That's funny because Asurion has multiple repair centers that tear down and refurbish iPhones and use Apple parts and maintenance interfaces that they're given access to. Nothing about what they do couldn't be done elsewhere by a trained technician.

The batteries are not 'crippled' artificially. There are extra cells in the battery and the control system balances them for wear and failure. There's extra margin built in so the pack has a longer service life at it's rated capacity. Telsa is unlocking that margin temporarily to help people get to safety. It wouldn't be very smart to use it all the time though as the service life of the pack will be shortened. It's the same thing done in SSDs. There's more raw flash memory in drives than you get to use. The extra is there to handle wear and failure.

The thing about vulnerabilities is one single entity can't find everything. If you're then disclosing those to get everything patched you are harming your offensive capabilities. It may impact another party's offensive capabilities as well, but it's very likely they have vulnerabilities that you don't know about. So then you have a double edged sword. Do you keep the exploit to use offensively and risk the undisclosed exploit being used against you, or disclose it and still risk another undisclosed exploit you don't know about still being used against you? Exploits are a limited resource and they expire. Once used they have an even shorter shelf life before discovery. You don't know when things will get discovered by another party as well. They need a constant influx of new vulnerabilities because the ones they have may not be useful against an assigned target tomorrow. Your warhead, information collection, and mission ability is all determined by the offensive software you have at your disposal. Everyone else will call it malware. A reachable known target can be implanted with a non-replicating tool. These are the most covert, but also the most difficult as you may not have a direct path to the target machine. That goes into getting access to a well defended network. That requires something that spreads on it's own so it can possibly reach the machines you need coverage on. This is also a double edged sword as putting in limitations to spreading also gives away the fact it's not a random infection. Those type of tools always end up spreading to unintended places and getting examined by security researchers. If a worm component is added then you cross into the realms of epidemiology and outbreaks though without geographic isolation as a barrier. It only takes one user in a network to get infected and then it'll spread until AV and OS patches catch up. So disclosing vulnerabilities isn't always an option if you want to remain effective offensively. It becomes a lot like a classic game theory problem The strategic choice would be to hang onto as many vulnerabilities as long as they can, and that's what everyone does.

While a curated store is good for the average user I won't tolerate anything that restricts what I can or can't do on my computer. Apple will at least let you turn off the store requirements for their computers or make exceptions. The push for cloud everything is just a method for them to collect more data. Storing your data on someone else's servers is not the answer to privacy or security.

I should have been more descriptive. Nuclear is a base sustaining power source, but it sucks at rapid changes in demand. Wind and solar can provide quite a bit but something like gas turbines or another quick reaction source will still have to be there to meet or back off on demand to keep the grid stable.

The most current approved design, the AP1000 from Westinghouse can continue cooling the reactor with zero power using it's passive system. If there is a power failure condition the valves automatically open and the passive system takes over. Much like some of the US Navy's reactors the AP1000 can naturally circulate coolant without pumps by convection. The passive systems are mostly all within the containment vessel and will operate even with total loss of control systems. The most interesting design I've seen is the Moltex stable salt reactor. It's a molten salt reactor that relies totally on natural convection to cool itself with heat exchangers in the coolant to take away heat for producing power. It's impossible for it to melt down because the fuel and coolant is already a molten liquid salt. The design is so simple it's vastly cheaper. It's got many years until even experimental approval.

We have four AP1000 Gen 3+ reactors under construction now. These are the shining examples of what the next generation design can be until the NRC approves any gen 4 or the number of MSR reactor designs being proposed. Nuclear can be much safer and more efficient if we can bring more next generation designs with drastically better safety measures online and retire the old units which do have a good safety record, but don't have near the number of safeguards as something like the AP1000 which can be kept safe even with a total loss of power unlike the older generations. Yes I support nuclear, and I support solar and wind, but those not familiar with the power industry don't realize how delicate a balance the grid is with supply and demand. There has to be a source to keep the grid stable with the varying wind and solar input. The best choice for that is nuclear be it fission, or fusion.

Moral of the story is to not piss of a very capable hacker community buy going after their heroes.

The setup I use involves VMware Workstation and the virtual teams. I have a collection of VMs to run samples in and those it in a virtual network. I have the gateway setup using FakeDNS to resolve everything to that one IP address no matter what it is. On that I run a webserver, snort, and Wireshark to grab the network traffic. On the network side you can develop a signature to catch it coming across the network both bots calling back and the actual executable itself. I would suggest studying network protocols and the PE format that windows uses in executables.