It's weird to me that all the articles are framed as the WPC got Apple to "work with" them and "share" technology, as if Apple is some sort of standoffish rival. Apple has been a participating member of the WPC since February 2017. Later that same year, the iPhone 8 debuted with Qi charging support (pre-MagSafe, so no magnets, just vanilla Qi). Eventually MagSafe came along, which as you said is just Qi charging with proprietary extensions--something WPC explicitly allows OEMs to do, via the Proprietary Power Delivery Extension (PPDE) of the Qi standard. While MagSafe is Apple's, they're hardly alone in making use of PPDE modes to extend their Qi capabilities. Virtually every major OEM has some extension.

So, it really shouldn't be any surprise that Qi2 has Apple's hand in it. Plus plenty of others. I'm guessing Google's contributions, or Samsung's (they're ahead of the game with 30 W Qi-PPDE charging, which I would expect to be standard in Qi2) just didn't have the same headline impact.

Compliance has already happened. "As of December 2022, all 50 states, the District of Columbia and four U.S. territories were certified as compliant."

The thing that seems to still be the stumbling block is "The Real ID Act requires that states and territories share their ID databases with each other, but this requirement was not included in the DHS certification criteria. ... As of December 2022, 36 states were participating in this system." So states are compliant per DHS, but still keeping to themselves. Which yeah I'd generally be in agreement that the panopticon can go fuck itself.

Nonetheless states have already otherwise complied with the documentation requirements. Real ID is already generally here.

And sadly even that is dwindling, as they let their disc library wither. I currently have 137 items in my disc queue, but fully 84 of them are in the Saved section, with "availability unknown" and I will probably never be able to watch.

It's not even entirely Netflix's fault either, since the other streaming services further Balkanize and seal up their IP by simply never releasing it on retail disc in the first place. Quite a few of those items in my Saved section are recent stuff, not old, but they're things that are an "<X Streaming Service> Original" (or otherwise owned by it, like Disney/Fox) so they're only available on that particular service, which will deliberately never, ever release it on disc. That Netflix even has it listed in their library as a savable item is just wishful thinking. A few of the services have even stated this no-disc-release-ever intention outright.

Though regardless, even with all these issues, Netflix's disc library remains far larger than its streaming library. Of the 53 items in my disc queue that actually ARE available for me to receive, only a single item is available on Netflix Streaming. The rest are not.

And aside from that, Stripe was also founded in 2010, barely a year younger than its main rival Block (Square). Last I checked the very definition of a startup company included being a new business.

Over a decade old is downright venerable in the tech world, never mind fintech.

This is actually an advantage of Matter. While obviously the Big Names are likely to implement their own products with phone-home requirements, this is not an inherent requirement of Matter itself. Even the 1.0 specification is designed for local-only mesh communication (via WiFi or Thead). Matter's also open source and royalty-free, so anyone can implement it, and as mentioned in TFS the SDK is now available. So, I expect to see local-only control hub implementations appearing fairly quickly, hosted on Raspberry Pis or the like. End-device nodes can likely be implemented on a simple, cheap Arduino or such.

There's a reasonably decent write-up on Wired, What Is Matter? that covers a fair amount of this.

So tl;dr, yeah, the commercial products will probably be online spymasters, but Matter has a decent chance to be a good local-only DIY standard too. It's like an updated X10.

It was voluntary. He (and his wife too) applied for citizenship in late 2020. He spoke openly about doing so and his reasons why.

Not quite correct. The initial, short-term warranty coverage that is included with device purchase sometimes still applies even if you buy an Apple device in a country other than your country of residence. It varies.

However, you can purchase AppleCare+ for any device you own, regardless of where the device was purchased. The only caveat there is that AC+ itself only applies for the country in which the AC+ coverage was purchased. So if you really want a for-sure warranty, wait 'til you bring your device back home and then buy AppleCare+ for it. You're covered just fine then.

You don't even need to go "overseas". It's only the U.S. model alone that removes the physical SIM support. Simply take a quick trip north and grab the Canadian model instead, which is not only priced almost the same as the U.S. model (European and Asian iPhones are often priced A LOT higher than U.S. units), it also uses the same frequency bands, making full compatibility a non-issue.

I rather suspect Canadian iPhones are going to become a hot ticket item among Americans that need physical SIM support for things like international travel.

"...eSIM is a global specification by the GSMA..."

"...an eSIM is a virtualized SIM card profile installed onto an eUICC chip permanently surface mounted to a mobile device at the factory.

"...the eUICC chip used to host the eSIM uses the same electrical interface as a physical SIM as defined in ISO/IEC 7816. Once an eSIM carrier profile has been installed on an eUICC it operates the same as a physical SIM..."

But I mean, don't let pesky facts get in the way of a good uninformed rant.

Your statement simply isn't true, but apparently no one caught on to that and called you on it. Sad that such an easily-debunked claim is modded insightful.

