If I were talking just about devices I myself use, I would say yes, get rid of all forced updates, but unfortunately, smart TVs are not bought only by the technically adept. (You should see my mother trying to use hers, and given her age and general incomprehension of technology I doubt her understanding is going to improve.) Their devices still have to be patched to keep the botnets from going after the rest of us. I don’t particularly like forced updates, but for security updates on consumer devices they sometimes are the lesser of two evils.

That becomes a problem when we’re talking about the 1% of updates that are sent to prevent your smart TV from becoming part of a distributed botnet, though. Some people might even complain about the 9% of updates intended to keep up with churn in the APIs of 3rd-party services that are part of the functionality the device was purchased for.

What we need is something that restricts forced updates to those categories. That requires regulation, which likely means starting in the EU, since that’s the only major jurisdiction that’s (sometimes) pro-consumer. We also need regulations on labeling that force the manufacturer to indicate on the outside of the packaging in big letters exactly what advertised functionality of a device will break if it’s kept off the internet.

Fair. Two wrongs don’t make a right. (And to be honest? If it were me, I’d actually just drop out of those channels. I’m used to venues on the Internet being easy-come-easy-go.)

Well, there’s always the ancient method that teens used to get their hands on alcohol when I was that age: pay someone who’s down on their luck for ten minutes of their time.

The article notes (along with names of shops—vote with your money, if you’re in the UK), that the ID system being used has the usual racial bias (has a hard time with anyone who isn’t white) and also a gender bias (has an easier time IDing men). And that the provider was careful not to mention this until after people started complaining.

So, we probably shouldn’t do it, then. (Which means that Ford probably will.)

It’s actually worse than that. Apparently, if you go down through enough layers of the movements pushing age-gating for social media in the US, you discover that one of the major funders is . . . Meta/Facebook (or at least this is what is getting batted around on tech sites). Whether they’re actively funding it up here, or it’s just slopover . . . 🤷

The most benign explanation for this is that they want more anti-lawsuit armour. The cynical explanation is that they want to harvest additional personal data from the organization doing the age-gating, so that they can sell more “personalized” ad spaces to their real customers.

(And the real solution? Make the toxic elements of large corporate social media illegal, period, regardless of the user’s age group. And while you’re at it, require any advertising-funded online service that shows different ads to different users to put up an annoying banner saying “we steal your personal data” in big red letters that has to be clicked through every time someone uses the site.)

An indication of whom they’re trying to emulate, perhaps.

It’s a tactic with a long history—I think it started with paper publishers of dictionaries and encyclopedias in the 19th century, if not before.

For what it’s worth, I have a system with first-gen Zen cores (Threadripper 1900X). 8 cores at 3.8GHz. Not too shabby even now. It’s just got a higher power draw than the newer chips. Got a fairly decent price on it on Black Friday of 2017. (Never ran Windows on it, though.)

My suspicion is that they didn’t talk to the neighbours until after they bought the house. So, yeah, lack of due diligence.

Are they claiming that the event has given the property a bad reputation that reduces its value by that amount? I suppose those are plausible grounds for a lawsuit. I can’t think of any other way a death on the property several years ago could cause damage to the new owners. Surely they’re not claiming that the house is haunted (and if that’s the issue, I can imagine the judge being extremely unamused).

anonymity enables greater levels of toxicity

No. No, it doesn’t. Various fora that have required real names and IDs over the years have proven this—people are quite willing to be extremely toxic even if their real names are attached to every post.

If it has a screen in it, it also contains basic electronic components—capacitors, resistors, diodes, etc. And unless something’s changed in the last few years, those are mostly made in China.

Unfortunately, the US’ behaviour is a significant contributor to costs here going up (although not the only one), so it’s difficult to decouple them.

I’m sure that there is an American auto company’s PR arm clinging to the bottom of the rock and hoping that it can scuttle away before anyone flips it over.

(Seriously, anything with a screen in it likely has some parts that were made by Chinese forced labour, including whatever device you’re reading this on.)

Feeding machines to get a pat on the head from the bosses is seriously fucked.

If the tokens are the company’s property and not yours, I guess it’s no different from paying for things with play money. (Or maybe the fake money they burn for the dead in China would be a better analogy.)

Pretty sure they’ve been doing fine without the US market for years.

(It’s going to be interesting to see what happens when BYD sets up dealerships just north of the border, since Canada has given them the okay to import a certain number of vehicles per year.)

Many are scared of what they can’t see (radiation), which isn’t completely indefensible but tends to be exaggerated way beyond the actual risks.

Others are afraid of what they see as “unnatural”, not realizing that nuclear fission is so natural that Mother Nature has at least once spontaneously created a fission reactor without the involvement of human hands. (Seriously—it was in Gabon. And there may be more whose remains we haven’t found.)

Anyway, the big heavy-water CANDUs like the ones at Darlington are pretty damned safe by my understanding, and should shut down spontaneously under most failure modes. I’d rather live next to one of them than next to a coal plant.

" . . . no one lost anything.”

Well, I’m hoping that you lost some face, Mr. Ford.