That's funny, I thought it was to protect EV manufacturing in North America (also includes Canada). China will flood NA with cheap EV's given the chance. EV manufacturing in NA would just die on the vine.I thought I read where Biden squashed the import of electric automobiles from China, as it could not be vetted whether they would be sending every and all information possible back "home". Like, where everyone driving one happens to be at a particular moment.
jeff
I don't think any US president gets into that much minutiae in government. That would be the job of congress.
When I retired 3 years ago, my new home was equipped with a Hikvision DVR and video cameras. I was going to buy another camera and learned that the US government had removed this brand of video systems from all federally owned facilities because there was a backdoor into the OS of the system.
Easy fix was that I don't have it connected to the interwebs.
When I retired 3 years ago, my new home was equipped with a Hikvision DVR and video cameras. I was going to buy another camera and learned that the US government had removed this brand of video systems from all federally owned facilities because there was a backdoor into the OS of the system.
Easy fix was that I don't have it connected to the interwebs.
Anyone remember the VAXMate? Yes, DEC made an 80286 PC compatible. Most were diskless and booted over the net. There were some like the unit in the picture that contained an internal 5.25 inch floppy drive and they would boot DOS from that floppy. There were a very few that had an internal Seagate ST225 20 MegaByte hard drive. This picture is from about 1993 and is of my desk in an off-campus Motorola think tank. ....
. I included a picture of the parking lot. Guess which car is mine?
We (Motorola) hired contractors for short term (1 to 6 month) EE or PCB layout jobs. Those contractors were typically young unmarried males that didn't mind changing jobs and also moving house often. South Florida had a thriving tech industry in the 70's through early 90's with several large employers like IBM, Motorola, Bendix, Harris, Racal Milgo, and others. They are all gone now.
Nice Prelude... We always wanted an Si with AWS, but instead I went and got a series of Integras. Finally ended up getting an 09 Type SH... red... What with the Mopar parked in front? Those were rare in SoCal... but we had lots of Honda cars... ;-)
Yeah, your office looked great. Mine was mostly devoid, as we had to keep all the ESD stuff in the lab... so for years I had an office in a cube, with no computer, just a phone, some books, a chair and my lunch/dinner bag... and a real nice office nook in the lab with lots of toys-no food but they let us bring coffee.
But by '00 we were running a media server with 160TB of music/movies/videos at work... right under the noses of IT. We changed the server IP addresses every so often ( we owned a bunch of them ) just to make sure IT didn't get their mitts on our "projects". Besides, IT wasn't allowed in our labs, we owned, and operated, the Cisco routers that operated as gateways. So we VPN'd to the machines on our desks upstairs and ran a VLAN right within the corporate Intranet.
Contractors for laying out boards... who lays out boards nowadays? I mean, I see some but most of the work today is done with off the shelf core/FPGA SBC boards. Unless, of course, you're building chips, in which case the whole thing gets done with a program, then tested in an emulator, taped out and finally you get to verify the silicon.... but the old fashioned way of building boards is mostly gone. At least in my business.
My first PC was an XT clone. My second was an AT clone, it had a front panel turbo switch (10 or 6 Mhz ). I never really trusted it so I filled the paperwork and took it to the lab at work. Hooked up a scope to it and realized the damn switch was wired backwards... no wonder!
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That's funny, I thought it was to protect EV manufacturing in North America (also includes Canada). China will flood NA with cheap EV's given the chance. EV manufacturing in NA would just die on the vine.
jeff
Actually, Biden did no such thing. He "shut down" the flow of EVs "made in China"... but he left it open for Chinese EVs "made in Mexico".
Which is exactly what the Chinese are doing... building the assembly plants in Mexico.
It's all BS... platitudes by lying politicians and a complicit corporate media.
Governments only really care about order and law compliance. Corporations are out to extract every possible cent from everyone that they physically can. Regardless of their politics or whether they are complying with the law. People’s everyday lives do not interest governments, but they DO interest sales people! That kind of control, to me, seems far more dangerous. And criminals want to find ways to drain any account they can get their hooks into. Corporations, by their greedy policies, trying to make payments easier and easier to encourage people to spend money, seem to give them the means to.
