Honestly most pickups never tow. According to companies that make them and have a vested interest in knowing what they need to build. Less then half of pickup owners ever tow anything.

The under half that do tow are still people though and still have needs and dollars. I tow, I early tow more then about 200 miles, I mean why would I fill a dump trailer with dirt from two states away and haul it home? We have dirt here! Most of my towing is under 50 miles. Occasionally it is 400 miles (not for dirt though).

you can make a successful product that doesnâ(TM)t address the needs of every single person.

Or to be less dismissive, people that tow a lot? My EV is fantastic to drive, and gets pretty decent range, until I tow a many thousand pound and worse yet physically large travel trailer, and then my efficiency drops to about 1.7 miles per kWh, which gets me about 166 miles on a full charge (and 0% to 100% charging is slow).

Which mostly means I don’t plan on any trips to locations much over 100 miles away with a big travel trailer. Which is ok, it is a big EV, I can sleep in it if I want. Not quite as nice as an actual TT, but it works. Other people maybe actually tow enough to that they can’t just decide to “not do that”.

Well for me it is a rare problem, say 0-3 blackouts a year, and 0-1 lasting more then a few hours. So less important then say “how does it deal with a long trip I make once a year”.

On the other hand a 3 day power outage in the winter (not normal, but not unusual) is no joke. It is enough of a “no joke” the most houses around here have an external input for a generator or other 240V power source. Mine in particular will power the house’s heating (well the water circulation pumps and the furnace ignition), as well as the kitchen fridge/freezer, and the wall outlets & ceiling fixtures in a few rooms. Which is nice because it means for around 500W you get heat, lights, and a way to keep the beer cold. You don’t get the stove (electric, high draw 240V), or the microwave (I mean you could drag it over to an outlet that has power, but a microwave is pretty hard on a portable generator), or the coffee maker (again it can be dragged to a outlet, but it is hard on a generator).

I have a big ass APEX battery something like 3kWh and does 240V output. It is way happier with the coffee maker then my little generator. It is decent in general for running the house’s limited “backup power” mode. Except it will only run it for around 6 hours. On the other hand my EV does have 120V 15A out, which won’t run my home heating system, but it will power the APEX. The EV has around 100kWh in the battery, so it’ll run the APEX and indirectly the house for a very long time.

Or to be fair a really crap Harbor Freight portable generator that will last one outage and then die a horrible death could be used to feed the APEX, and the APEX can weather all the rough loads and ramp-up/down and generally make life easier for the generator.

However that is all a bit of a diversion from my main point. It may be a bit uncommon to have a 3 day winter power outage here (although the power outages tend to happen during rough weather, so -20F ice storms tend to bring the power outages, and the bad weather makes it harder to get linemen where they need to be and equipment to them, so yeah the long outages tend to be winters!)...but they aren’t even rare. Live here for a decade and you will have about three of them. Having it well below freezing and no power and no heat means whatever water you have is going to freeze and expand. A lot of heating around here uses water to transit the heat, so the normal “nothing will freeze and burst in the first day, maybe two” you get “well at least one of those pipes runs in the low insulation areas under the roof to help clear ice sheets...and that one will freeze in a few hours. Plus others will freeze pretty early as well, maybe not day one, but you arne’t getting through much of day two without many thousands of dollars of damage.

So try not to over generalize from your local power stability and lack of winter power oriented damage. This kind of feature can be worth tens of thousands of dollars every few years.

I’m less sure that there are a lot of places you can save enough from buying power at low rate times and using it from you down battery at higher rate times (I think there are clearly places with a 3x rate difference, but even so it is around 20 per kWh, and most EVs have more like 40kWh batteries, not the 98kWh battery I have, so the savings tops out around $8/day and that isn’t a lot even if it doesn’t put any noticeable extra strain on your EV’s lifetime it has a super low payback. Then again maybe some places have a much larger kWh cost and a bigger off-peak discount? I definitely don’t know any place it is a fast payback though.

eMudhra is exiting the global SSL/TLS certificate business and is offering customers Sectigo-issued replacements [ ... ]

...Sectigo? Née Comodo? They haven't always been the sharpest tools in the shed, either.

And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world, in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. [emphasis mine]

-- Arthur Jensen, Network (destroying his golden goose)

Further viewing.

