I wish I could say I'm surprised.

However, this has been a consistent pattern that goes back to the 1930s and I wouldn't raise an eyebrow if you corected that to the 1830s. Companies know that you make the most money by selling to both sides.

This will be great for Haiku, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD installs, there's not the remotest possibility there'll be binaries for these. Not because the software couldn't be ported, but because the sorts of people politicians hire to write software would never be able to figure out the installer.

I still can't get ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude to write a decent story or do an engineering design beyond basic complexity. They're all improving, but they're best thought of as brain-storming aids rather than actual development tools.

They don't provide cloud *storage* but they do heavily push you towards cloud connectivity.

The mobile app did not support direct connections at all until recently.
Although now it does, it explicitly ignores SSL certs when connecting directly resulting in MITM risk.
Although the controller is reachable via HTTPS, it does not let you view video from a mobile device and forces you to use the app, this appears to be an arbitrary limitation as you can access it just fine from an ipad which is basically a large iphone.
Support for IPv6 is very poor (many users have CGNAT for legacy traffic so IPv6 is the only way to reach devices).
They broke IPv6 completely for a while - the HTTPS service did not listen on the v6 address even when the device did and could be accessed via SSH.
There is no support for custom SSL certs unless you use third party scripts, and the updates keep breaking those scripts.
There is no support for dynamic dns without third party scripts.

Until recently the only way to access the cameras from mobile was through the cloud service, you could access the device over https directly but then it wouldnt let you view video if you were doing so on a mobile device.

The mobile app still defaults to forwarding everything through the cloud, and although there is now an option to connect directly in the most recent versions it does so by ignoring the SSL certificate making you susceptible to MITM attacks.

Their IPv6 support is also very poor, and there are a lot of networks using CGNAT for legacy service so inbound legacy traffic is not possible. There is no option to configure IPv6 through the web interface, no mention of it at all, although the device will acquire an address via SLAAC and DHCPv6.

The controllers themselves don't provide an easy way to load a proper SSL certificate, although it can be achieved with third party scripts.

There's also no built in dynamic dns support which is needed if the ISP keeps changing your prefix.

What I need is something that supports SSL over IPv6, and lets me use a valid cert preferably providing an easy way to request one from letsencrypt or other such services. The unifi stuff can be forced to work with third party scripts, but they still try to push you towards their cloud service and you still have the security risk due to the lack of ssl cert checking in the mobile app.

The chance of someone capable of learning critical skills being born in switzerland is the same as anywhere else, if the swiss are not training their own citizens to perform these critical roles then that's already a failure on their part.

The unifi stuff leans heavily towards cloud, you can force it to do direct connections but its not the default and there are some limitations, and direct access for the mobile app is a relatively new feature.

Social media has become a toxic dump. If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant, then you shouldn't allow them to play in the social media that's out there. Because, frankly, of the two, plutonium is safer.

I do, however, contend that this is a perfectly fixable problem. There is no reason why social media couldn't be safe. USENET was never this bad. Hell, Slashdot at its worst was never as bad as Facebook at its best. And Kuro5hin was miles better than X. Had a better name, too. The reason it's bad is that politicians get a lot of kickbacks from the companies and the advertisers, plus a lot of free exposure to millions. Politicians would do ANYTHING for publicity.

I would therefore contend that Australia is fixing the wrong problem. Brain-damaging material on Facebook doesn't magically become less brain-damaging because kids have to work harder to get brain damage. Nor are adults mystically immune. If you took the planet's IQ today and compared it to what it was in the early 1990s, I'm convinced the global average would have dropped 30 points. Australia is, however, at least acknowledging that a problem exists. They just haven't identified the right one. I'll give them participation points. The rest of the globe, not so much.

A (proper) truck GPS will avoid roads that would be unsuitable for trucks, but would be fine for a regular car. This could inconvenience you at times.

No, it is "end to end" encryption exactly as they claimed - one of those ends is their datacenter where the data is processed.

As per the description from the linked blog:

The "chosen recipient" is Kohler's datacenter, so it's behaving exactly as claimed. The application functions by processing the data on their servers, which is also why a monthly fee is charged to provide the service.

You could theoretically avoid this by transmitting the data directly between the camera and your device, and doing the processing on your device, although that might not be practical

There are many much worse examples where data is routed through hosted servers unnecessarily, typically as a kludge to get around NAT restrictions.

It's "licensed" when it suits them, and "sold" when it suits them.. Customer always gets screwed.

That's actually a good question. Inks have changed somewhat over the past 5,000 years, and there's no particular reason to think that tattoo inks have been equally mobile across this timeframe.

But now we come to a deeper point. Basically, tattoos (as I've always understand it) are surgically-engineered scars, with the scar tissue supposedly locking the ink in place. It's quite probable that my understanding is wrong - this isn't exactly an area I've really looked into in any depth, so the probability of me being right is rather slim. Nonetheless, if I had been correct, then you might well expect the stuff to stay there. Skin is highly permeable, but scar tissue less so. As long as the molecules exceed the size that can migrate, then you'd think it would be fine.

That it isn't fine shows that one or more of these ideas must be wrong.

Any communication technology can be tracked - cell towers can pinpoint your location, hard lines obviously are laid to a specific address so the idea that your location can be tracked when your using a particular service is nothing new, and many governments already require the ability to locate an individual subscriber when presented by an appropriate warrant or court order.
A service which cannot pinpoint users would be illegal in many countries and would not gain regulatory approval.

A healthy body will regulate blood sugar, and when someone suffers from diabetes their ability to regulate blood sugar is compromised. This can result in either dangerously high or dangerously low blood sugar levels.
Doctors would recommend patients drinking a sugary energy drink if their blood sugar dips to dangerous levels, but this becomes difficult when a lot of places don't even sell full sugar drinks any more.

Someone with diabetes needs to control their sugar intake, not replace sugar entirely. This becomes a lot harder when products that previously contained a lot of sugar now contain something else without obvious differentiation on the packaging.

Some artificial sweeteners were found to pose higher risks for diabetes than sugar, for instance: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.oncologyrepublic.c...
and yet people are pushed towards the sweeteners as if they're a magic solution etc.

In many countries it's becoming increasingly difficult to avoid artificial sweeteners. There are many restaurants now where the only soft drinks available contain sweeteners, your only options are alcohol or water.
For years we were offered a choice, but now the full sugar choice is being increasingly taken away from people.