A lot of places have ecommerce sites that require me to "create an account for my convenience"... and so does my health insurance, mortgage company, etc..
I refuse and don't deal with them. I don't use my cell phone for doing business. If I must create an account, I do it only in one of my home PCs. I also created a webmail interface for the few sites that we might need when we're on the go and using mobile devices.
When they wonder why I don't agree to an account, I remind them that every year or so I get a letter about some "data breach that "might" have gotten access to my personal information". Why should I open yet more accounts?
BTW, my cell phone has very few "apps"... Firefox, Chrome, VLC, foobar, Tidal, flashlight, ftp/telnet client, ES File Explorer, Whatsapp (1), a Cannon Camera connect, My email is my own and accessed via a Webmail interface and I have a 512GB SDcard (2). I don't publish, nor do I use, the gmail account Google foisted on me.
(1) I need that one to communicate internationally, so I limit my exposure to it. I did curtail my exposure last June by taking a burner phone and getting a Vodafone SIM card with the local company... So I had a temporary local mobile phone number while there. Plus I had the roaming plan for our US phones too. Whatapp is just handy for sending quick texts. Sure, my solution wasn't "free" because I bought my privacy.
(2) the recent trend to get rid of SDcards bugs me. They say I can use "the Cloud" but when I tell them I got like 400GB of music in my SDcard, they mumble, specially when I ask them "how much will it cost?" and "what will I do if I have no Internet Access".... so pretty much we've decided we don't need the stinking brand new top of the line, $1800, phones anyhow. My wife just "upgraded" to a Samsung S20 with 512G of memory.... I might get a Note 20.
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Exactly. Governments are just along for the ride anyway.It's all BS...
jeff
That's funny, I thought it was to protect EV manufacturing in North America
I don't think any US president gets into that much minutiae in government.
Well I do believe I read it was a "national security issue" over China having the GPS coordinates of every one of these vehicles in real time. You dont get to have a US population density map in real time, 24/7 - sorry!It's all BS... platitudes by lying politicians and a complicit corporate media.
As I said, a vet of someone's OS. While its in binary - you can ask for the source code and believe it's actually only whats in there... As soon as something like that becomes policy, they'll just put the information gathering function somewhere else, like that Intel remote management hardware. But its in the firmware of the antenna interface chip.
"No screens, no radio. Heck, it doesn’t even have a tachometer. The Toyota IMV 0 is (un)like other modern cars in that it doesn’t have many switches on the interior, but in this case, it’s because there’s almost nothing to turn on and off" - Road & Track. What a niche! When everything else pushes the "loaded" paradigm as far as they can.
The good news is you don't have to buy one, at least for the foreseeable future. 😉Well I do believe I read it was a "national security issue" over China having the GPS coordinates of every one of these vehicles in real time.
jeff
I have owned two Hondas, an Element and a Pilot. Let's just say that the thirst of a 7.2 Liter V8 restricted the number of days I took it to work, a 40+ mile round trip on I-95.Nice Prelude... We always wanted an Si with AWS, but instead I went and got a series of Integras. Finally ended up getting an 09 Type SH... red... What with the Mopar parked in front? Those were rare in SoCal... but we had lots of Honda cars... ;-)
The need for expert PCB layout depends on the application. Our business needed the best layout people around and they were supervised by an EE that was an expert in the particular circuit on a multi function board that was being laid out at the time. All was supervised by a lead EE who was responsible for the entire board design. Consider a cell phone where you have a transmitter that makes about 1 watt peak of amplitude and phase modulated RF power in several frequency bands from 500 MHz to 4.2 GHz. It is being switched off and on at a rate in the 8 to 200 Hz region and draws a current pulse approaching 1 amp at turn on. On the same board is a bidirectional audio amplifier that amplifies a millivolt microphone signal and provides several hundred milliwatts of audio to a speaker in a phone with speakerphone or walkie talkie capability. The same PC board is shared with a receiver that also covers from 500 MHz to 4.2 GHz which must resolve a received signal in the less than one MICROVOLT range. All of this is controlled by a custom microcontroller that ran in the 100 + MHz range. 1990's vintage NEXTEL phones had external RAM and Flash ROM, so the 16 bit data and 20 bit address buses carrying 2.5 volt pulse waves had to be routed on the PCB.Contractors for laying out boards... who lays out boards nowadays? I mean, I see some but most of the work today is done with off the shelf core/FPGA SBC boards. Unless, of course, you're building chips, in which case the whole thing gets done with a program, then tested in an emulator, taped out and finally you get to verify the silicon.... but the old fashioned way of building boards is mostly gone. At least in my business.
