Bitlocker without a PIN is a setup where a normal boot of the machine decrypts the disk without any user interaction. Why would it be a surprise if it was possible to alternate boot from USB and also be able to automatically decrypt the disk? This would be true for any disk encryption software that doesn't require the user to enter a PIN or password at boot time. If you can boot from alternate boot media, pretty much any operating system would allow that alternate boot to have access to the underlying file system, while bypassing the original operating system accounts, logins, and permissions.

So foreign routers and related firmware is too risky to continue to allow for imports, but it's not too risky to allow the same risky sources continue to give us new firmware? Seems to me if a foreign entity wanted to screw us, now with be the time. It's like, those guys over in the US are going to cut us off, so we should use this last chance to send them backdoored firmware.

I have a car that has a rear view mirror that can operate as a real mirror or as a screen to the rear camera at the flick of a switch. I strongly prefer the real mirror because I don't have to shift the focus of my eyes when looking at it. When driving and looking out the front window, my eyes are focused for distance, and with a real mirror I can see what is ahead of me and what is behind me at the same time. The real rear view mirror is part of my situational awareness without effort. However with a screen for a mirror, my eyes have to focus on the screen which is only a foot or so away, so I can't have what is behind me and what is in front of me in focus at the same time. At night the the video based rear view screen is mostly useless as all I can see is washed out headlights - maybe the dynamic range of my video rear view mirror isn't as good as what's in the Polestar, but technically it's pretty hard to match the dynamic range capability of the human eye. I do love my backup camera and it's great for backing up, but for keeping tabs on what is behind me when I am driving forward, I like the real mirror better.

The overall topic of the thread is about comparing the performance of two browsers, and the summary listed electrical power usage as part of the comparison. Your post was discounting the power comparison portion and writing it off as "greenwashing" as if power comparison had no value other than being green. I am saying that power consumption is a valid technical comparison point for reasons beyond the political. It impacts the total performance possible on the machine (my point), and it impacts cost and battery life (points made in other threads here).

I don't understand your comment about the tasks being different between the two browsers. Each browser's task is to render a web page, if one browser uses less energy rendering the same web page as a different browser, it would objectively perform better by this metric. I would hope that anyone comparing browser performance by this (or any other metric), would have the two browsers render the same web page(s), and ensure that the networks were setup so that they hit the same physical target web server and that the target webserver was in the same cache state for each test.

Because power consumption is a proxy for performance? If you run two different programs (performing the same task) on the same hardware, and one uses more watts (watt hours actually) than the other, then the one using more power resources is using a higher percentage of the total capacity of the system. Processors (and their related cooling infrastructure) have a limited amount of heat they can dissipate. While power consumed is not a (speed) performance metric for a computer running a single task, it is a performance metric when looking the capability of the whole system when the computer is doing multiple things. On a fully loaded system, software pulling more watts will bring down the performance of the overall system more than would software pulling fewer watts, assuming the system has thermal throttling, which most modern systems do.

Watched the video and took a quick look at the website and it's not clear to me where the data lives persistently. I get that there is synchronization and it sounds like that there is some logic to keep cached copies of stuff on multiple nodes based on popularity and the numbers of others subscribing. But say I want to host a personal website or some data of mine that I want to share with others. If that data isn't popular enough and I have no subscribers, does that data only exist in my local node, on my desktop machine? If I want to ensure that the data isn't lost, and is available when my desktop computer is off, do I have to ensure that another node is running on a backed up machine in a hosting facility somewhere? I think the answer to these questions is "yes", but that reality doesn't seem clear in the promotional material, which seems to just say "It's on the Freenet network". This isn't necessarily bad, and does have the advantage that I can control who has access to said node, but sounds like I would still be responsible for a bunch of always on and redundant infrastructure, which is one of things that drove people to centralized data models and "cloud hosting" historically.

It checks the "doing something to save the children" checkbox, checks the the privacy checkbox, and check the easily bypassable checkbox. For parents that actually care, they can give their kids devices that have the kid's age properly set (and not give the kid admin on the device), so it provides reasonable path. Sure, some smarter kids could figure out how to bypass, but those kids are gonna bypass anything. For adults, it's a low configuration bar, and doesn't require exposing actual birthdate or anything sensitive to a lot of apps. For lawmakers, they have done "something".

Data (only) in the cloud isn't your data. Not sure why this is a difficult concept to understand...

Power grids are interesting in that at any given moment the power being consumed needs to match the power being generated; in theory every time you or someone else turns on or off a light, a generator somewhere needs to spin a little faster or slower. In the time lag between the light turning on and the corresponding generator speeding up, the frequency of the grid slows a bit until the corresponding generator speeds up. Realistically no single light (or small load) being turned on or off has impact because there are lots of lights being turned on and off and it all averages out. There are also things like the inertia of spinning mass and banks of capacitors and batteries that smooth the balance of grid consumption and generation. Power grids are engineered and tuned to handle a certain level of consumption swing.

Anyone here a grid engineer that has a real understanding (beyond my vague conceptual understanding) that can comment what a lot of 1MW swings (anytime someone plugs in or unplugs one of these truck chargers) does to a grid or grid design? Are 1MW "lights" being randomly turned on and off a challenge for our grids, or are or grids so large that even 1MW swings are just noise?

That's encouraging news

The Spotty plugin for Lyrion Music Server, formerly Logitech Media Server, formerly Slimserver - one of the best, if not the best open source music player ecosystem out there appears to be a casualty of this. Looks like after "the big scrape", Spotify has tightened down their APIs and have for the time being locked out 3rd party players of Spotify music. Lyrion itself of course still works fine, but you can no longer stream Spotify via it. This sucks because while I can use the Spotify app on my phone or computer, if I want to have music playing throughout the house, there isn't a good way to synchronize multiple Spotify players. Lyrion has been able to synchronize players for multi-room playback way back to the Slimserver days (and way before Sonos was a thing.)

If the Spotty developer can't get it working again, I will likely drop my paid Spotify subscription and have to get my streaming music elsewhere, as the only reason I pay for Spotify is that it has been easy to stream through Lyrion. I suppose I can start downloading from Anna's...

Absolutely no beef here against the Spotty developer, they had the API rug pulled out from under them, and it's not yet clear if there will be a technical solution.

Dropping API support for paid customers is a great way to drive those customers to piracy.

How about a small percentage tax on every trade? Accomplishes "taxing the rich", reducing incentives to high frequency trading, and raises revenue.

If it were truly end to end encryption the consumer endpoint wouldn't be the toilet, it would be the consumer. However I don't think we really want end to end encryption in this case. If so, we might be asking the company to tell their customers to "Take this certificate and shove it up your ass."

One of the reasons we have two pilots is for redundancy in the case that a single pilot becomes incapacitated (or during emergencies, overloaded). How would a technology enforced rule that requires two pilots to agree on something work if one of them is incapacitated? Sure, you could have some system where a single pilot could override that rule, but then you are back to a single pilot making the decision. You could have additional monitoring so that if one pilot does something weird, the other is alerted, but in this case the other pilot noticed immediately (the voice recorder caught one pilot asking the other, "why did you do that"?), so additional monitoring would not have helped.

As others have noted, ultimately you have to trust the pilots as there are lots of ways a pilot desiring to do so could crash a plane.