FaceDeer

I think you've misinterpreted. The trial is going ahead, it's just not going to be a jury trial because the only thing the jury would be there for is to determine damages. Since Google is preemptively paying the full fine that the prosecution was asking for there'd be literally nothing for the jury to do there. It'd be a complete waste of time. The trial will instead be a bench trial, decided by a judge alone.

They weren't "getting out of" anything with this payment. The "hell" that Google was facing was exactly the fine that they paid.

Did you read the article this thread is about? The sub-headline is:

The tool will be opt-in, so Copilot+ PCs won’t screenshot your activity without permission.

I started Googling "Rob Schneider" and Google autocompleted "herp de derp" after that.

Windows Update is automatic by default.

Sounds a bit unusual, but not unfair - Google just preemptively paid all of the damages that the government was seeking in this particular case, which is the only thing the jury would have been needed to determine. So having a jury would be a complete waste of the jury's time. The rest of the case would be up to the judge anyway.

If the prosecutor thinks they could get more now maybe they should have asked for more earlier. I think this may have been a miscalculation on the prosecution's side.

Frankly, this is one of the areas I'm most looking forward to seeing what integrated AI can do for Windows. A couple of months ago I was having trouble with getting my printer to work and what I ended up doing was taking a screenshot of the printer settings and pasting the literal image of the screen into Bing Chat to ask it what I was doing wrong. It was able to parse my settings out of the image and figured out what I needed to change to make the printer work.

Having a troubleshooting AI like that that can actually "read" the entire state of my machine would be great.

Don't be so sure. This forum is a bubble, 99% of Windows users have never heard of this feature in the first place let alone any of the details about how it works.

We had a good solid enraged mob going here, and Microsoft is ruining it! The bastards!

I've actually had those troubleshooters work for me several times in recent years. Mostly fixing networking issues.

If their goal is to prevent AI trainers from scraping their art then an open federated platform is the opposite of what they want.

It also has an expensive back end and no plans for any kind of monetization, so it's dead in the water from that side too. The moment they're successful they're broke.