Despite the slurs, Mr Swenson was glad that the hackers had announced their presence so loudly. It would have been much worse, he said, if they had decided to quietly observe his family inside their home. They could’ve peered through his robot’s camera, and listened through the microphone, without him having the slightest clue.

Who says they didn’t???

Even if Mr Swenson had used the same username and password on other sites, and if those credentials had been leaked online, that still should not have been enough to access the video feed or to control the robot remotely. These features are supposed to be protected by a four-digit PIN. The PIN code was only checked by the app, rather than by the server or robot.

I don’t even…

You forgot to add the /s in the end…

It might but wind based energy production won’t go away. It has already proven its place in energy production. While there’s a lot of people that had invested in fossil and nuclear, there’s a lot of investors in wind energy too.

Wind energy production will just get more efficient and getting closer to being CO2 neutral in the future.

In my experience there always someone willing to create everything from homebrew software to software activation. Especially if there’s some money to make on it.

The hardware has full functionality from day one. The limitation is in what software you are using.

Active suspension is not a hardware feature, it’s software collecting data from sensors and by analysing the data being able adjusting the suspension to “optimal performance”. Just because certain hardware can be controlled by software doesn’t mean that you will get whatever software features you like to have.

BMW would claim that “BMW Smooth Comfortable Cloud Ride Software” is included free of charge with the purchase of a BMW.

BMW would also claim that they offer “BMW Hyper Advanced AI Premium Sensation Masculine Active Road Experience Pro Suspension” as an optional subscription for alpha males and people with too much money in their pockets.

The outcome of what you are suggesting will be a slight change in the phrasing of the product offering at the most.

With access to the keys, the owner can subscribe to the BMW solution, unlock the features in breach of the agreement with BMW by not subscribing or get a software solution for the car from another provider.

While a honorable move, “never” doesn’t exist in a world based on quarterly financials…

So you purchase ordinary suspension but get active suspension that works exactly like ordinary suspension and cost like active suspension to service…

It’s time we get legislation that gives the consumer access to all encryption key pairs used in the product they purchased.

(For you who don’t know what encryption key pairs are used for: they are used for the software to know that a change order, like “activate suspension”, is legit and therefore will be executed.)

Not an American… But holy crap… If Disney succeeds with this… then … E-v-e-r-y single service will have a clause like “you hereby agree to never ever take legal action against us, our subsidiaries, cookie partners, affiliates, our friend’s dog or Bob for anything we might or might not have caused in the next 2 billion years if we don’t give you permission.”.

I’m happy that I’m living in the European Union av and not in Florida.

Of course it’s clear the China is helping Russia.

Yeah… I totally respect that China doesn’t want to support any of the sides in Russias aggression against Ukraine.

So let’s fucking do this the Russian way by using proxies when purchasing products and services from China. China doesn’t seem to have any problems with that.

Or does it all boil down to that China “unofficially” supports Russia?

Goldman Sachs is overhyped and unreliable.

I have the same experience as you do, but there’s a reason that the big ISPs continue to be big: The majority of customers seems to prioritize a lower price than a better level of support.

(Also, I’m not just talking about ISPs. I meant customer support in general and how the view has changed from “keeping a customer is much cheaper than gaining one” to “cattle, cattle, cattle. If we lose one, there’s hundreds to gain”.)

Nice try. But let’s play with the thought that there’s no way we can let a rookie listen in on customer calls and gradually work their way into the role until they have enough experience… What about hiring technicians/professionals that has been working with the products/services for 10 years?

That would be a way of getting competent customer support people, right?

And just to clarify my comment that you replied on: The problem today is that most often there’s no career path for the customer support rookies and the pay is so lousy that most people just work customer support until they get something better.

That’s definitively the correct way to avoid getting experienced people in the customer support.

Unpopular opinion and rant: Us, the consumers, brought this on ourselves. Not intentionally but it was a slippery slope.

No one I know did ever ask the sales representative “does your customer support answer within 5 minutes and will I always reach a representative with att least 10 years of experience, that has the authority to make real decisions?”. No, but we were all very interested about the pricing of the service/product.

Then these “Please press 1 for…” happened… and no one of us really cared about the change because the service providers offered a much lower price than the ones with customer support representatives with 20 years of experience. Since all of us went for the cheapest provider, the other ones had to cut cost to be able to offer their service on a competitive price level. So then there were no one offering competent support with representatives that knew their shit. And it slowly continued to go downhill…

So here we are with shitty services, which we pay for, where we all are treated as cattle.

If people at least started to ask for better customer support there would someone, who wants to climb the corporate ladder, creating a PowerPoint presentation with a real VIP Service Level. Of course it will cost more money, because real people cost money, but we would att least get what we want.

But no. Consumers will still go for the lowest price.

Here we go again…

Five Guys have a vanilla milkshake till bacon … Yummmmm

Ok my god. I had an Samsung Omnia 7 and I loved the Metro UI.

Remote Desktop to a Windows 2008 Server and try to open the Start Menu by clicking a single pixel in the left lower corner… Shoot me.

Going public introduces shareholders that prioritizes return on investment as opposed to making technology and knowledge about technology accessible for many.

It doesn’t always end this way but often enough to worry about it…

Kermit

Yup. /r/Datahoarder guided me right. Got two of the recommended model of MyBook and shucked them. This was 2-3 years ago. Disks are still going strong in my NAS.