But second, keep in mind that for a lot of people, most companies are still responsible members of society; “pillars of the community,” and generally worthy of trust. It’s not because they’re dumb, it’s because they’ve been propagandized into believing it.

Oh boy that is so true, I was laughing my ass off during the financial crisis about how people were shocked that banks are businesses trying to maximize profits like any other business.

They genuinely thought that banks were some sort of community institution that existed to help people with their finances, and not businesses that are selling products to make money.

Still even if people are so ignorant that they are unaware of privacy issues, they have chosen to be willfully ignorant, because this issue has been talked about non stop for decades. For nothing to sieve in at some point, you have to be a special kind of willfully ignorant.
Even people that are very low information on technology, know that the Internet is a source of potential surveillance, and having your info on the internet in any form is a potential for being surveilled. Everybody knows that all the big IT companies are trying to gather as much information as they can. And Amazon is right at the top among them.
So to claim they were ignorant of Amazon possibly collecting and sharing their data is a bit far fetched IMO.

Question is why they bought a Ring camera in the first place?
There is no way they can have been unaware that these gadgets can be accessed from outside.
But it was only when the evidence was put right in their face they finally connected the dots?

So my answer is quite simple: Because they are stupid, and bought a sleazy product from a known sleazy company, and when they found out it was in fact as sleazy as could be expected, they figured that maybe they didn’t want to to be voluntarily surveilled anyway.

I made a digital MIDI drum reader using Piezos on an Arduino with my wife some years ago, For that you need way more than 2 analogue pins.
I don’t see why newer Raspberry Pies couldn’t have something like 12 analogue pins, it would be amazing for many things, and it’s dirt cheap to make today. The ESP32 has 18 AFAIK.
In some ways ESP 32 has way better features than Raspberry Pi, but it is not nearly as user-friendly and it lacks audio. It’s also not a general purpose computer with the things that entail, but “just” an embedded system, although a very good one for sure.

I think it’s strange that they haven’t extended the 40 pin IO capabilities. For instance analogue IO would be very welcome for many purposes.

That’s not the point, the point is that their new developments do not do for the community what the original products did.

It looks to me like they have lost focus on their original purpose. Which was to provide cheap and open compute opportunity for education and tinkering.

Denmark’s leading anti-piracy group is shifting to a more aggressive litigation strategy.

Unless the students are acting incredibly naive, it’s almost impossible for the anti-piracy group to lift the burden of proof here.
In general all you have to do is to claim you know nothing about it. For instance having “evidence” that your IP address was used for download is useless as evidence.

Also the Anti Piracy group has a reputation of themselves working outside the law here, so maybe an investigation into this group could be a good idea.

https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Schlüter

Johan Schlüter was for many years the embodiment of anti piracy in Denmark forming “AntiPirat Gruppen” (Anti Piracy Group).

I 2014 idømte en fransk domstol ham 18 måneders ubetinget fængsel

Translation: In 2014 a French court gave him 18 months UNCONDITIONAL prison term!
The case was followed up with a €5 million lawsuit. For the fraudulent handling of Charles Trenet copyrights.

In 2015 he was reported to police for defrauding 100 million DKK from copyright holders. The investigation found “inconsistencies” in 4 companies owned by Johan Schlüter tro the amount of 200 million DKK (€30 million). Later that year AntiPirat Gruppen" was declared bankrupt.

i juni 2017 tiltale mod Schlüter og to andre advokater i Schlüters advokatfirma.

Translation: In July 2017 cases were raised against Schlüter and 2 other lawyers in the company.

So the people handling these copyright investigations and cases do not have the best reputation. In fact they are the real thieves stealing from copyright holders, embezzling their money through their judicial con job. Promising to help, but doing more harm than good, to a degree that in Denmark laws have been changed to basically protect against activities by anti piracy lawyers that are immoral and illegal.

Absolutely brilliant. 👍

Thanks for posting, but people will find something else stupid to complain about, because there is pretty obviously a storm of propaganda against Firefox, which I very much suspect is driven by interests that are against an open and free internet.

