This is about Airpods. The phone still includes the cable.

I’m more concerned about them using the word “sapient.” My dog is sentient; it’s not a high bar to clear.

But what about … new users entering the Apple ecosystem?

What ecosystem do they think people are coming from where they didn’t already have a USB C cable or wireless charger?

Good to know! I saw that mentioned on some (apparently outdated) Comodo marketing copy as a benefit over LE

EV certs give you an extra green bar or something along those lines. If your customers care about it, then you have to. If they don’t - and they probably don’t - it’s a waste.

What exactly are you trusting a cert provider with and what are the security implications?

End users trust the cert provider. The cert provider has a process that they use to determine if they can trust you.

What attack vectors do you open yourself up to when trusting a certificate authority with your websites’ certificates?

You’re not really trusting them with your certificates. You don’t give them your private key or anything like that, and the certs are visible to anyone navigating to your website.

Your new vulnerabilities are basically limited to what you do for them - any changes you make to your domain’s DNS config, or anything you host, etc. - and depend on that introducing a vulnerability of its own. You also open a new phishing attack vector, where someone might contact you, posing as the certificate authority, and ask you to make a change that would introduce a vulnerability.

In what way could it benefit security and/or privacy to utilize a paid service?

For most use cases, as far as I know, it doesn’t.

LetsEncrypt doesn’t offer EV or OV certificates, which you may need for your use case. However, these are mostly relevant at the enterprise level. Maybe you have a storefront and want an EV cert?

LetsEncrypt also only offers community support, and if you set something up wrong you could be less secure.

Other CAs may offer services that enhance privacy and security, as well, like scanning your site to confirm your config is sound… but the core offering isn’t really going to be different (aside from LE having intentionally short renewal periods), and theoretically you could get those same services from a different vendor.

You can get wildcard certs with LetsEncrypt (since 2018): https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/acme-v2-production-environment-wildcards/55578

Sure, but if everyone does it then it wouldn’t work (no one would be drawing excess when the solar is at peak)

If everyone did it then electric companies could prioritize investing in batteries and capacitors and further reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.

If everyone did it, then even without extra storage capacity, net metering would still work. You don’t get credits for generating energy, just for sending it to the grid. All they have to do is the same thing they already do - curtailment.

Finally, it’s impossible for everyone to be on net metering because NEM 3.0 doesn’t have net metering and NEM 1.0 and 2.0 are only available if you’re grandfathered in.

If oversupply were really a concern, then you’d think the prices during oversupply would reflect that, dropping to basically nothing. They don’t. If they did, then EVs could be charged for super cheap when solar power was flooding the grid.

that sounds a lot like what they are talking about

What they’re talking about is revoking the law that grandfathered people into NEM 1.0 and 2.0 contracts. Keep in mind, the people who purchased solar under NEM 1.0 and 2.0 did so under the presumption that they would be able to stay on it for at least 20 years (because that was codified in law).000

only getting paid some large percentage of the price for energy sent to the grid

NEM 3.0 reduces the way credits are calculated to, on average, 25% of what they were before, and that are not the same as the retail rate.

https://aurorasolar.com/blog/explaining-and-modeling-californias-net-billing-tariff-nem-3-0/ has some examples. At the same time that electricity from the grid costs $0.44/kWh, solar sent to the grid only returns a $0.05/kWh credit.

5 cents is not a large percentage of 44 cents.

If your neighbor has solar and you charge your EV in the middle of a sunny day when your neighbor is at work, you’re probably using your neighbor’s electricity to do so. That’s gonna cost you $15 and net your neighbor a $1.71 credit.

Under NEM 1.0 and 2.0, if you import from and export to the grid in the same hour, those amounts are netted, even before NBCs come into effect. But under NEM 3.0, you could get billed for importing in the same hour even if you exported far more than you used. If you imported 1 kWh from the grid, you’d need to export 9 kWh to break even.

Again, this doesn’t make sense. Someone is paying $0.44/kWh for the energy you exported, but you’re only getting $0.05 credit for it.

If your solar system has storage, you can strategically export energy to the grid when the compensation is higher. That’s something you can consider when installing your solar system… but that’s not true for the people who are grandfathered into NEM 1.0 and 2.0, who knew they were grandfathered in by law.

And from what I’ve heard, even that doesn’t actually help that much, because the credits don’t apply to the largest part of the bill - they apply to “generation,” not to “delivery.” I haven’t found a reliable source confirming that, but if true it just adds insult to injury - if you pay the added cost to install an intelligent storage system and configure it to return money to the grid when their costs are highest, you get a credit equal to the cost you helped them avoid, but then the credit’s actually only usable on a small portion of your bill. If the calculations are based on avoided cost, you should get those credits even if it means the electric company is paying you.

It doesn’t really seem like net metering is sustainable.

Not sure why you think that.

Say for example someone generates the same amount of electricity they use, in that case they pay $0 for electricity even though the grid has to take the burden of storing the electricity until they use it later in the day.

The grid isn’t storing their energy - it’s sending it to other customers, meaning that non-sustainable, polluting energy sources don’t have to be generated.

The only time that’s not true is when the net load on the grid dips below zero. According to the duck curve graph from the article, it does appear to be very briefly dipping for a very brief time period each day. At that point it could make sense to store the rest, but if the grid doesn’t have storage capacity then any excess is “wasted,” but at that point the grid engages in a process known as “curtailment,” which means it rejects the excess, meaning that nobody gets credit later for energy that isn’t used now.

