2024 - A CrowdStrike employee was pressured to push an update straight to prod. 90% of Windows installations were taken offline, but executives dodged any responsibility, and even got the shareholder lawsuit dismissed. Angry shareholders might have been told to blame the employee.
2015 - Volkswagen executives came up with "a rogue engineer" managed to make every VW diesel in the US violate emissions standards, while faking it during emissions testing.
It's already happening. Nationwide offers a discount if you agree they get to use the data feed that is already wired to them - they specifically name Toyota as the brand that delivers your driving information automatically. On other manufacturers you get the discount if you enable their app while driving (ironic, since cell phone use is strongly tied to worse driving outcomes)
The connectivity may not be fully disabled in a 2025 Acura Integra, but there is a way to disable data sharing. You then have a permanent yellow "nag icon" top right on your infotainment screen, but the spying is "disabled."
The connectivity may not be fully disabled in a 2025 Acura Integra, but there is a way to disable data sharing. You then have a permanent yellow "nag icon" top right on your infotainment screen, but the spying is "disabled." I mean what this other commenter in this same thread found via GDPR after doing this very step: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49955366
Depending on the car, how you disable it may not really disable it at all. Connecting your phone via Bluetooth or taking the car in for service will often let the car upload a backlog of data.
You generally have to completely remove the power from the DCU - which can have as many as three different power sources (including a backup battery with days of power in some cases!), and often disables features in your car like the hands free microphone, built in gps, etc.
And that's not all. I used to work with a guy who spent a large portion of his career at a famous car manufacturer. I can't say which one cause their operation and output is rather small(niche, hyper-wealthy customers that take their international passport when they go for a drink across the street, "just in case"). From what he told me, their cars have 11 individual computers with full operating systems on them for various reasons. While compute has become more expensive over the last few years, courtesy of slop, small, embedded ARM devices are still inexpensive and incredibly powerful. I also spent a short time in the automotive industry(where I met the guy I mentioned) and modern cars are an absolute integration hell and even their engineering teams can't say fully what's in them in terms of hardware and it's magnitudes worse with software.
In today's blog post, we are all studying the enshittification of the BIOS.
In general, I agree with you that the bigger laptop makers can repair laptops and do an amazing job.
What we're all here for though is 2026. No big company is coming to fix your machines, even big companies are waiting 30+ days for parts availability from the big company bros they bought from. If you're a consumer, forget about it.
"Many of them are Ubuntu-certified as well." I'm calling BS here. Dell and HP hide their limited, paltry Linux offerings in the back of their website. Define your use of "many."
Now we're down to the BIOS. Today's blog post encountered a failed BIOS update, and takes Framework to task for it. Some of the support team at Framework are really cool and would probably have detected this customer is https://xkcd.com/806/
This time he got the strict script follower for customer support. I hope it blows up on Framework.
This is how I define "many." Dell in particular seems to certify lots of laptops for Ubuntu support, even if they don't sell them with Ubuntu. It's not just their enterprise offerings, either; I see lots of consumer models.
2015 - Volkswagen executives came up with "a rogue engineer" managed to make every VW diesel in the US violate emissions standards, while faking it during emissions testing.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/volkswagen-pulls...