You only need one piece of (timeless) advice regarding what to look for, really: if it looks too good to be true, it almost certainly is. Caveat emptor.

Seriously, ending up with nothing is always a risk you run when buying something advertised as non-functional in the hope of fixing it or recovering any undamaged parts. The fact that the components on this card weren’t original is almost irrelevant, because the result would have been the same if they were authentic but damaged beyond recovery.

Remember, Windows will install updates without user intervention. If you remove things, it just puts them back.

There are still a few brands of dumb consumer TVs on the market, although they’re becoming harder to find. Ars Technica did a roundup in December.

Even their older, simpler fridges are crappy. We bought one because our previous fridge conked out in mid-pandemic when the selection of new appliances was low. It lasted about three years before developing an issue that would have cost us more to fix than just replacing the damned thing. So we replaced it with some cheaper probably-Chinese brand I’d never heard of before and will never buy another Samsung appliance again if we can help it. AI will just add expensive, useless functions on top of their already poor design and dubious manufacturing.

In other words, if these become the only fridges in existence, I may just try to find out where I can purchase an old-fashioned icebox.

Gentoo is volunteer-run. The people doing all this work don’t expect any money. Rare in this day and age, I know. If you check the actual report, it’ll tell you where the money went (mostly hosting).

Dude, all Rockchip had to do to avoid this was a bit of license-related bookkeeping. They’re a corporation, so they’re used to dealing in bookkeeping and contracts. Someone at their end whose job it is to track this stuff either screwed up or let this through on purpose, assuming they wouldn’t be caught (more likely the latter, because China).

SD card readers that plug into your USB port are still quite cheap, even if you have the misfortune of being in the US.

According to records obtained by the group, “it’s often impossible to tell which parts of a police report were generated by AI and which parts were written by an officer.”

This does not give me a great impression of the literacy level of American police officers. Another good reason to stay out of that country.

If you have no internet but want your music as a file, that’s how you go about it.

They picked the wrong history, in my not so humble opinion. The AI situation looks more like the dot-com bubble, recycled.

It’s possible—I’ve used Perl scripts to pull data automatically out of email attachments stored in a maildir setup, and you should be able to pick commands out of a plain-text email body with a scripting language even more easily—but I will add my voice to the chorus that’s saying you should look into any other method you can find before settling on this. If it turns out you must proceed along these lines, think long and hard about security.

You should be able to set up the system to autologin on startup and then run commands from the auto-logged-in user’s .bash_profile, if you can reduce what you want to do to a script. You’d probably want to specially set up a user for this, to reduce security risks.

(I just stood up a weird little Gentoo media PC that does approximately this—logs a user in on startup and then runs startx from .bash_profile to make it easier to use with no keyboard attached and no DM. You’d just want to put a different command in instead.)

Lacking government regulation in the largest markets, proper separation will never be enforced, because it isn’t to the manufacturers’ benefits. And that probably isn’t going to happen until hacked infotainment systems kill enough people to draw attention, unfortunately.

Animals, including humans, have sensors for pain (nerve endings), and a series of routines in our brains to process the sensory data and treat it as an unpleasant stimulus. These are not optional systems, but innate ones.

Machines not only lack the required sensor systems and processing routines, they can’t even interpret a stimulus as unpleasant. They can’t feel pain. If you need proof of that, hit a computer with a sledgehammer. I guarantee it won’t complain, or even notice before you damage it beyond functioning.

(They can, of course, make us feel pain. I just spent the last hour trying to get a udev rule to work . . .)

For some people, recreating the form factor of a book is the point, regardless of its convenience or cost. I’m sure whoever put this thing together was quite aware of how mainstream e-readers are built and didn’t want that, or they would have bought a Kindle or a Kobo.

Attempting to defeat browser fingerprinting (you can never be 100% sure you’ve defeated everything) without TOR is kind of an advanced subject, yeah, and one of which I have only shallow knowledge. A lot of it is Javascript-dependent, so allowing Javascript only on a whitelist basis should help (but is too tedious for a lot of people). Deliberately pissing in the pool by varying prominent identifiers like the User-Agent string should help. Canvas poisoning. Specialist browser extensions, some of which may be more effective than others. Running the blandest default-settings browser possible in the blandest possible default-settings environment (a container or live media inside a VM) could conceivably cause you to vanish into the noise, but may be highly inconvenient.

It’s worth considering who is likely to be interested in going to the trouble of browser fingerprinting in the first place. Small players have little use for the information and aren’t likely to accumulate enough to sell it for much money. So the problems are going to come from ad networks, large digital networks like Google and Meta/Facebook, possibly CDNs and service providers like Shopify if they think it’s worth their while, maybe some governments, and completely dishonest scam sites that think any money is good. Some of these can be avoided altogether if you work at it.

It does, however, make a certain level of anonymity at least possible as long as you scrub your cookies regularly, never log into the same accounts over the VPN that you were using without it, and never buy anything over the VPN.

In the end, you have to sit down and ask yourself what information you’re trying to protect from whom, and how much trouble protecting it is worth. You don’t want your nosy cousin who works at your ISP to know you look at furry porn, well, a VPN should be good enough for that (provided you don’t use the ISP’s DNS). If you’re trying to conceal your actions from a nation-state-level observer, you’ve got a lot more work to do.

It’s been available in Gentoo since late 2022 (Project:LoongArch at the Gentoo wiki). And in some other distros.

I disagree. Doing so reduced the amount of diversity in rendering engines and reinforced the idea that lazy site owners don’t have to test against more than one browser. That’s a loss for the Web as a whole.

I think the main problem would be the controls. I mean, you could put a tiny bridle on the rat to steer, but how do you shoot? Pull the tail? (How you avoid being bitten while pulling the rat’s tail is a separate issue.)