I have been able to "smarten" dumb appliances by plugging them into smart power switches. For less than $8 each I bought a couple boxes of smart switches from Amazon, then reflashed them with Tasmota -- no more cloud! -- and joined them to Home Assistant. Now any device I want to be smart, I plug it into a smart switch and monitor the power.

One of my scripts monitors the power draw on my dryer, and when it goes above 100W for a minute then drops below 10W for 15 seconds, it knows the cycle is done and alerts us to go down to the basement and take out the clothes before they wrinkle. A similar script monitors the washer.

The refrigerator's plug has a script alert me when the average daily power draw is higher than normal. I added that after my son called me from his most recent vacation and said "my refrigerator is using more power than it should, can you go check it?" Sure enough, their freezer door had been left open by their toddler. Of course the food was already thawing, but we cleaned it out a week before they would have come home to a house full of rotted food stench. And before you ask, yes, when I installed Tasmota I configured the switch to be "always on", so that even if Home Assistant thinks it would be a good idea to shut off the refrigerator's power, it can't.

I also have a small water pump on a smart switch. Normally the pump draws 36W, but when it runs dry it draws 30W. Now if the power consumption drops below 33W and stays there for a few minutes, it shuts off the pump and alerts me that the water is low.

So I get what I need -- timely information about the equipment in my home, automated reactions when things go bad that might keep things from getting worse, and no cloud involvement from any sleazy appliance manufacturers. And an $8 plug is a lot cheaper than paying a $400 premium for a "smart washer".

Tuya's become a nightmare to deal with. They've decided they fear local integrations because they're losing ad revenue when people don't use the Tuya app. They have been going to progressively greater lengths to prevent device buyers from bypassing the Tuya servers and running their stuff locally.

My understanding is you can no longer register for a free Tuya developer account that lets you set it up with the "Local Tuya" integration for HomeAssistant -- you have to have a paid developer account, if it works at all. And their libraries used to flash right onto an ESP32, but now they're encouraging developers to more secure chips, in an attempt to prevent end users from reflashing their own devices with firmware (like Tasmota) that no longer communicates via Tuya services.

I wouldn't buy anything Tuya with the hopes that it will someday integrate with anything else. If you buy them, expect them only to work with the official apps.

PKIs were designed for offline use. There are a couple hundred trusted Certificate Authorities that each issue a "root" certificate. These root certificates are distributed worldwide, in browsers, operating system distros, phones, etc. When you encounter a certificate in the wild, you have to verify the certificate before accepting it, which is done by checking what you can locally: is it expired? Does its DNS name resolve to the name on the cert? Does it have a valid signature? This means checking to see if it was signed by a CA certificate that you already have in your local trust store; if so, you can accept it without going online.

Not to say that the online component of certificate validation isn't important, but it's of varying importance depending on the risk level. When online you should check for certificate revocation, which is to check to see if a previously issued certificate has since been flagged by the CA as compromised and revoked. This can be done by looking for it on a Certificate Revocation List (CRL) published by the signing authority, or by querying the authority's Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) server. But it's an optional step, and can be skipped in low-risk situations (such as being offline.)

Much as Tim Sweeny has got a lot bad press for this he's got the right of it.

Enabling linux support and anti cheat is fine if you're willing to accept that cheating can still happen, but is low consequence.

But there's nothing stopping you from writing your own linux kernel patch and installing that on a steam deck. If you can't trust the kernel, you can't trust anything that depends on the kernel. For something like fortnite there's a huge financial incentive to cheat, Destiny isn't as bad, but it's still potentially game breaking.

For Eldenring you can mod the game on PC anyway, they just don't let you play online, so they're willing to accept some level of risk, Apex legends have their own risk tolerance.

Windows (and the consoles) also have the same problem but writing and deploying a kernel patch for Windows or a console is much harder, and then it's a Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo problem, not such much an application problem.

One would assume you can still stream otherwise unsupported games from your Windows PC to a Steam Deck, or install windows on it, and run the games that way.

Hawala always provided the kind of money transfer services that cryptocurrencies are specifically designed for, so it's no surprise that they are in this game now.

As usual, though, this take on hawala focuses on drug trade, and completely ignores the fact that it's also the system used for routine long distance transfers between family members etc.

Why build roads if they're getting bombed into rubble every decade?

I love how it's mostly self-entitled Westerners who never had to deal with an oppressive government extolling the virtues of monetary regulation here.

Russians, meanwhile, lived through a default and a bunch of reforms that were borderline fraud (like the govt giving one weekend to exchange the old banknotes for the new). Ransomware is peanuts in comparison.

It really depends on how radical you want to get. If your only reason to not run your own email server is the lack of free time and/or desire to administer it, then maybe consider Helm ( https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthehelm.com?

I can think of plenty of small businesses with fewer than 10 employees who need access.

How about "fuck them both"?

A simple solution to this is to ditch copyright terms altogether, but tax copyright (and other forms of intellectual property) like we tax real estate. Then copyrights will only last for as long as sufficient profit can be made to sustain them, and content will fall into public domain immediately after.

Better yet, make the tax progressive over time, starting with zero for the first few years (to give author some time to market it), and then exponentially increasing. This would reflect the lost (to the commons) value of directly or indirectly derived works that would have being created if not for copyright restrictions - since every potential derived work would itself be the basis for more works, this value grows exponentially over time.

Keep in mind that the "natural" price of a book is the cost of making a copy. The only reason why it's possible to charge significantly more than that is because of copyright, which is itself an artificial construct created by the government. As such, it can come with arbitrary strings attached, including "price fixing".

As far as having less choice - is that a real problem these days? If anything, we're drowning in content, especially once you include self-publishing. I read every day, and yet my reading queue has grown non-stop for the past decade or so, at an increasingly accelerating rate.

Did you graduate top of your class in the Navy Seals, by chance?

Allow me to demonstrate, then.

Two days ago, you wrote - and I quote directly from your comment: "regardless of the fact that we are attacking your fundamental rights or limiting your fundamental rights, and the charter says that is wrong, we're still going to go ahead and do it".

Sounds like you hate freedom. Should you hang?

I'm no fan of Trudeau. I'm merely pointing out that you're spreading outright misinformation. "He's a bad guy anyway" is not a valid excuse for that. If you want to criticize him, cite data that actually supports that argument, don't fudge it.