The only problem with this is you have to go stand in the sunlight to charge it.

These types of draconian laws will ruin the internet if they are ratified.

Itâ(TM)s easy to switch the search default in Firefox to whatever you want. I use duckduckgo, personally.

I have been able to "smarten" dumb appliances by plugging them into smart power switches. For less than $8 each I bought a couple boxes of smart switches from Amazon, then reflashed them with Tasmota -- no more cloud! -- and joined them to Home Assistant. Now any device I want to be smart, I plug it into a smart switch and monitor the power.

One of my scripts monitors the power draw on my dryer, and when it goes above 100W for a minute then drops below 10W for 15 seconds, it knows the cycle is done and alerts us to go down to the basement and take out the clothes before they wrinkle. A similar script monitors the washer.

The refrigerator's plug has a script alert me when the average daily power draw is higher than normal. I added that after my son called me from his most recent vacation and said "my refrigerator is using more power than it should, can you go check it?" Sure enough, their freezer door had been left open by their toddler. Of course the food was already thawing, but we cleaned it out a week before they would have come home to a house full of rotted food stench. And before you ask, yes, when I installed Tasmota I configured the switch to be "always on", so that even if Home Assistant thinks it would be a good idea to shut off the refrigerator's power, it can't.

I also have a small water pump on a smart switch. Normally the pump draws 36W, but when it runs dry it draws 30W. Now if the power consumption drops below 33W and stays there for a few minutes, it shuts off the pump and alerts me that the water is low.

So I get what I need -- timely information about the equipment in my home, automated reactions when things go bad that might keep things from getting worse, and no cloud involvement from any sleazy appliance manufacturers. And an $8 plug is a lot cheaper than paying a $400 premium for a "smart washer".

Tuya's become a nightmare to deal with. They've decided they fear local integrations because they're losing ad revenue when people don't use the Tuya app. They have been going to progressively greater lengths to prevent device buyers from bypassing the Tuya servers and running their stuff locally.

My understanding is you can no longer register for a free Tuya developer account that lets you set it up with the "Local Tuya" integration for HomeAssistant -- you have to have a paid developer account, if it works at all. And their libraries used to flash right onto an ESP32, but now they're encouraging developers to more secure chips, in an attempt to prevent end users from reflashing their own devices with firmware (like Tasmota) that no longer communicates via Tuya services.

I wouldn't buy anything Tuya with the hopes that it will someday integrate with anything else. If you buy them, expect them only to work with the official apps.

PKIs were designed for offline use. There are a couple hundred trusted Certificate Authorities that each issue a "root" certificate. These root certificates are distributed worldwide, in browsers, operating system distros, phones, etc. When you encounter a certificate in the wild, you have to verify the certificate before accepting it, which is done by checking what you can locally: is it expired? Does its DNS name resolve to the name on the cert? Does it have a valid signature? This means checking to see if it was signed by a CA certificate that you already have in your local trust store; if so, you can accept it without going online.

Not to say that the online component of certificate validation isn't important, but it's of varying importance depending on the risk level. When online you should check for certificate revocation, which is to check to see if a previously issued certificate has since been flagged by the CA as compromised and revoked. This can be done by looking for it on a Certificate Revocation List (CRL) published by the signing authority, or by querying the authority's Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) server. But it's an optional step, and can be skipped in low-risk situations (such as being offline.)

Reddit used to have principles that aligned with the open source model. Now they are removing mods that protested their API pricing. They have changed and that is how they are killing the goose that lays golden eggs. Everyone was cheering for them to succeed. Not anymore. The good will people had towards reddit is gone. They killed it.

It's going to cost $20mil a year to run Apollo with the current API pricing. It's not sustainable. Reddit is killing themselves like Digg did.

All of which would improve almost immediately with competition.

I have posted here for maybe five years. But I felt a twinge of nostalgia, so I decided to check out the latest headlines.

So I see this headline and I go: This is totally crazy, so nothing has really changed about the world during my absence.

So then I see your comment and I go: This is totally crazy, so nothing has really changed in the discourse, either.

The competition-porn security blanket was a cute idea back in the early 1980s. I was there when the Apple II, the TRS-80, and Commodore Pet were busy trying to set the world on fire. And I've watched the evolution of this space very carefully ever since. As a blue-blood digital native it's the main story of my life and times. My fascination with digital electronics began in the early 1970s. My attitude when the original home-computing toys arrived wasn't: Where did this come from? No, it was: Where have you been all these long, painful, pining year?