I’m in the awkward position of being a long time proponent of “hire experts and retain them, software isn’t a one and done it is a lifecycle and having someone with deep knowledge is a competitatave advantage”, and yet also after a lay-off at the big G a software consultant.

Which makes my opinion of this maybe a bit self serving, but it is appropriate to hire outside help for “OMG we have to fix this right away, no time to get approval for a permanent staffing increase, or to find someone who works for just the right amount of money to not upset all the employees who would want a raise if the new guy gets more...and we can put up with someone outside the normal corp culture for a few months as long as they aren’t too far outside of it...but never take a permian hire that doesn’t wear just the right tie and use the perfect tone to suck up”.

So: need a security fix before billions leak out of your company? Hire a contractor that can get the job done, unless you luck into a new employee that can.

Need to copy another companies feature before you lose all the market share? Hire a contractor, but keep “contract to employee” conversion in your back pocket.

Have an idea for a killer new feature nobody else has: develop that in house. If you really can’t get the resources allocated long term for that, a contractor is better then nothing, but you really want in house knowledge of how the feature works, and how many other departments it touches and all the technical and interdepartmental entanglements. So doing that with a outside expert makes it hard to support long term.

Plus the except from the article already says:

It is unclear if the 1000 contractors “remain here today” because they were hired on year long contracts for four months of work, or if they are now a roving hit squad for tough bugs and the contract is “long term”. Also it doens’t say if the 3000 people already “in that area” are employees or other contractors. So I’m not really sure if we are seeing a company not willing to invest in operations, or if they are investing money rather then time (contractors are fast to hire but tend to cost more over time then internal hires -- even if you retain them).

Elon, Sam, Mark, Peter, et al... You are cordially invited to go fsck yourselves.

The magnitude of destruction you have wrought upon this industry, upon our livelihoods, and upon society as a whole, cannot be calculated, much less excused. You have stolen the corpus of human ingenuity and creativity from its creators without recompense, and now are trying to sell a provably shittier version of it back to us at a markup.

And, let's be honest, this is what you wanted to build -- a barely capable servant who will do your bidding, whatever it is, immediately, without question or compunction. It's extremely telling about your moral compasses that you studiously sat on your hands when your customers were creating graphic sexual imagery of celebrities over their vociferous objections; or impressionable young people (who needed help, not encouragement) were being driven to suicide by your chatbots; but "torturing" a memory block of neural net constants is somehow the bridge too far?

I repeat: Go fsck yourselves.

I have a wildcard cert from LetsEncrypt, which I install on all the services on my home LAN. However, because it's a wildcard, LetsEncrypt insists that I prove domain ownership by updating some DNS TXT records. My DNS provider doesn't support automated updates to TXT records. So ACME won't work, so I have to do that bit by hand.

Next, I have to distribute the cert to a handful of local services, including pfSense, TrueNAS, Postfix, the Unifi Controller (extra annoying, because Java), Forgejo, and probably a couple others I've forgotten about. None of that is automated, either. It hasn't been so painful that I've bothered to write scripts for the process, so I get to do a little SSH dance every three months.

"Deploy your own!" Couple of issues there: 1) Everyone treats self-signed certs as suspicious, so they're inappropriate for Postfix TLS; 2) Every time I've tried that, Firefox and/or Chrome complain about some obscure feature not being what they expect. The latest headache had to do with OCSP stapling, which has to be turned on -- oh, whoops, now it has to be turned off... Bleah. LetsEncrypt certs Just Work, so I haven't revisited building my own CA.

This "new" site is part of a larger effort by that slob to kneecap or compromise US government Web sites, and steal your personal data.

I first read about the effort here: https://thedreydossier.substac...

Yesterday, she took a look under the hood of America.gov, and yes, it's as bad as everything else the DOGE vandals have been doing: https://thedreydossier.substac...

Up until this point, government Web sites were designed, built, and maintained by the agencies responsible for that government service. For example, if you wanted to apply for or renew your passport, you would go to state.gov, which is run by the US Department of State, which is responsible for processing applications for and issuing passports. No other department has lawful jurisdiction over passports.

From the point of view of the law, that's still true. But the slob, without anyone's permission, kluged together passports.gov. This site was built and is run by the White House's "National Design Studio," completely outside the law and without any independent oversight. The State Department was not consulted and has nothing to do with it. Further, the site is filled with third-party trackers, analytics, and some custom code that copies every page you view, including form contents, to an unknown third party.

