Well, that didn’t work, and now I own some socks with jokey cartoon characters on them. Now what?

You should do both.The second one might take a while.

They are fair for calculating road damage. But that would also mean that large trucks should be paying hundreds of times as much as passenger vehicles.

And that’s not the only reason to tax vehicles: urban crowding, danger to pedestrians and cyclists, pollution from fossil fuels (if used), the social and political cost of dependence on fossil fuels, particulate emissions from non-combustive sources such as tires and brakes, and I’m sure there are a few more too.

They’re punishing EV adoption so that we’ll keep buying gasoline. It’s obvious what they’re up to, and corrupt as fuck. The Democrats, at least one of the few with a spine, should say that as soon as they’re back in office, they’ll refund the punitive charges and massively tax gasoline and diesel fuel.

Removed by mod

FOSS is certainly easier to audit, though there’s still a risk of malicious contributors introducing backdoors or other exploits.

And just to be clear, there are groups within China who are relentlessly executing cyber-attacks against European and US assets. China’s not the only source, but it’s the biggest (at least based on what we’re seeing at my workplace, which includes a high-volume website). And nothing happens in China for long without the CCP’s approval. So, at least de facto, assume that’s in line with Chinese government policy.

The best course of action is to never assume any third party is going to protect your data unless someone credible has independently confirmed it. Don’t buy internet-connected devices unless there’s a damned good reason for them to be connected, and even then, firewall the hell out of them and make sure there’s no path from such a device to your sensitive data. If you have a home LAN for your various connected devices, keep that stuff logically (and ideally physically) separate from your personal data.

the US is a NATO ally

Are they still? They’re not behaving like allies.

The EU (and UK, and AU, and more) have their own power-mad authoritarians among their leadership, regardless of what the US might want. Of course, now, the US leadership is so erratic and dictatorial that they pose a major risk to anyone’s privacy who does anything even remotely within reach of US jurisdiction.

The CLOUD Act is to allow data stored outside the US by US-based cloud providers to be accessed by selected foreign countries that have issued subpoenas and have requested US government assistance. It’s not a backdoor per se, and anyone with any sense encrypts their data before uploading it to the cloud instead of relying on cloud provider encryption services. Even if the US government weren’t snooping, there’s the risk that a cloud provider could be compromised by other hostile actors. Though it’s not all that wise to assume that cloud providers’ encryption services don’t have backdoors, unless that’s been confirmed by an impartial third-party audit. I know of no such audits.

The PATRIOT Act is a human-rights nightmare for many reasons, but doesn’t grant the US government anti-privacy powers that the CLOUD Act doesn’t. It’s just more vaguely worded.

And if you really want some worse Kafkaeque misery, FISA warrants will give you plenty if your or your firm’s name is on one.

It’s bullshit. But elements within the EU have been relentlessly pushing for backdoors for at least a decade, and the UK and the Australians have tried it on as well.

Just firewall it, that’ll save you the effort of reverse engineering.

Yeah, excellent suggestion. There’s no reason for a device to accept incoming requests from Chinese IP addresses for any reason. In fact, I’d keep them on the WAN and block anything incoming from the internet-- you can do a secure tunnel to your WAN if you really want remote access. I’d alert on outgoing requests and block them unless you confirm them. If the device is phoning home to Winnie, then consider blocking outgoing entirely.

I’m not a security expert either, but the systems I build always pass security audits with no major findings, so I think my rules of thumb are good.

Badenoch’s policies (to the extent she has any) are increasingly indistinguishable from Deform’s.

It’s the only one Trump likes to use, since he’s too stupid to actually negotiate.

Yeah, because appeasement always works so well.

/s

I won’t buy a car built in a country led by fascists.

He’s a fascist and a Russian stooge, so he’s going to lie.

Fact checking a habitual liar is just letting him DDOS you.

After the apocalypse, one of the few surviving humans will find a stepdown station with a fried squirrel in it.

Main land Europe from Portugal to Turkey is one big network.

The connection between the Iberian peninsula and the rest of Europe isn’t all that high-capacity. That’s been a known weakness in the grid for a long time.