This was all supposed to set the world free. That's the story we always tell entering into a new age.

What do I see around me now? Five or so trillion dollar corporations dictating nearly every damn thing about this technology is developed, how it is delivered, and how it is consumed.

This is the house that competition built.

What were these companies competing for all these long years? What was the final brass ring? I'll tell you, and it should be obvious: To gain the monolithic scale to collect monopoly rent not just from their products, but also from the very context in which those products are rendered relevant to our psyches.

Sure, competition is a magic growth hormone, considered narrowly. But surely there's enough water under the bridge at this point that "considered narrowly" ought to be consider harmful. No?

So let's step back and not consider competition narrowly. What are the systemic realities of naive faith in competition?

The systemic reality is that competition injected at the bottom (a good thing) merely kicks the can down the road. The corporations then compete to rise above the discipline of competition. Maybe we double down and inject competition again, this time bigger, purer, bolder than before. Then the cycle repeats again. This time with even bigger corporations competing to rise above competition as titans, behemoths, and leviathans.

Is the government succeeding at taming these giants? Do Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook practice all that much legitimate competition? Here's a skill-testing question. Which of those five corporations is not known for commanding a primary vertical? Google has search and YouTube and the gated Android store. Scratch one. Amazon has AWS and the gated Kindle store. Scratch two. Apple has the iPhone and the gated iOS app store. Scratch three. Microsoft has government workflow integration and the PC gaming community. Scratch four. Facebook has social. Scratch five.

Even to define these verticals as duopolies requires athletic feats of imagination. I happen to use YouTube as my main social platform, and I've never had an account on Facebook. Do I strike you as a typical consumer? Or the 1% of the 1%?

I'm not just speaking here in cliche. I'm extremely well versed on free market principles, free market principles, and the theory of systems, including economic systems and human discourse systems. I spent over 500 hours consuming neoliberal podcasts featuring every possible flavour of neoliberal guest.

On a parallel track, over the past year I traced pretty much the entire evolution of postmodern thought from Hegel and Marx forward to the present times. There's actually quite a lot of neoliberal theory I'm sympathetic toward. I wish I could say the same for postmodernism, but that's another can of worms.

I like much of neoliberalism, but I'm not stupid. I can see the world plainly as it exists plainly before my eyes. We injected competition, it was wonder and vigorous for many decades, but finally and we got was monopoly on a larger scale than we've ever seen before.

What do you suppose the host talks about after conducting over 500 hours of interviews with hundreds of different guests, on mostly the same small set of topics?

Here's an eternal theme: If only we did it right, this time.

You see, every attempt to reform the world that lead to the world remaining the same as ever, only more so, shared the same universal flaw: We didn't go big enough to make $purity cure $horse. This is the one true universal excuse. It was used for socialism. It was used for market capitalism. It was used for every darn thing in between.

So the silver lining in creating worse monopolies than we've ever had before is that we forced them to make us a lot of nice toys in getting there. So I guess we have actually reformed monopoly to some degree. Once upon a time, monopolies came into existence without hardly making anyone a new toy worth having.

Okay, so what's another topic that burns eternal when you discuss the same small set of neoliberal principles for 500 hours?

Education reform. Sound familiar? It surely must. You see to be an expert, with an expert diagnosis, which in your unique genius you've managed to distill down to one word. Competition. Quite the magic trick there, I must say.

Here's a small thing. Charter schools, as normally implemented, are yet another government program. It's a government program with an extra degree of freedom inside compared to the normal landscape. But it's still a government program.

How do Charter schools mainly compete? For the quality of the parents. They often say that they are neutral. But then the application process is so arduous, that only the most truly devoted 1% of parents make it all the way through. So many meeting you have to attend with the school admissions people. What kind of family can organize that? Either a family with means, or a family with fervent devotion to the educational cause.

The vast majority of superior Charter school outcomes comes from this factor alone. Education concerns human capital. Nothing improves human capital like a sorting hat that selects only the right people, for whatever metric you wish to optimize.

Actual value-add in education has mostly proven to be a long unicorn hunt. You can figure out who your best students are easily. No matter how you teach, your best students will remain your best students. For the rest of your students, things are far more hit and miss. One teaching method might connect with one student, whereas a different method might connect with a different student. Neither of these were A students to begin with. And rarely do they become A students at the end. (There are of course some spectacular exceptions if you pray at the alter of N=1.)