Also, curtailment is often not because the grid itself is over-supplied, but because specific regions are over-supplied and the grid lacks transmission lines from them to regions where demand is higher.

in that case they pay $0 for electricity

True under NEM 1.0, but NEM 2.0 also includes “non-bypassable charges” - components of pulling from the grid that cannot be offset by what they contribute. Those charges are roughly 5% as far as I can tell, meaning that if they pulled $300 worth of energy from the grid and sent back $300 worth (or more), they’d still owe $15.

The article explains the infographic and adds a lot more context.

The amount of arsenic depends on location - if you’re in a region that has standards on arsenic levels, like the EU, UK, or the US, then you’re probably fine, but the levels may be higher than what’s considered safe for children. This method would allow you to reduce the levels by around 50%, and since the levels for children are a bit under half of what’s acceptable for adults, that’s likely to make it safe for them.

The time savings are relative to other methods for reducing arsenic content, like cooking it with excess water (like a 12:1 ratio) and then discarding the excess, as this method allows you to use a rice cooker for the remaining time and to cook with a much smaller water:rice ratio, even accounting for the discarded water.

Cool, didn’t know that about Ecosia.

Qwant: looks like maybe they used to have a browser that might have been forked from Firefox, but it hasn’t been updated in a while - per the App Store listings, I think they now just have a lightweight search engine frontend.

Brave on iOS appears to have been forked from Firefox on iOS back in 2018-2019, which was news to me. (“Appears to” regards the date; it was definitely forked from Firefox).

the rest of the browser is derived from Firefox

This might be true for some, like Ecosia, but I’m guessing that Brave isn’t pulling changes from Firefox. It seems like they basically used the Firefox codebase as a starting point - and in 5 years of development, a lot can change.

I wasn’t saying that this is generally true for IOS browsers, just that a pretty large part of FOSS ones are

Gotcha, that makes more sense.

One more thing to point out is that your comment reads like they were based on Firefox and that Firefox didn’t use Webkit (but of course Firefox on iOS also uses Webkit).

more like Floorp

Meaning that they’re forks of Chromium on desktop in the same way Floorp is a fork of Firefox on desktop?

They are based off Firefox for IOS which uses WebKit, but they are still based on the browser like Edge which is based on chromium vs Flakon which uses blink but not the rest chromium

I’ve reread this like 5 times and still have no clue what you’re trying to say.

The person you replied to was technically incorrect - other browsers aren’t UIs on top of Safari, but (outside the EU) they’re all limited to the same browser rendering engine Safari uses, Webkit.

This means that other rendering engines - namely Firefox’s Gecko and Chromium’s Blink, as well as niche engines like Ladybird’s - are unavailable there (outside the EU).

They are based off Firefox for IOS

This is not generally true of browsers on iOS, and might not be true of any.

Flakon

I didn’t know what this was at first - apparently this was a typo for “Falkon.”

which uses blink

The browser rendering engine used by Chromium browsers is Blink, which was forked from Webkit over a decade ago, but I’m not aware of any non-Chromium browsers that use it… including Falkon, which appears to leverage QtWebEngine, which itself uses Chromium.

but they are still based on the browser like Edge

By “based on” do you mean “uses the same branding as and is loosely inspired by?” Because I highly doubt that the iOS codebase is based off the desktop codebase for many Chromium or Firefox-based browsers… they may share some code and assets but I doubt they get to share much more than that.

It’s a bit unclear what you mean by “Apple” - I’m assuming you mean Safari on both Mac and iOS.

The search engine I use is SearxNg. On Firefox on Mac it was pretty easy to add.

To use it in Safari, I installed the Keyword Search extension from the App Store. It has the option to set a search engine as the default if you don’t use a keyword, so I did that. This works in both Mac and on iOS / iPadOS.

There are other Safari extensions that do similar things, like Customize Search Engine (free). Kagi has an extension that can make Kagi the default search engine, for example (it doesn’t appear that there’s an equivalent for Startpage, though). I haven’t used anything other than Keyword Search for this, though.

I haven’t switched to Windows 11, but I also haven’t been using Windows 10, either. I’ve seen plenty of people say that Windows 11 is fine, but you should probably check with other students at your school who use the same software you do. Make sure your machine can be upgraded to 11, at least, since support for 10 is ending soon and that could result in software or services that you need being unavailable as well.

That’s what the plugin they used did.

while (true) { print money; }

Someone’s never heard of Bitcoin

It sounds like your bank is doing MFA (multi-factor authentication) correctly, and that’s a good thing, because it sure would be obnoxious to have to verify all that information just to view your balances, and it’s a higher risk activity to allow someone to transfer funds than to view your balances.

If the dealership didn’t verify your identity and someone else made changes to your lease, would you have a problem with that?

You don’t have to use an authenticator on your phone. You can use a password manager like Bitwarden (their $10/year premium plan, or their $40/year family plan) that supports saving TOTP and auto-filling them from a browser extension (click to copy or you can have it automatically copied to the clipboard after you auto-fill the password). It also supports passkeys and you can avoid getting locked into a single ecosystem that way.

I’d prefer countries, especially the US, not fuck with other countries, regardless of whether their goal is “improving” them or not.

Each credit reporting agency offers this option, at no charge …

It is highly recommended to lock your credit. Frankly, it should be locked by default. In September of 2017, Equifax announced a data breach that exposed the personal information of 147 million people.

Note that, before this incident, it wasn’t consistently free. I remember it being free to lock, but costing $20 or so to unlock. A law passed in 2018 required credit bureaus to offer freezes and unfreezes (and to fulfill them within certain time frames) for free.

Also note that you might need to look for a “freeze” instead of a lock. Experian charges $25/month for their “CreditLock” service, for example, but they offer a free security freeze.

Are you seriously asking why a commonly supported 27 year old format doesn’t need a fallback, but a 2 year old format does?