue.

This headline is ridiculous; I expect better from Ars Technica. You "admit" to things you shouldn't have done. In this case the government compelled Apple to disclose certain data and simultaneously prohibited Apple from disclosing the disclosure. Thanks to a senator's letter, Apple is now free to disclose something that they previously wanted to disclose, about something they were forced to do in the first place.

Compare to the Reuters headline: "Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications - US senator." The emphasis and agency are correctly placed on the bad actors.

Do you honestly think Apple cares about Nothing in any capacity? They are irrelevant and apply zero market pressure on Apple.

On the tech side, Android users also get lower-quality photos and videos when they're sent through iMessage.

Android users don’t receive anything at all through iMessage; the whole conversation becomes SMS/MMS. I suppose getting major, relevant tech details is hard for an outlet like Engadget.

The headline isn't an accurate quote. 9to5Mac, quoting the Wall Street Journal:

When Goldman Sachs and Apple launched their joint savings account in April, Goldman held a town hall at its headquarters, where bank executives talked it up. One executive had a different message shortly afterward. “We should have never done this f—ing thing,” the Goldman partner told colleagues.

"Mistake" isn't actually even part of the quote. The headline also implies that this is an observation made by looking back on it, rather than a comment made at launch by someone who may not have even been involved in the project.

"Some carmakers" is a strange way to write General Motors, which is to my knowledge the sole carmaker who has announced they're going to shoot themselves in the foot by dropping a non-negotiable feature required by a majority of new car buyers. I predict they backtrack on this plan pretty rapidly.

I'm not willing to give Thomas credit for even this. Eastman's appeal was never going anywhere, with or without Thomas. He recused himself on what is fundamentally an uncontroversial case. He gets a little political reprieve for pretending to have suddenly discovered ethics, but nothing was on the line. There's not a chance he'd recuse himself if his vote had any chance of undermining democracy or human rights.

The new pope and Mussolini essentially rose to power together, forming an alliance. The church’s open embrace of the Fascists was critical to the government’s power and to ending the enmity between the church and secular authorities.

The pope was also jaw-dropping antisemitic. Jews did not have many friends in the Catholic Church.

I think you’re more likely to find sophistry trying to dress up racism in euphemisms. Prager U is a far-right organization created to indoctrinate young people and Republicans are now using their “educational” materials in public schools. They really are racist so the joke rings true.

The confusing alphabet soup of Wi-Fi versions got renamed. 802.11n became Wi-Fi 4, 802.11ac became Wi-Fi 5, and 802.11ax became Wi-Fi 6. Wi-Fi 7 is still in development so 6 is the best in-use version.

Apple offers to match donations from employees so this is a case of an employee making a small donation and Apple matching it rather than Apple explicitly choosing to make a tiny donation itself.