To be fair if I were Microsoft I would tell motherboard manufacturers to get a grip and make it a USB device. Hanging it off the SMBUS, where critical stuff like fan control and power management also lives, is kind of insane for controlling some lights.

If it was USB then it could just use WinUSB or even HID. No driver needed, API is very mature.

I don't think it's particularly hard or anything. The bigger issue is getting it signed by Microsoft. Because it's a very low level driver that can interact with critical parts of the hardware, like controlling your fans and power management, the bar is naturally a bit higher than a driver for some random USB device. Therefore every time it gets updated, Microsoft has to check it and sign off on it.

There was some company that was updating it, basically just rebuilding it to keep it compatible with the latest Windows version and getting the driver re-signed. Really though it's something Microsoft should take on themselves and create an API for. I think Gamers Nexus were trying to create some common API for RGB, but I don't know how far they got.

It's going to get nasty when home batteries and solar really start to become the norm and being totally reliant on the grid gets much more expensive. It's inevitable as the cost of solar and batteries keeps falling, while the cost of distribution stays the same or rises due to climate change. As ever, it will be expensive to be poor and not be able to make the up-front investment.

It might not just be a lack of appropriate compensation, although that is chronic in my country. It takes time to train people in this technology, and there is sometimes no substitute for experience. There are lots of different people needed too - some to install the batteries, some to handle the electrical side at the local level, and some to deal with them at the grid level. There can be delays anywhere along the chain.

If you look at how China did it, the government said that adding battery capacity should get priority, and even then it took them a few years to really ramp up. Also their grid is quite different, newer and with less regulatory capture. 220V as well, giving them a bit of an edge with things like EV charging and heat pumps.

Hopefully they make significant gains when it comes to maintainability and readability as well. A lot of AI generated code looks superficially properly commented, decent variable names, that sort of thing, but in reality is a pain to deal with and only likely to ever be worked on again by more AI.

Hopefully now this has been proven to work, we can accelerate the process.

The issue is political. A lot of people in London and the wider are poor, and can't afford a new car or even a used EV when petrol bangers are as little as a few hundred quid. At least sales of new ones are increasing steadily, and the Chinese manufacturers are offering them at reasonable prices. That competition seems to have driven down prices from European, Japanese, and Korean manufacturers too.

If they just popped out they could be reused cheaply. Most of them are going to be fine, ready to re-use without any more than a simple test. Some people collect them and build their own home batteries out of discarded vapes.

We could do with an EU level rule that such batteries must be removable without tools and use a standard JST connector.

In this case it's an open source driver that is the problem. Specifically this one: https://www.highrez.co.uk/Down...

The maintainer abandoned it, but everyone kept using it because it's the only real option for apps (including open source ones like Open Hardware Monitor) to access the motherboard SMBUS which controls fans and RGB lighting, among other things.

It's not clear exactly what the cause of the crash is, but it may be related to anti-cheat tech which basically rootkits Windows and then panics when it sees certain drivers installed.

If you believe that Iranians saying that stuff is a statement of actual intent and makes peace impossible, then you should also believe the same about statements made by the Israeli government and its genocidal intent to create a Greater Israel.

Well, Linux is European, and we are at least less hostile than the US.

China has domestic hardware for government computers.

For example, they have multiple domestic CPU designs. RISC-V, ARM, MIPS, and even some licensed AMD Epyc cores with the random number generators replaced by domestic designs.

Richard Stalman used to have one of the MIPS CPUs IIRC, until it got stolen. Reason being that it was the freest laptop available at the time, running almost entirely open source software.

Cloning the data won't help. The data on any half decent phone is encrypted. The encryption key is kept insecure a secure memory, which requires the password to unlock.

When you use the duress password, it doesn't overwrite the data on the flash memory, instead that key is wiped. The secure memory has an integrated processor that generates a new key.

Merely having a copy of the data is useless, because unless there is a flaw in the key generation there is no way you can decrypt it. If there is a flaw, a mere border agent probably isn't going to have access to that information, it's the sort of thing that the NSA keeps to itself.

If you don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons, disarm Israel. They have at least 100 nukes, and multiple ways to deliver them. Stop the settler state sponsored terrorism too.

Take away the reason why Iran thinks it needs nukes to secure its existence.