Blocking these features may calm some people, but in reality, none of these features were used for anything unless specifically used by the user. So the claim of it making Firefox slower or using more resources or being used for telemetry were all outright lies.

A sentiment is tried to be created that Firefox is just as bad as Chrome, Edge, Brave and Safari when nothing could be further from the truth. But even people who consider themselves IT savvy are falling for it. 🙁

Interestingly these attacks on Firefox coincide with Chrome getting steadily worse, forcing Googles own standards and preventing plugins that block advertising, while reducing functionality for Firefox on Google/Alphabet owned sites.

WTF?!
I know Sweden is way more liberal with what is considered street legal than Denmark,

systemet kräver i sin nuvarande form ständig förarövervakning

Translation: The system in its current form requires constant driver supervision

So it’s more like “assisted self driving” which of course is an oxymoron.

I åratal har Tesla sålt funktionen ”total självkörningsförmåga”

Translation: For years Tesla has sold the function “fully autonomous (self) driving.”

I wonder why they are allowed to advertise that?
But it seems it is following EU regulation, so I guess we can’t blame Sweden for it. But those shitty Tesla cars shouldn’t be street legal in EU even without FSD.

45% Failure rate!

A 4 year old model Y revision just reached the age of mandatory safety check here in Denmark.

Article in Danish:
https://fdm.dk/nyheder/nyt-om-trafik-og-biler/tesla-skandalen-fortsaetter-naesten-hver-anden-tesla-model-y-dumper-til-syn

Translation of the headline:
The TESLA Scandal continues, almost every 2nd Tesla model Y flunk safety check.

The previous record was held Buy Tesla model 3 with about a third of the cars failing!
The average for all brands is about 7%.
And a similar priced VW ID.4 is less than 2%. LESS THAN!
Without question the VW is way better quality, and even the cheapest Chinese cars we can get here have way lower failure rate than Tesla!

So very obviously Tesla and safety are not things that go together.

This is what many of us warned against already 20 years ago. It’s one of the inherent dangers of ALL proprietary software.
Back then most people didn’t believe or understand it, now that such dangers are out in the open, nothing continues to happen about it.
Everybody knows today, but (almost) nobody gives a shit.

American-controlled CPUs

and fucking invest into not needing to use American-controlled CPUs as every single one of them contains a backdoor.

China has been working intensely for at least 2 decades to catch up, and they are still about a decade behind!

Netherlands has ASML which is a huge advantage for European independent manufacturing, but even with that it’s an insanely expensive investment to make a realistic competitor to AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom etc. because they have loads of patents that are hard to avoid, and they have decades of know how. This is not even accounting for the software infra structure that would have to be built almost from scratch.
Chip production is a global enterprise, and even USA isn’t independent anymore. They depend on ASML and TSMC for their most popular products in AI, Smartphones, servers, laptops and desktops. And more and more Arm is taking over from Intel/AMD.

What we may be able to do would be using Arm and have TSMC help us with manufacturing. But to make such a project succeed is not an easy thing, we had European computer companies in the 70’s and 80’s that were heavily subsidized by governments that dominated home markets for several European countries, and they essentially all failed against international competition.
So what we risk if we were required to use a European product funded by EU/European governments would be to have to use an overpriced under-performing technology, that would be a millstone around the neck of all of Europe, making Europe not catch up, but instead fall further behind.

consoles blow a fuse with each new patch so you can’t load older patches.

Admittedly I was unaware of this, but for consoles it can have a real functional purpose as part of the protection against cheating.

That’s part of how shitty the consumer protection really is.
But common for all, there needs to be complaints before the law is involved.

So are console sold with the possibility of changing the OS, only to have that option removed later? There was some issue with PS3, but apart from that I never heard about it.

If true, this is sabotage of the customers product, and must 100% be illegal in almost any country!!
But my guess is they are limiting this to countries that have absolute shit consumer protection.

the misuse of the word “propaganda”,

No I use the word propaganda because the accusations are based on falsehoods.

I’ll take that as a “Yes”.