Easy, replace them all with AI! :D

An assumption, and an incorrect one at that. I don't carry it everywhere. Except when I'm on-call, which means the location data is somewhere within my 35 acres anyway, which tracks the same as if I leave it at home. And it's a librem 5, so when I want to carry it but don't want to be tracked, I flip some switches and I'm offline. Physical disconnect. Not everyone trades their basic privacy for a bit of convenience. Your asaumption tells me what side of that you're on.

The assumption you can't have a quality car without tracking is ignorant. 2015 WRX STI, no onstar, no tracking, 47k miles in perfect condition. 2019 RAM 3500 Tradesman package, 55k miles, no onstar, no tracking (original owner custom ordered from the factory, the dealership apologized for the lack of lojack, I told them that was great). In other words, do your homework, shop around, take care of your vehicles, and you don't have to be tracked.

I do not, and cannot, understand how a supposedly tech-savy site like slashdot (obviously not what it once was) misses this point in every discussion of the subject. For some people, the issue isn't charging, or range, or quality, or any such thing. There is the major issue of privacy. Do you WANT to drive around in a metal box that spies on you at all times? Do you WANT to park a car on your property that has cameras facing 360 degrees around and inside of it? Is no one concerned that, as I predicted, this "private" footage is accessible to tesla employees so they can have a private slack channel to share videos of people screwing in their cars? Show me an EV with no internet connection. Show me the EV that works when you pull the sim card. Show me the EV that's fully functional in an entirely offline state. Show me the EV that I can troubleshoot and repair without permission from the manufacturer. You can't. Because it doesn't exist. Christ on a goddamn cracker, this used to be a tech community that rebelled at the very notion of persistent and pervasive tracking and monitoring, but when it comes to EVs, no one even mentions the complete and total lack of privacy. Even if it was viable where I live (it's not, the temps get so cold the thing would neither run nor charge in the winter, ignoring the fact that there are like 5000 people in my county and maybe two public chargers within 75 miles), I would not park this invasive spyware at my home, much less drive around in it. And no one EVER mentions this issue. If this was MS Car, would you trust MS to protect your privacy and let them slurp up every detail of your every movement, and put cameras all over the place? No, of course not. Or at least I would hope not. So, why is no one here concerned about the invasive nature of every EV on the damn market?!

My front end iMac with 10.14 lasts about a month or so before a panic. Currently:

$ uptime
16:24 up 38 days, 5:01, 9 users, load averages: 4.79 7.10 6.14

As you can see from the load, that poor iMac is getting a workout. The OS gives up after a few weeks. I just got a new M2 Pro mini... not thrilled with Ventura, considering installing Monterey. But we'll see. Hopefully it stays up longer.

A front-end Linux server that hosts haproxy and other stuff:

$ uptime
  21:24:45 up 528 days, 21:36, 1 user, load average: 0.52, 0.43, 0.33

Packages do get updated regularly, but clearly the kernel hasn't been updated in quite a while. That machine only reboots when I tell it to. I cannot recall when I last experienced a forced kernel panic/reboot other than power related on any Linux machine. I recall back In The Day our SunOS workstations with uptimes in multiple thousands of days.

Yeah, that's reassuring. Except, what's being described here falls under neither of those categories. It's not a backdoor, and it doesn't require providing access to Apple's servers. So, Apple is blithely sidestepping the issue with careful phrasing, denying only activities about which they were not asked, while artfully ignoring those about which they were.

Seriously, though, the problem for Tesla isn't just that people will misuse the system. The problem is, even when the system isn't at fault, and the driver knows it wasn't at fault, there will still be a subset of people who will try to lie and blame the system in order to weasel out of fines/criminal charges/general responsibility, because it's new enough, controversial enough, and makes for a sufficiently good sound bite that some media outlet will start screaming bloody murder about it being Tesla's fault, and other media outlets will pick it up and run with it without any form of fact checking.

If they succeed, they should be sure to take care when stocking the soda machine in the break room. Those things can be dangerous...

What in the world could be the point of this? Suppose the deal goes through as described. From the security researcher's perspective, the code is already in the wild, downloaded repeatedly. Could easily be forked to a new project, hosted by someone else, etc. It will be back up and online the moment he takes it down. From the malware author's perspective, if he gives up all the existing keys, he loses his current "market", but he can just change the keys, and redeploy his malware. So, the malware author gains nothing because the project will undoubtedly remain online. The security researcher gains nothing, since the malware author can just deploy a new version with different keys. So, the exchange does nothing but generate headlines. Nothing else accomplished.

Who wants to help me test their resolve by helping edit my new Wikipedia page, "List of Pirate Bay Proxy Sites"?

To quote the article you linked,

So, if we are to accept the conclusions of this article, we shouldn't really be able to tell the difference between 480p and 720p until we get to roughly 10-12 feet. That's ridiculous, I could tell a 720p from a 480p image from twice that distance. If you can't, double-check that 20/20 of yours, may be time for a new prescription.

Permit me to disagree. I have not so hot vision (contacts, -4.50), and, unlike many people I know, I can clearly distinguish between, say, 720p and 1080p. I just moments ago installed my new 55" 4k Vizio (P series ftw!), and the difference is remarkable. It's fairly noticeable on upscaled 1080p content, but plug in a computer and push some real 4k (read: games), and the difference is remarkable. At a viewing distance of about 10 feet, the difference in clarity is readily apparent. And I'm not alone in this regard. The friends who helped me install this beast are fellow videophiles, and we were all blown away by the difference. I'm about to hop on to netflix to start up my subscription again (haven't had an active netfilx account in years) just so I can stream their 4k content (already have amazon prime), and I'm eagerly awaiting 4k blu ray (not that I'll spend much time swapping discs, as with current blu ray, they'll go in the drive just once, to be ripped, and then get carefully filed away).

Also, I heard many of your arguments years ago when HD was first rearing its head in the market. "There's no content, no one will buy it", "no one will buy it due to lack of content, so no one will make content", "current resolutions are completely sufficient, and no one will see a difference anyway". All wrong. Give it a year or two. Even if 4k blu ray doesn't take off particularly well, expect to see more and more streaming/downloadable 4k content. And, a quick perusal of 4k video on torrent sites show that 4k is already being pushed by the same people who have pushed every other major advance in home video for the last few decades: the porn industry. I couldn't find any 4k movies to download, but if you want to watch people screw in 4k, the future is now.

I'll go ahead and get off your lawn now.

Mugen Power Batteries, great batteries, excellent price. They make extended batteries, some that fit in stock battery compartments, some that use extended battery covers. I've used them on several phones, and am about to buy one for my new LG G3 (only an extra 100ma, but when you're on call, it helps).

This is interesting. I was just discussing this with my friend last night, and proposed this exact solution. However, it's still a reactive solution. It will detect that you may be the victim of a stingray attack, but it won't stop your phone from connecting in the first place. But there is another potential solution, I just don't have enough experience developing android roms to say how it would have to be implemented. The idea is this: maintain a database of all know cell towers (your link to OpenCellID would do nicely, they offer their DB for download). Using a rooted or fully custom ROM, such as cyanogenmod, have the phone compare any new tower to the database prior to connecting. If it doesn't exist in the database, red flag it and don't connect.

The question is, can this be done on the OS level, or does it have to happen on the driver level? If it can be done at the OS level, easy peasy, just modify the code to establish tower connections to include this check. If it has to happen on a driver level, it gets trickier. Most phones use proprietary binary drivers for their cell radios, so they couldn't be readily modified. However, it may be possible to load an intermediate driver, which in turn loads the proprietary driver. If it could be determined which driver calls involved connecting to a new tower, you could just pass through everything else, and only pass through calls to the tower connect function if they passed your database lookup. Trickier, but doable. Because really, you want to avoid connecting to these things at all. Nice though it is to see you're being attacked, it's better to stop the attack before it starts.