pbasista

They are soldered in. Replacement itself can probably be done by a professional repair technician who is equipped with the right tools. But it is not a self-service job that anyone can do.

On top of that, the drives might be somehow paired to the motherboard. And I would imagine that pairing a new one with the existing motherboard may require some proprietary software that only Apple has.

These are only my assumptions though. People e.g. at Louis Rossmann's repair shop might know more.

Why not?

I can understand that they might be cautious about sharing their data with a Chinese company.

But them being the most successful companies means that they can just buy their own hardware. And run whatever models they can get their hands on in there.

Even if those models are Chinese. They (the companies running them on their own hardware) would be in full control then.

> very hard to move off of without convincing a lot of others

In my opinion, you do not need to convince anyone. Just leave. And face the consequences. If you think it is the right thing to do, do it. Do not wait for it to be convenient.

You will still be able to communicate with those people using plenty of other means. They have phones. They have e-mails. Some might even have open access social media accounts such as the Fediverse ones.

Similarly other people will still be able to contact you if they want.

I would be interested in knowing which devices were (or still are) vulnerable to these zero click exploits. And how those exploits (used to) work, specifically.

A very good point.

I assume that it is the current go-to way to operate for many spy agencies. Hire intermediaries. Who are then tasked to hire further intermediaries. Who then do the dirty work. Without a clue of where the actual order comes from.

Such a mode of operation has lower efficiency of course. But it can be done at scale. Which then offsets the losses caused by inefficiency.

I would not be surprised if there are multiple such attempts to spy on businesses all around the place occurring right now. And the person from the article is just one of the unlucky guys that got caught.

This mode of operation is likely also used, in my opinion, in the current hybrid war attacks by the Russian GRU, mainly in the Ukraine and in Europe at large.

You might make a distinction between looking at the door and walking through that door. But that is a flawed analogy to this particular issue. Because you cannot "look" at API. API has a single purpose. It can be used.

And if the entity operating it does not want public to use it, they need to make it non-public.

> if Reddit bans you, you aren't entitled to use the site

I would say that you are not allowed to use their site as a logged in user (i.e. upvoting, downvoting, commenting, making posts).

It does not seem logical to me that Reddit could "ban" anyone from using their public frontends as anonymous users.

They could only do something like that, in my opinion, if access to all their content was gated behind a login.

There is no agreement you need to enter into in order to use public APIs.

That is the purpose of public APIs. Usage without prior agreements.

If the API providers want to restrict the usage of their APIs, they are free to make them non-public.

What are you talking about, specifically?

Using software with specific licenses? Or making modifications to it?

That is substantially different from reading the public APIs.

Terms of service have no legal binding unless both parties agree to them.

In other words, if X has a public API and Nitter is using it, then neither Nitter themselves nor the Nitter users have to agree to any terms of service in order to do so.

X cannot expect anyone to behave in accordance with terms and conditions they never agreed to.

I do not understand how what you have suggested could be considered as an appropriate analogy.

No one implied that the author should offer their product for free. I merely suggested that they need to focus on other aspect of their product rather than the mechanical software parts because they can no longer be the differentiating factor. Precisely because they could easily be recreated or copied.

Of course.

I think that the differentiating factor must be something else than the software product feature. Because that can easily be copied or recreated.

It can be e.g. the customer support where customers will be listened to and will have their suggestions and requests implemented as features.

I would suggest that, instead of trying to complain about the people copying your products, which I think is practically impossible to avoid, and even from your own experience preventing it has led nowhere so far, you should focus on making sure that your version of the product is the best one. So that the people will naturally use it instead of those repackaged versions.

> take the Javascript code from my website, remove all ads from it

I would assume that this might be one of the reasons why people are modifying and repackaging your product. I would suggest to remove that incentive. So that the people will have no reason to repackage your product because it has annoying features. And so that they could use it directly and be happy about it.

> They refuse it because ...

It is completely irrelevant why they choose to refuse to provide this information.

From what I understand, disclosing this data is not optional. It is a law. And if they have willfully chosen to operate in a country where such a law applies, they have to obey that law.

From the article:

> The European Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) obliges data centers with an installed capacity of at least 500 kilowatts (kW) to report data including their energy and water consumption. In practice, few do so, despite the directive being in effect for three years.

I do not understand how that is even possible.

If any law is supposed to have any practical impact on the society, it needs to be enforced. Otherwise it is a guideline at best, not a law.

I think what would help is for these companies to each receive strict and hefty fines for non-disclosing the electricity and water consumption data they are obliged to disclose.

I assume that after that they would report all the required data very quickly.