Wild to me that any tech sector business would want to rent an operating environment to park their entire infrastructure into. This is the equivalent to traveling shoe salesmen setting up a tent in the parking lot of a strip mall.
This isn't designed to stop attackers with physical access. This is designed to stop casual tinkerers and shade tree mechanics.
You know what isn't vulnerable? A "dumb" offline charger. You know what doesn't make any money or turn the consumer into another product? A "dumb" offline charger.
If it were about physical security, the suggested fix would be to remove the communication from the port entirely.
Companies shouldn't get to make something simple and secure into something inherently insecure and then iterate security into it. Like drive by wire steering, or brakes. Nobody asked for these things and if you ask ANYONE who works on, builds, or actually enjoys cars the consensus is NOBODY wants it.
But there are enough sophomoric, pedestrian car owners out there who gawk at the senseless overdeployment of technology and think "this is so convinient" and don't see it as 1) regulatory barrier building and gatekeeping 2) enabling vendor lock in 3) overcoming right to repair legislation. So the knowledgeable and enthusiastic voices of reason who care about cars get drowned out by the hoard of pedestrian geeks who couldn't imagine operating a car without at least a 16 inch touchscreen.
In security, the best defense is not introducing a vulnerability at all. There is value in having less code. For example, if your PaaS doesn't collect user SSNs... then it can't lose SSNs in a breach.
The question here should not be "why is this not secure." The question should be "why does this even need to be secure in the first place?" We have a very simple task to do and we've complicated it so much we've introduced vulnerability that didn't exist previously.
I was commenting on the hasty generalization, not this specific case.
> If it were about physical security, the suggested fix would be to remove the communication from the port entirely.
You can’t charge without negotiating charging rates. Communication is a requirement. Every EV does this. Heck, every cell phone does this.
> Like drive by wire steering, or brakes. Nobody asked for these things and if you ask ANYONE who works on, builds, or actually enjoys cars the consensus is NOBODY wants it.
Every hybrid and EV for the past 20 years has brake by wire. That’s how regenerative braking works.
> And it doesn’t stop with the security questions: the Trump administration’s signature style of international engagement is to wield American leverage as a bundle. Deadlocks in trade negotiations are broken by threatening to withhold intelligence, tech deals are stalled by reference to food safety standards. And so I don’t know when a U.S. administration would choose to leverage its seemingly inevitable predeployment authority over frontier models to secure its broader interests, but I’m sure it would in due time. That means that even if we do everything ‘right’ on the security and economic side, frontier access is still fundamentally contingent as long as there’ll be divergences between governments’ strategic interests.
The Trump Administration telling the very neo-fascist oligarchs who bought him an election and bought him a ballroom to play nice with their toys? At the expense of rampant capitalism? Lol.
He already showed us the limit of his comprehension of the topic when he made EO 14179 limiting states from regulating AI.
Trump doesn't swing for perfect pitches. He is a madman, a lunatic, and a true moron. Do not give this man any credit. I would be shocked if he could tell you the time on an analog clock.
That's a weird way to characterize months of incessant "we have incontrovertible hard evidence but you can't see it yet" claims, which--when finally forced into the light--were laughed out of every court in the nation.
If it was just pure and innocent "questioning", things would be very different. We probably wouldn't have had the January 6th mob attack on Congress, for example.
I think an important step is to acknowledge when and where to implement technology in the first place.
Arguably the environmental benefit of an American farm replacing a 10 year old tractor with an electric model isn't nearly as good for the environment as a farm in India replacing a 70 year old tractor that leaks gallons of oil per month with a 50 year old tractor that doesn't.
Capitalists don't understand how to apply cost-to-benefit ratios to anything outside themselves. There is no global entity making sure resources are spent responsibly or equitably at scale.
70 year old tractors? India is the largest manufacturer of tractors but you think they all use 70 year old tractors like as the standard? I feel like you don't really know what you are talking about or just using examples on the fly to make your point which doesnt make much sense. China and the US are the two biggest polluters in the world.
My original analogy was flawed. And yes, I pulled the reference out of my ass. The actual objects referenced are arbitrary. Let me try again.
Replacing a low efficiency device with a medium efficiency device is better for the environment (and more cost effective) than replacing a high efficiency device with an ultra high efficiency device.
> We’re very intentional about where we’ll add capacity—partnering with democratic countries whose legal and regulatory frameworks support investments of this scale, and where the supply chain on which our compute depends—hardware, networking, and facilities—will be secure.
*Buys compute from actual fascist Elon Musk in a failing democracy during the death throes of late state capitalism.
This makes me think as a father of middle class kids... Kids with middle class parents get one shot in life. If they blow it by getting hooked on drugs or getting a DUI, they will likely struggle to recover for a loooong time. Kids with lower class parents don't even really get that. Kids with upper-middle class parents get to fuck around a little bit. They'll get to party a little but need to be careful not to let it ruin their lives.
Then there's the rich kids. They will get to go to party's, wreck their car, spit on cops, do drugs, buy their homework, and still go to college until they succeed. They will get bailed out of jail, won't have to work, and will go on to write books about how "nobody wants to work" and "jobs chase capital" and "pick yourself up by the bootstraps." And they will get a free ride to the top in daddy's limo.
In case someone's wondering, that's a pretty accurate rendition of the parental wealth, but limited.
Rich kids
- hang out with rich kids and get jobs from other rich kids parents
- get every opportunity to improve themselves through better schools and access to extracurriculars
- can always risk failure at a business because they know their parents won't let them go hungry
That last benefit? Turns out rich kids are really in the top 25%, not the top 1% as you might have been thinking.
The article didn't do a good job of explaining why the agreement between Home Depot and America Efficient is dubious. The business model does seem very suspicious, but also so does the whole market they are engaged in. Why is my utility company wasting money on auctioned efficiency data? Why don't the manufacturers share this with the utility companies for the common good of everyone? Why doesn't Home Depot make an offer to sell this data directly to the utility company? Why would anyone want to bid on this data? Why create that middle man?
The whole thing sounds like late-stage capitalist hogwash. This all seems very inconsequential except to make a bunch of rich people richer.
> Why is my utility company wasting money on auctioned efficiency data?
If you lower the energy demand on the grid then you lower the price that the grid needs to pay by a lot.
Grids tend to take in bids from power companies of Volume + Price and then pick enough Volume (at the lowest Price first) until they get to the expected Volume and then payout to those winning bidders the Price of the last needed Volume. If you can decrease the Volume then the total price paid by the grid goes down.
If sharing some of that energy savings with another entity it's still a win-win because you're overall paying less.
It's like hiring a tax account where they get paid 50% of whatever taxes they save you. It's a win-win until they start committing tax fraud.
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