Oh, and the guy leading the National Design Studio and in charge of building these fake sites? He's Joe Gebbia -- cofounder of Airbnb. Read both articles for more details.

In short, you should treat America.gov as a malware site and stay well away from it. Under no circumstances should you feed it any of your personal information.

what's the point?

The point is to be able to use your hardware in the manner you deem appropriate, and to ensure it is not doing sneaky shit behind your back.

If, instead of a Playstation, we were talking about rooting LG televisions to run custom Linux builds stripped of pervasive privacy-violating code and "apps," I suspect your opinion might be rather different. (And no, when the entire industry has turned to the Dark Side, voting with your wallet doesn't work.)

Iovine, the music executive and Dr. Dre's partner in Beats by Dre, [ ... ]

...Yeah, thought so.

Sony MDR-V6 forever, dudes...

"It is clear Flock has aspirations far beyond ALPRs to become a digital platform for policing," [emphasis mine]

They misspelled, "Orwellian suveillance and harrassment."

Law enforcement officers are already abusing Flock's existing capabilities for stalking. This will not improve matters one iota.

Some light reading on the topic: https://www.epi.org/publicatio...

The expansion pack is currently available only for the platforms listed. If you own Quake from GOG.com, the Epic Store, or own the original CD-ROM, you are, for the moment, SOL.

That isn’t really true. Let’s say I have a service where I sell dirty filthy smut. You want that dirty filthy smut. I require you to set up an account. So I know what account name you have picked, if it is “WankerWeasel” I can guess that it is the same WankerWeasel as is on SlashDot and maybe other places, but that is a guess. If I look at the IP address you use to connect to my web server I can assume I know roughly where you are, although Private Relay makes that a pretty bad guess (I’m in VT and everyone that looks at my Private Relay IP address is going to think I’m around 400 miles away in MA. Which doesn’t make me “hidden enough” if I don’t want it known I’m in the USA, but hey, Apple didn’t promise me that, plus the farther they drag the traffic the more latency gets introduced). In the future when you use the passkey again I’ll know it is the same identity as was used before, and very likely the same person. I still don’t know if you are the same person as is on SlashDot. I definitely don’t know what state you live in, or if you are in the EU what country. If you are on a smartphone I probably can’t figure out your movements if you use Private Relay unless the passkey continuously leaks the address (i.e. in future verifications not just creation), and even then I’ll only see it on login. If Private Relay also covered that traffic I wouldn’t know any thing about your travel habits.

So sure you making an account gives me some ability to track you, but not really much to correlate you to any other existing data I might want to link yup so I can leverage my vast store of citrus treat preferences to advertise at you at a higher success rate. Folks always looking for ways to blame Apple

Yeah, they are (now) the big guy on the block, so many root for failure, and point and jeer. Plus on slashdot they are frequently seen as the enemy of open source even though they do frequently contribute patches back to various things, or entirely open up works they do internally.

That said this is an Apple screwup. I’m pretty sure it was an accident not an intentional privacy leak so they can “look good” but still gather privacy data. It is at worst a bug someone noticed prior to release and it got filed as a P1 or a P2 and got demoted to a P2 or a P3 so the product could ship, and once shipped rather then being treated as a “fix ASAP” it got treated as “that can’t be a block ship bug by definition, because we shipped with it, so P2 at best, why should we block a future product for a bug we already shipped?”, so it is sitting in someone’s radar backlog and it hasn’t gotten fixed despite being fixable (maybe the private relay folks and the passkey folks have a disagreement on how to fix it, but it doesn’t seem like it is a hard fix, either have passkey ask PR how to route traffic PR can’t recognize as “web traffic to reroute”, or PR has a mechanism to mark non port 80 port 443 traffic as something that PR needs to reroute and passkey isn’t using it, but should -- maybe it is a little deeper, maybe PR doesn’t have a way to encapsulate non http(s) traffic and passkey’s protocol isn’t “enough like” http to work, so a general VPN needs to be used, and Apple’s private relay partners are not up for general VPN, and Apple hasn’t solved the busness side of that yet, not even the minimal “only VPN a few protocols from processes that have the right entitlement so it can be used on a case by case basis for things like passkey but not magically give everyone a free VPN that Apple has to pay for if they use it for bulk data”).