Large corporations have a bureaucracy that rivals some small countries. Motorola was no exception. The PCB layout group did a good job of protecting their turf, imposing rules on who could do what. I found myself in the position of being that guy who had overall responsibility for the entire PCB on two phone designs. It was a stressful time in my life, and I chose to leave the phone group after 5 years for a job nobody wanted in a research group. I laid out test boards for custom chips that the highly paid "simulating and calculating" boys designed. I got them made, populated, and tested. In several cases I decided how to best test and evaluate a custom chip, RF power amplifier, or other new device.
Near the end of my career, I decided that the best way to test, evaluate, and showcase a new IC chip that performed most of the RF and analog functions in a multi band police walkie talkie, was to build a multi band police walkie talkie. This was one of the last boards I laid out for Motorola. It did all of the RF and analog functions for a full function radio, covered every police frequency used from 136 MHz to 941 MHz, and was designed to fit into the housing of an existing product and use its existing digital board with new firmware. This board contains over 600 parts in under 6 square inches of space. The brass cans cover some Voltage Controlled Oscillators which cover the RF frequencies marked on the cans. All of this was to be integrated into the next version of the chip. I left Motorola in 2014 after 41 years. The radio being developed here is now a shipping product with two main chips, the RF / analog chip and the digital / microcontroller chip. PCB layout for a complex product with multiple conflicting technologies like low level audio and 3.3 or 5 volt digital signals is still an acquired skill, best left to experienced PCB guys.
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I worked with a guy in the 90s that had an old truck made in the 50's. Ran a carbureted engine. It was immaculate show-car quality. I asked him why he didn't like all the new gadgets cars had these days, like EFI, power windows, cruise control. He said "because there is nothing in this car that I can't fix in my own garage."
Eisenhower warned about this rise of the Intelligence State nearly 80 years ago.A lot of the talk here has been about corporates and their data gathering, but really the problem will be governments...
I don't know how many people here know much about the East German Stasi and the volumes of information they collected from informants.
But imagine what they could have done with facial recognition, gesture, expression analysis, car plate recognition, card sales data, phone metadata, cell tower location data.
All combined with the mountain of personal and financial data they already gather.
Two years ago, I put a 1995 Chevy LT-1 engine and 4L60E transmission in my 1953 Chevy 3100 pickup. Dakota Digital gauges and PCM. I can tune the PCM with a laptop, and using the software, I can tell what is wrong with the engine. I can fix it all in my garage.
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There's also the concern about being hacked with some of the newer car ECU's ~(>2005). Like the murder of Michael Hastings. Almost all cars nowadays have Throttle By Wire, So if the ECU got hacked or corrupted or shorted. The throttle could go wide open.I worked with a guy in the 90s that had an old truck made in the 50's. Ran a carbureted engine. It was immaculate show-car quality. I asked him why he didn't like all the new gadgets cars had these days, like EFI, power windows, cruise control. He said "because there is nothing in this car that I can't fix in my own garage."
Then electronic brakes, electronic emergency-brakes that wont work in an emergency such as the loss of electricity.

Well that's a normal ECU. But modern cars have everything going through the ECU. Often theres like 5 ECUs, costing like 1000$ each to replace, and even worse, sometimes they're serialized and reject an unmatched set of ECU's.Two years ago, I put a 1995 Chevy LT-1 engine and 4L60E transmission in my 1953 Chevy 3100 pickup. Dakota Digital gauges and PCM. I can tune the PCM with a laptop, and using the software, I can tell what is wrong with the engine. I can fix it all in my garage.
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All proprietary, closed source code of course.
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Two years ago, I put a 1995 Chevy LT-1 engine and 4L60E transmission in my 1953 Chevy 3100 pickup. Dakota Digital gauges and PCM. I can tune the PCM with a laptop, and using the software, I can tell what is wrong with the engine. I can fix it all in my garage.
You can not fix the electronics.
Given an EMP your truck will be sitting idle, unable to move, with the latest Teslas...
I think the point of the guy with an old 50s trucks, with no electronics, is that it will survive an EMP.
Even so, the condenser and the points etc... still will be an issue with long term maintenance.
Honestly, I'd rather have a car with ABS, TCS, torque steering AWD and an USB so I can play Tidal on the road. I mean, cars don't really break down nowadays and they don't need the maintenance. Ideally, buy a car that you can write off and then you know you limit your downside. Don't buy more car that you can afford. Hmm.. which is hard nowadays...
Mind you, Chez Moi we're state of the Art... No BEV ( battery EVs like the Tesla ) but we've had a number of Honda hybrids and EVs. Currently we have a '24 Honda Accord Touring ( which is an iMMD hybrid... our 3rd ). We also had a Clarity Fuel Cell EV (FCEV) and a Clarity Plug In (PHEV)... and in the late 00s we had a Civic Hybrid and then in the 10s a 14 and 15 Accord Hybrids.
IMHO, a serial hybrid is the best powertrain.... well, the FCEV is the BEST and the PHEV is capable of doing most of the local daily driving on EV mode. I had a job in Torrance where I could charge the car for free... so I'd haul on the car pool lanes with the PHEV at 85 and almost drain the battery... then I'd charge back and drive back more sedately, at 70, and get home with half a battery. Doing this three days a week... it worked nice for me.
But the serial hybrids are the best.... low end like a diesel, easy to drive in stop and go traffic, a range of 500+ miles per tank, great mileage and quiet at 80 mph on cruise control on the Interstates... All those people in their F150s swearing off the hybrids have no clue. It is actually the ideal powertrain for a truck... or just about any vehicle except a race car...
I keep looking to see if Honda will release a Passport iMMD AWD... Imagine, a 2L turbo, with 280 bhp powertrain, torque steering iAWD, 34 mpg and a 500 mile highway range on the tank at 80 mpg. I love the sound of the J35 at tilt, but off the line, the electric motor drive ( serial hybrid ) is very hard to beat. You would need a 454 to match it.
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DuckDuckGo sold out like 2 years ago, now it's just glorified google and tracks you just the same.
Brave still has yet to do the same but the image search on that sucks a ton.
There's SearX which is a a combined search engine with privately hosted proxies, but that has problems with lag, and you often get timed out if you search a lot of queries in a short period. and you're left to trust that whoever hosts the instance has good opsec, otherwise you can be tracked just the same
But search engines is just scratching the surface... you have an android phone, android is owned by google, and google puts a ton of spyware in the android services. There's GrapheneOS which is an open source android distro but it's only supported on (ironically) Google Pixel phones.
IPhones aren't free from spyware either. Perhaps even worse so because they're closed down so much, you wont be installing any other OS on them any time soon. As opposed to most android phones which are almost trivial to boot a different OS onto.
If you're on PC, If you have a windows OS there's tons of tracking there too. And 5x more with every new version.
You can install Wireshark and just take a look for yourself.
With Linux it's different. But there you have the problem with software support... Most specialty software is only available for windows.
There's also the browser. Chrome is obviously garbage and google spyware, Opera is chinease spyware, Firefox is better, but firefox devs f up the browser more every update, you have to tweak tons of settings to harden it which the regular user wont do, also, google pays them to have google as the default search engine, which regular users wont change. Brave browser is a fork of firefox made by a former firefox dev. It's descent... for now. But it'll probably come to an end eventually too, by selling out or being forced to reduce the security by some regulations.
Even with all that you're gonna have tons of tracking, because every website will have some google search engine optimization service running that will track everyone who connects to that website. You will have "eliminated" client side tracking but there's not much you can do about server side tracking.
You could install ublock and block all 3rd party scripts from being loaded, that'll break most websites, and still wont ensure tracking protection.
Then there's your internet provider which is obviously gonna track you too.
The internet router which may have spyware built in by the manufacturer.
Your device which may have spyware built in by the manufacturer (For example Huwawei and iirc Lenovo laptops)
Intel CPU's have had proprietary firmware on them since like 2009, AMD a bit later.
So maybe if you get an old thinkpad, install a linux distro on it, an open source bios, never connect to the internet, and sneak into coffee shops whenever you want to download something... you wont be avoiding tracking.
Brave still has yet to do the same but the image search on that sucks a ton.
There's SearX which is a a combined search engine with privately hosted proxies, but that has problems with lag, and you often get timed out if you search a lot of queries in a short period. and you're left to trust that whoever hosts the instance has good opsec, otherwise you can be tracked just the same
But search engines is just scratching the surface... you have an android phone, android is owned by google, and google puts a ton of spyware in the android services. There's GrapheneOS which is an open source android distro but it's only supported on (ironically) Google Pixel phones.
IPhones aren't free from spyware either. Perhaps even worse so because they're closed down so much, you wont be installing any other OS on them any time soon. As opposed to most android phones which are almost trivial to boot a different OS onto.
If you're on PC, If you have a windows OS there's tons of tracking there too. And 5x more with every new version.
You can install Wireshark and just take a look for yourself.
With Linux it's different. But there you have the problem with software support... Most specialty software is only available for windows.
There's also the browser. Chrome is obviously garbage and google spyware, Opera is chinease spyware, Firefox is better, but firefox devs f up the browser more every update, you have to tweak tons of settings to harden it which the regular user wont do, also, google pays them to have google as the default search engine, which regular users wont change. Brave browser is a fork of firefox made by a former firefox dev. It's descent... for now. But it'll probably come to an end eventually too, by selling out or being forced to reduce the security by some regulations.
Even with all that you're gonna have tons of tracking, because every website will have some google search engine optimization service running that will track everyone who connects to that website. You will have "eliminated" client side tracking but there's not much you can do about server side tracking.
You could install ublock and block all 3rd party scripts from being loaded, that'll break most websites, and still wont ensure tracking protection.
Then there's your internet provider which is obviously gonna track you too.
The internet router which may have spyware built in by the manufacturer.
Your device which may have spyware built in by the manufacturer (For example Huwawei and iirc Lenovo laptops)
Intel CPU's have had proprietary firmware on them since like 2009, AMD a bit later.
So maybe if you get an old thinkpad, install a linux distro on it, an open source bios, never connect to the internet, and sneak into coffee shops whenever you want to download something... you wont be avoiding tracking.
Wouldn't cars be protected against EMP's? they're essentially a faraday cage.You can not fix the electronics.
Given an EMP your truck will be sitting idle, unable to move, with the latest Teslas...
I think the point of the guy with an old 50s trucks, with no electronics, is that it will survive an EMP.
...
...
So maybe if you get an old thinkpad, install a linux distro on it, an open source bios, never connect to the internet, and sneak into coffee shops whenever you want to download something... you wont be avoiding tracking.
Use Tor.
Big Brother smacks me again!
I picked up my phone today to find this greeting from Google. My question is how did they legally get the picture that they used? I took this picture in April of 2004, over 20 years ago. It is one of over 500,000 pictures on my hard drive. Most of them are identified only by the photo number assigned by the camera when the picture was taken, and the folders are identified only by the camera model number. For instance, the FZ1000 folder contains 307 sub folders like 407_PANA, each with 1000 individual photos. 99% of the pictures contain inanimate objects.
I picked up my phone today to find this greeting from Google. My question is how did they legally get the picture that they used? I took this picture in April of 2004, over 20 years ago. It is one of over 500,000 pictures on my hard drive. Most of them are identified only by the photo number assigned by the camera when the picture was taken, and the folders are identified only by the camera model number. For instance, the FZ1000 folder contains 307 sub folders like 407_PANA, each with 1000 individual photos. 99% of the pictures contain inanimate objects.
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