Because building a school with better human capital is so much easier than improved the human capital you're stuck with, almost all the best charter schools have mostly done the former. Mostly. There are marginal gains to be had by getting the rest right. Marginal.

So what happens? The schools get good at lying about the reality that they are competing for human capital, and make a big story about how they've improved the capital of their students during their time at the school.

I think it's Finland that has gone furthest in education reform. This was also a competition for human capital, but they moved this into the teaching ranks, rather than the student ranks.

Education is very nearly the hardest degree program in Finland to get into. It would be maybe a small step down from medical school. Dullard teachers in Finland are rare birds. The students have far less class time, are given far less formal homework, but they work hard anyway, and consistently score highly in the world tables.

South Korea does everything exactly the other way. Stories are written about high school students in Korea jumping out of windows. After you sleep through most of the official school day, off you go to the second, private sector school day. And all they ever graduate are narrow technocrats. It's a disaster on wheels.

Blowing smoke up the ass of competition sure beats having to know something about the real world. Makes you sound smart, without typing your fingers off, like I've just done.

Which is why I finally moved on from Slashdot to greener pastures.

Getting a chip made IS the big hurdle. Soldering the chip is trivial by comparison.

Not to mention no dedicated hardware LED to indicate that the microphone/camera sensors have been switched by software into an active state. I generally keep my phone inside it's leather sheath and not in the same room. Close enough to reach in a few steps if it beeps, not close enough for rogue candid camera.

No one who actually cares about their privacy is using Chrome anyway.

You've missed the entire ball of wax. People care about privacy, but they get systematically priced out of the conversation.

People who "actually" care is just doublespeak for those who are too stubborn to allow themselves to get priced out of the conversation.

I've been immersed in the software profession since the 1970s. I once won a math prize. I even won a writing prize. I spent much of the 1990s reading Applied Cryptography for light entertainment. I understood that there ought to be side channels in the time domain concerning caches and speculation long before these began to emerge. (Peter Wright's book from 1988 had already impressed upon me that exploitation of side-channels was a going concern.) I figured that smarter people than me must have poked into this, so it probably wasn't as bad as it appeared to be. I was wrong. If anything, it was even worse than I intuitively suspected.

In summary, I have all the cognitive tools in the world, and security still makes my head hurt. To "actually" care is a Sisyphean standard in the modern IT landscape.

"Just" install Firefox. Seriously. That's the full cure?

If you can even do that much. I have family members who work for the government. They are only allowed to use Edge, which just Chrome with an additional layer of sheepskin, draped over top of a wolf with twice as many teeth. So they drive Edge for 35–45 hours per week at the office (only one of my four family members lucked into the nearly mythical short government work day) and then they come home to drive something completely different, just to show that the "actually" care about their privacy.

If greater society actually cared about people actually caring, then the government IT environment would permit the use of alternative browsers, at least within reason. Greater society does not actually care about people caring, so this is entirely verboten.

Unless this: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice — 18 November 2021

How long did that last in Munich, at the other end of Germany?

LiMux was a project launched by the city of Munich in 2004 in order to migrate from Windows to a desktop infrastructure of its own, based on Linux. By 2012, the city had already migrated 12,600 of the total of 15,500 desktops, until in November 2017, the Munich City Council resolved to reverse the migration and return to Microsoft Windows-based software by 2020.

The LiMux lead on Wikipedia used to also include this sentence:

The city reports in addition to gaining freedom in software decisions and increased security, it has also saved Euros 11.7 million (US$16 million).

Now you can only find it burried deep in a ==Timeline== section, as a single line item:

23 November 2012 — Savings from LiMux environment over 10 million euros.

Ironically, there's a copy edit flag on the entire section stating that "this section is in list format but may read better as prose".

Am I going to sign up for the apparently Sisyphean task of keeping that comment about security and privacy and savings prominently displayed in the LiMux article lead, where it belongs? No, I'm not. Because I "actually" don't care, according to your doublespeak usage of the word "actually". Because to "actually" care is to have infinite resources in all directions and no concern whatsoever over painting yourself thin.

Intelligence is a dumb word. I prefer cognition. Cognition is modular. Intelligence is an attribute of the whole system. Cognition is an engineering domain. Intelligence is a judgement domain.

So, three minutes of exercise a month is better for your health than zero minutes a month.

give the user something to do while loading in the background

Something more productive than minesweeper?

Is this principle oriented toward true productivity, the cult of merely looking busy, or the need for constant distraction felt by those living lives of quiet desperation?