> The idea that ROMs from questionable sources make your device safer sounds very strange to me.
It's about owning your hardware, not safety. A person that's willing to go through the hassle knows the consequences of such actions and how to deal with them.
Do "normal people" need to do that? Absolutely not. Should it be easy to do that? Absolutely not. But for those of us that really want to own our hardware, there should be a way of doing so without relying on exploits.
Yeah, pointing to the problem is quite easier than figuring out a solution.
As far as I'm concerned, I actually read the popups and having to click okay about five or six times in a row would make me second-guess my decision. Would that work for everyone? Most of the people? Some of the people? I don't know that answer.
> I'm not even sure if such a barrier should be technological or legal.
My answer would be both. I highly doubt it's in hardware manufacturer's interest to figure out a technological solution, but if there's some legal incentive for them to at least try, they'll figure out a technological solution.
Android's option of connecting the device to a computer over USB, running a program on the computer, logging into the device, seeing a scary warning and wiping the device seems to work well. I don't think I've heard of a large number of people being tricked into unlocking their bootloader — at worst, a handful of script kiddies might have been tricked.
As with any Apple product ever, this is not a "completely new tech product". This is a long established market that Apple believes they can do better than everyone else.
For an exorbant price of course, but that stage is some years into the future.
It's easy for a story or two to go viral (as in, slightly easier than on other platforms). What's not easy is to retain that viewership. Similarly to YouTube, you could put weeks worth of effort into one article just for it to flunk spectacularly simply because the recommendation algorithm didn't like it in the first 12 hours or so since you've clicked "publish".
In any case, thanks for mentioning it. Thoroughly enjoyed Story of Your Life and Others and had no idea he released a second short story collection a few months ago.
It's going straight to the top of my to-read list.
> and no, sending a reset command via apps is not feasible (what if you've lost the account password and you've accidentally paired it to your neighbours wifi?)
Hubs save all the pain with smart lighting system. No need for an account, system works locally. If you wanna control them remotely, you can (but you don't have to). Connected to the wrong wifi? Reset a hub instead of individual bulbs. You pair bulbs with hubs and have just one device spamming traffic to your router.
Ikea and Philips Hue seem to be the only systems that got this solution down properly.
I have a few problems with hubs; you need to store the physical thing somewhere, and as a house with difficulties in getting a wifi connection to corners, I can't guarantee that the coverage will be good enough before committing to a whole system. Then there's interoperability - I don't really want to be locked in to Phillips bulbs (though I'm sure some are a little more interoperable than others)
So I'm left thinking: I already have a wireless signal hitting most of the house, why complicate things? I'm not sure ability to reset is worth it...
Note that the Philips system is a mesh network, so you communicate with the bulbs via WiFi/LAN to hit the hub, but the hub communicates via the mesh network, which lets it reliably reach distant bulbs out of WiFi range so long as there's a bulb chain it can bounce the signal along.
> I have a few problems with hubs; you need to store the physical thing somewhere, and as a house with difficulties in getting a wifi connection to corners
The hub only speaks WiFi to the app.
All the smart units (hub included) use Zigbee mesh-networking for cross device-communication, which is self-extending and only gets more reliable the more units you add.
At no point in time does IKEA or Hue bulbs depend on WiFi to function.
I couldn't agree more. I can't help but feel like the Venn's diagram between people who suggest "move to a more rural area" and people who never lived in a rural area for a prolonged period of time is a full circle.
It sure doesn't help that there's a bunch of articles about people who "found happiness" by moving to a rural area like a year ago. You may see some benefit in the short term (yes, one year is a short term), but on a long term it will fuck you up.
I grew up and lived in a small mountain community. 63 houses. The "big city" nearby was population 50k. That is where we went to school. I lived there for 30 years, and commuted to a coastal city two hours away for several years. I've since started being fully remote.
Can you explain on how being rural will fuck you up? Do I count as rural as described above?
What was your commute time to the big city? Being in a small community but being within a daily commute of a big city seems to make you a bedroom community, not an isolated community.
About 20-30 minutes into town. That town was traditionally agricultural but became what was considered the bedroom community for going another hour out to where a lot of people worked, or one more hour out to where more people worked. All that aside, rural means relating to the countryside rather than in town. We were out of town for sure.
I can't help but feel like the Venn's diagram between people who suggest "move to a more rural area" and people who never lived in a rural area for a prolonged period of time is a full circle.
I've seen plenty of comments from people in rural areas along the lines of "Why are all the young folks moving to the big cities instead of here?"
The answer is so simple it's brilliant: you need a permission from the local police in order to organize a protest on a specific location at a specific time. In most of the cases, that works fine.
In a small number of cases when the authorities really don't want you to organize a protest, they'll keep denying you one location after the other using bullshit excuses until the date when the protest is set to happen. Then they can crack it down for "unlawful assembly".
Note that I'm not from Russia, but I am from a country that looks up to Russia for some forsaken reason and we have experienced protests getting killed in this fashion.
> you need a permission from the local police in order to organize a protest on a specific location at a specific time.
Correction #1: from a town administration, not a police.
Correction #2: the actual legal state of a non-permitted demonstration is fuzzy because while the right for it is given by the Constitution, organizers and any violations of "peace and unarmed" way could be penalized due to federal laws which are stated applicable by the same Constitution.
Then it's going to lose against the free gitlab, and the pricing page (https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/) that doesn't even have a "contact us for a price" option.
I have never touched their air purifier, but I did three other gadgets (TV box, some indoor camera, some light bulbs).
If privacy is your concern, I wouldn't recommend them. If stability is your concern, I wouldn't recommend them.
The light bulb works with an app only (probably to remove the need for a separate hub), the camera could be rooted to work offline-only (which is why I bought it, but I gave up after a couple of shots and it's currently sitting in my drawer), and the TV box is by far the noisiest device in my local network. It's like 60% of all DNS requests blocked by my Pi-hole.
Their devices are also the most unstable devices I own, to the point where I'm considering just throwing them in the trash and re-investing in another camera and a TV box. I've already replaced the bulb I've purchased with a Philips Hue system. Quite more expensive, but truly works locally.
I have the same experience - Xiaomi makes good and cheap hardware, but the software and reliability are bad. And if you want to keep your data private, skip them.
It's about owning your hardware, not safety. A person that's willing to go through the hassle knows the consequences of such actions and how to deal with them.
Do "normal people" need to do that? Absolutely not. Should it be easy to do that? Absolutely not. But for those of us that really want to own our hardware, there should be a way of doing so without relying on exploits.