Pro tip: walk the store in the opposite direction. When you walk like everyone else, you'll be trying to overtake slow walkers, couples with a stroller who somehow manage to block the entire 5m wide aisle, groups. Walk against the flow, and you'll be parting the crowds like Moses did the Red Sea. And if they appear not to make way, look slightly to the side as if you are not looking at them. They'll move.

As a former landlord I have spent a considerable time in Ikea...

Matter is just an application layer comms protocol, and yes it's open. Often combined with Thread, a low power radio comms network (The new Ikea stuff uses it), in which case you need a Thread hub, or a Thread border router that acts as a bridge to your LAN and by extension to the Internet. Matter devices may or may not require the cloud.

I have a bunch of thermostats and TRVs (Tado brand) that use Matter, and can be added to my own Matter hub (Home Assistant), to the manufacturer's cloud, or both. There are several brands that follow this model even if they don't use Matter. The good news is that you can continue to use these devices or add new ones even if the manufacturer has gone out of business or shut down their cloud. The bad news is... many of these devices need some configuring; often highly specific settings that can only be done through the manufacturer's app. They'll continue to work but you won't be able to reconfigure them.

Matter allows devices to expose device settings, but it seems that not all manufacturers bother, or they are too specific to fit into the generic Matter types (for instance: heating schedules)

SAS has been dead for 15y; it started with R and then Python absolutely destroyed it. No one teaches SAS in universities any longer, why would they? It's terribly expensive and absolutely fucking dead.

We migrated away from SAS back in 2017 and never looked back. The only verticals still using it are heavily regulated and running long-standing legacy code that they're slowly migrating to Python.

I remember absolutely dying when they tried to renegotiate our contract UP back in 2015. I flat out told them they were dead and we were moving away from them and they told me, "good luck managing your data without us!"

Two companies and 10 years later, we're doing just fine and they are not.

We don't want to be associated with a fascist regime when the wind changes.

I trust Windows Server 2003 more than I trust Windows 11. It's less stable, but Microsoft isn't in control of your machine.

There are several brands that work totally local (ZWave, Zigbee)
There are also some that can use either the cloud but also work locally. Your story shows why one should be ware of such devices. Some still require the cloud to function, or to change settings, even if they can be operated without the cloud. So you keep them online, there's an update, and something gets broken. Philips Hue will no longer function without registering ab account with the company. Tado removes functionality (allowing thermostatic radiator valves to demand heat for a room even if there's no wall thermostat) for newly added devices: that now requires their monthly subscription. Support for certain APIs get dropped. And so on.

I don't say it often but there ought to be a law, regarding services tied to physical devices owned by the end user. No diminishing functionality when a device is updated, no hiding formerly free functions behind paywalls or subscriptions. And cloud service guaranteed for the reasonably expected lifespan of the last device sold officially (not of of clearance or second hand)

Spam, spam, spam, eggs and spam didn't provide enough incentive to try to distinguish between humans and skin jobs, but now "AI slop" does? Ok, great!

Check the OpenPGP signature.

Unsigned? /dev/null.

Signed but no trust path? /dev/null

Signed and with a trust path? Can still be trash, but its claims to be of human origin, are worth taking seriously. If you find a problem (e.g. someone trusted the wrong person) then deal with that then.

The man bought a vacuum cleaner that required an internet connection, and that didn't make him suspicious?

Not so clever I reckon...

The pigs using ubiquitous street camera surveillance to accuse the woman, or the woman using ubiquitous in-vehicle camera surveillance to prove her innocence.

No part of this story makes me warm or fuzzy.

and the ubiquitous surveillance of large swathes of the internet as well. Woohoo!

Note to self: stick to Debian and don't touch Ubuntu or Mint for a few versions until the kinks have been worked out.

This. Personally I am pretty happy with using Nvidia Shield devices instead of a PC; they run Kodi as well as Prime, Netflix and Apple TV, and you get Twitch, YouTube and other apps as well. And they are not a lock-in, you can always replace them with something else if you want or have to. The TV is not going anywhere near the internet.

For every law that has such an impact on our privacy, I think a few questions would need to be answered as part of the bill:
- What is the impact on our rights, and is that proportionate to the expected effects of the bill?
- What is the expected effect of the bill?
- How and when will that be measured?

With the understanding that if the bill does not have the desired effects (all kiddie porn will simply be moved through other channels), the law will be rescinded, not by vote but automatically

Take stupid bets, make stupid payouts.

Shut down all sensors that have nothing to do with navigation, that Google uses to put people under surveillance, stop the data collection and stop sending data to the mothership all the damn time. I guarantee you power usage will go down significantly.

How do I know that? because my Fairphone 4 running CalyxOS gets a few more hours of battery life than the same Fairphone 4 running vanilla Android, and my Fairphone 5 running Ubuntu Touch also does better battery-wise than the same phone running Google's surveillance platform.