Apple doesn't have the ability to "give up the keys to the kingdom", and can't unlock/decrypt an iPhone (they CAN however provide iCloud data, and they do so when presented with a warrant; they have never hidden this fact). What Barr and the FBI were trying to force Apple to do was help them literally hack the phone, and crack the security. Apple refused to do this, and refused to help in the creation of a backdoor. They did NOT have the ability to simply unlock the phone. Never did.

Barr and the FBI tried forcing them again with the Pensacola shooter and Apple again publicly noted they don't have the ability to unlock/decrypt the phone. And again, what they refused to do was help with the creation of tools to crack the security and/or backdoor it.

It's not just e-mail. I use my Linode as a VPN, and I regularly encounter websites that likewise wholesale block Linode IPs. I'm among the many users that have made requests of Linode for years, asking them to set up some kind of web form or something to make it easy to let them know the places where they've been blocked, but so far Linode blithely continues not to make it easy. I just submit tickets to support instead, since Linode does actually (well, sometimes) try to contact at least the larger, major sites and work things out.

Probably the biggest example in recent memory was, for a while, the websites for Delta and Virgin Atlantic airlines just flat refused to talk to me. I'd simply get a plain text page with 'Access Denied' stamped on it. Linode did actually make an effort to contact them, and I've been able to access those sites after that. There are many, many smaller sites with this issue as well (in keeping with the airline theme, FlyerTalk still to this day blocks Linode's entire ASN for example) that I doubt I'll ever be able to access from my Linode VPN, because there's just simply too many for Linode staff to keep up with.

Here's hoping Akamai can have at least SOME impact in making my VPN a little more usable for web browsing.

Poorly said on my part, yeah. Or more like incomplete; my thoughts got ahead of my typing.

Yes, restrictions and the like. I was thinking gerrymandering resulting in an extremely one-sided state congress, which has been doing everything it can to further tilt the playing field through changes in election laws and rules (and of course, lots more gerrymandering). This has been a work in progress for many years; it's not new. What's new is the rapidly accelerated pace and shear boldness of the most recent changes, using the Big Lie as their excuse.

Hell, and then you've got most of the state government from the top on down actively pressuring state courts to reverse their rulings, just because they don't like them. So that the AG (a lapdog who's literally been under indictment the entire time he's held office) can, unilaterally, pursue election prosecutions despite the state constitution saying the AG isn't a prosecutor. Talk about stacking the deck.

Anyway this is wandering rather off-topic, but hopefully a little more clear on where my thoughts were with my initial rant.

Of course he's pandering. This is the same asshole that has billboards plastered all along my drive home, with lines like "Stop giving ILLEGALS your money!" and "Eliminate property taxes!" with all of them done in black background, with white base text and red emphasis, while he looms behind it all. It's classic scaremongering design, and it's pure pander towards a blindingly obvious demographic. I'm not surprised he's glommed on to this shit too.

The only reason he even has a remotely viable chance is because of extensive gerrymandering, the same kind that has Austin "represented" in state congress entirely by GOP members. Texas is far more purple than many realize, but it sure as hell isn't represented thanks to such corruption.

Fuck Huffines and everything about him.

I was thinking this same thing about Google, as well as other platforms, and was wondering if perhaps the person making this claim about Apple misunderstood where they're wanting to use it. I think scanning personal devices would be a huge legal quagmire and I rather doubt that's what Apple's thinking, but on the other hand Apple could use this to scan photos on iCloud with significantly less legal issues, if any.

Much like Google scans e-mails on their servers, and Facebook scans photos on their servers. iCloud is on Apple's servers. As most Slashdot readers are already familiar with, your stuff in The Cloud(tm) is just your stuff on someone else's computer.

iPhones don't (yet) require upload to iCloud, but I believe iCloud Storage is the default setting. Might be wrong on that. Either way I bet tons of people are using iCloud Storage.

I also work in this industry, and that is more of a "yes and no" sort of deal. Yes, most of what is listed in the Bloomberg article is already required, with the cyber security aspects particularly covered under NERC CIP. However (this is the "no" part), the caveat is that that stuff is only required if you must comply with NERC CIP. CIP compliance, or at least various parts of it (again cyber security in particular) is only required of utilities and service providers above a certain size, or certain number of assets, or coverage area, etc. There's several types of qualifications. Smaller utilities, and especially rural ones (rural cooperatives in particular), which the Bloomberg article mentions explicitly, are often CIP exempt.

I say this with first-hand knowledge, as I work for one of said rural cooperatives. The main company (which serves the members of the coop) falls under CIP, as it is a sizable generation and transmission provider. However, most of our individual member utilities do not fall under CIP, or many parts of it, and thus aren't required to have/do a lot of this stuff.

I think the U.S. grid would do well to simply remove that loophole entirely.