It's already happening. Nationwide offers a discount if you agree they get to use the data feed that is already wired to them - they specifically name Toyota as the brand that delivers your driving information automatically. On other manufacturers you get the discount if you enable their app while driving (ironic, since cell phone use is strongly tied to worse driving outcomes)
The connectivity may not be fully disabled in a 2025 Acura Integra, but there is a way to disable data sharing. You then have a permanent yellow "nag icon" top right on your infotainment screen, but the spying is "disabled."
The connectivity may not be fully disabled in a 2025 Acura Integra, but there is a way to disable data sharing. You then have a permanent yellow "nag icon" top right on your infotainment screen, but the spying is "disabled." I mean what this other commenter in this same thread found via GDPR after doing this very step: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49955366
Depending on the car, how you disable it may not really disable it at all. Connecting your phone via Bluetooth or taking the car in for service will often let the car upload a backlog of data.
You generally have to completely remove the power from the DCU - which can have as many as three different power sources (including a backup battery with days of power in some cases!), and often disables features in your car like the hands free microphone, built in gps, etc.
And that's not all. I used to work with a guy who spent a large portion of his career at a famous car manufacturer. I can't say which one cause their operation and output is rather small(niche, hyper-wealthy customers that take their international passport when they go for a drink across the street, "just in case"). From what he told me, their cars have 11 individual computers with full operating systems on them for various reasons. While compute has become more expensive over the last few years, courtesy of slop, small, embedded ARM devices are still inexpensive and incredibly powerful. I also spent a short time in the automotive industry(where I met the guy I mentioned) and modern cars are an absolute integration hell and even their engineering teams can't say fully what's in them in terms of hardware and it's magnitudes worse with software.
In today's blog post, we are all studying the enshittification of the BIOS.
In general, I agree with you that the bigger laptop makers can repair laptops and do an amazing job.
What we're all here for though is 2026. No big company is coming to fix your machines, even big companies are waiting 30+ days for parts availability from the big company bros they bought from. If you're a consumer, forget about it.
"Many of them are Ubuntu-certified as well." I'm calling BS here. Dell and HP hide their limited, paltry Linux offerings in the back of their website. Define your use of "many."
Now we're down to the BIOS. Today's blog post encountered a failed BIOS update, and takes Framework to task for it. Some of the support team at Framework are really cool and would probably have detected this customer is https://xkcd.com/806/
This time he got the strict script follower for customer support. I hope it blows up on Framework.
This is how I define "many." Dell in particular seems to certify lots of laptops for Ubuntu support, even if they don't sell them with Ubuntu. It's not just their enterprise offerings, either; I see lots of consumer models.
Doesn't Microsoft want fewer, bigger games locked into their Project Helix platform? Why compete with Unreal when they can sign a sweet license for the engine?
Why build an ecosystem when they are already a huge monopoly?
I second the other commenters, and recommend watching the linked videos.
General Relativity and Entropy have not yet been unified into a single theory. In the meantime, gravity always takes priority over entropy. Or in other words, physicists don't yet know how gravity could make entropy slower or faster, so gravity ignores entropy and entropy just has to deal with whatever happens within the gravitational field.
A spaceship in a strong gravity field would not know their time was any different. Someone outside the field would give them a different relative measurement. But inside the field, entropy is not slower and not faster, because the spaceship doesn't see any change in the speed of their own clocks, even if they hear from someone else that their clocks are going at a different speed.
Not all cash is fungible for CapEx. For instance, much of that might hypothetically be held in an offshore account. Building a datacenter with it would trigger unfavorable VAT or sales tax or something... Hypothetically...
High cap companies use debt for this: bank loan is located in the market where it's needed most, and the debt is serviced by interest earned from securities in other markets. The net taxes are a small percent (think 3%) relative to simply transferring funds within the company. Yes, this is the low effective tax rate the EU is quite upset about.
Other reasons for not touching their holdings usually have a similar explanation. The securities are fungible for accounting purposes but not fungible enough for actual day-to-day operations. Result: securities get "stranded" and the large company grows a hedge fund appendage.
Yeah, for profitable companies, debt is a strategic tool not a desperate act. It more about orchestrating around the money that is soft locked somewhere else.
Please keep in mind this sudden burst of legislation is because Facebook recently faced a combined $1.1 billion fine for intentionally harming children. The judgment took years.
New Mexico Child Safety Case ($375 Million) was an actual judgment.
US class-action privacy lawsuit was a $725 million settlement, with no judgment.
These laws were proposed as soon as it was clear Facebook would not win. They move the liability to the Operating System, exempting Facebook.
Is there any additional info on where it was "published publicly by an unrelated third party"? From the timeline in the writeup:
> 2026-05-07: Submitted detailed information about the vulnerability and the exploit to the linux-distros mailing list. The embargo was set to 5 days, with an agreement that if a third party publishes the exploit on the internet during the embargo period, the Dirty Frag exploit would be published publicly.
> 2026-05-07: Detailed information and the exploit for this vulnerability were published publicly by an unrelated third party, breaking the embargo.
Edit: nevermind, details are further down in the thread:
