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Per LA Times [ https://www.latimes.com/environment/newsletter/2021-12-16/ca... ]

They propose to pay customers $0.05 / generated kWh instead of the $0.20-$0.30/kWh that customers pay in California. So you would have to generate an excess 160 kWh /month to cover the $8 fee (per installed kW of capacity). Your non-solar neighbor who uses your 160kWh of generated electrons will pay the utility $32-$48 for them, while reaping the benefit of lowered stress on the grid.


160kWh is twenty 8 hour days at 100% efficiency. That will almost never be worth it. I guess that’s the end of net energy metering in California.

According to an article about the legality of the fee linked elsewhere in this thread, customers can still opt out of NEM, and just waste the excess electricity generation.

That will essentially always be the right financial decision.

It would actually be less hostile towards solar installs if they simply paid $0 for excess energy, and didn’t introduce the fee.


It makes sense. The cost of generation is just a part of the cost of distribution. It never made much sense to force the power company to buy power from consumers at consumer prices, it amounted basically to a subsidy for grid-tie installations. What I hope is that this incentives people to move towards off-grid systems with their own storage. Grid-tie was never viable in large scale if you really think about all the details.


Californians can see what's happening with their grid at: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html


The main problem with Prop 65 is that it was done by ballot proposition -- through California's initiative process. That is, the proposed law was voted up or down by the people AS IS. As opposed to being created through the normal legislative process that would have allowed for sensible changes (as well as probable neutering by opponents). The initiative process is a form of direct democracy intended to bypass/override the legislature. As such, it is difficult to tweak Prop 65 legislatively for needed fixes that would make it more effective.

This is one example of why most things that are proposed should not actually be done through the initiative process, IMHO. As a Californian, my default bias on ALL ballot propositions has become NO until proven well-written.

That said, I'd rather have Prop 65 as imperfect as it is than nothing. It occasionally gives me actionable information.


There is a spot somewhere between abstinence and gluttony where you can live well and keep your risks under control. I think I'd rather live a little and take my chances - as long as its my choice. I'm with you generally, its good to have notice, but not all science is correct/settled and we need thresholds.


I believe this is the "Argument to Moderation" logical fallacy [0].

> Argument to moderation is the fallacy that the truth is a compromise between two opposing positions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation


I'm saying that I can't eat french fries everyday, but once in say 15 days isn't so bad. That isn't true of Benzene. Prop 65 would warn you to abstain from many things, many things that need more science.


Let me tell you about Swiss direct democracy. If an initiative comes up, parliament can amend the law and tell the people, hey look, we already improved the law, you can reject the initiative, or make a rejectable counter-proposal, or even both. It's sometimes complicated and it doesn't always produce something I would call nice but more often than not the outcome is better than acceptable.


>Raw IPs can be used as well, but that doesn’t negate my point.

And in fact if you have enterprise-wide visibility on DNS requests, you have the opportunity to detect the use of an IP that was not returned in a request. Making it immediately suspect.


They are responding to the very recent emergence of applications (like Firefox) that (optionally) use their own encrypted DNS, thus bypassing the enterprise's ability to apply security policy based on DNS. (Visibility on DNS is also useful to help detect some malware.) I'll allow it.


It's clearly also spurred by the attempts to further obfuscate the use of DoH via Oblivious DoH [0] - though they don't go into much details on it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25344358


>thus bypassing the enterprise's ability

I think you could change it to read " bypassing the NSA's ability" and find the real reason behind this.


They aren't recommending you don't use DoH. Just that you don't allow individual apps to bypass your enterprise resolver. In fact I use the same strategy at home (with DoT) to enforce ad and tracker blocking. It's just common sense really.

From the document: >[...] NSA recommends that the enterprise DNS resolver supports encrypted DNS, such as DoH, and that only that resolver be used in order to have the best DNS protections and visibility.


Net net: what IME is best for a mainland Chinese user of Signal?


Is there a database of already analyzed objects? For example, can I search on the sha256sum of my IoT device's firmware and see if someone else has done the heavy lifting?


No.

I know IDA has a "Lumina" database.

https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/lumina/

Someone has made a public "Lumina" database for IDA.

https://lumen.abda.nl/

If you don't have a legit copy of IDA, you can always pirate a copy and use that public "Lumina" server.


If there was any public documentation on the "Lumina" protocol, one could create a Ghidra plugin that interacts with the server. Sadly, I don't have a copy of IDA (and therefore cannot reverse engineer the protocol) and the author of lumen.abda.nl hasn't released the source code.


V Nice. Thanks for the Lumen link.


That would be awesome, like GhidraHub or something

I'm not well versed in the legality of publishing those databases, as some discussions I've heard elsewhere treat them the same as the object code they annotate and thus it would be like publishing the .exe from Photoshop. I would guess it's possible to separate the annotations from the object code, similar to the way subtitle files are shared for the movies, but similar to a wrong subtitle file, it would take some doing to discover it and more doing to try and rescue the annotations if they could apply to a slightly different but still applicable binary


I'm sure Ghidra's creator's have one


Hehe yeah, but it's a Cassandra cluster ;)


Given the features and cost, what are the likely class of suitable applications for Precursor? It looks like the guts of a typical (consumer) router e.g., or a set-top device, but maybe not a commodity IOT thing (overkill and cost) and certainly not an iPad (performance, for one).


Precursor is focused on applications that prioritize evidence-based trust over everything else. Thus it's envisioned that it could be useful for applications such as password managers, authentication token generation, secure comms and crypto wallets; but given its high price point it only makes sense for individuals at-risk to use it.

Thus it's overkill for your average user, but if you're a comptroller with million-dollar signature authority on corporate bank accounts or a journalist operating in hostile situations it could be worth the cost.


i suppose "a journalist operating in hostile situations" should be better served by some kind of "steganographic solution", then a pretty shiny Precursor

otherwise, i wouldn't bet he'll come back with all the nails he had in the beginning (maybe if it's disguised as some kind of "stupid" appliance"..)


> A 2020 version of this might be "why there aren't more Teslas." It's interesting how many electric car companies are active in China, most of which westerners haven't heard of. (Check for example the video of the "Chengdu Motor Show" by FullyChargedShow on YT.) Relevant to the topic at hand, it seems that the "More Googles" are more likely to be arising in China, mostly outside my reality bubble. Some helped by market segregation enforced by the current political situation. That's orthogonal to the overall topic, but not irrelevant.


I generally support the EFF and think netizens need far more protections than they have, and those need to come through legislation. But I don't get why this mandated interoperability is a good idea.

Mandating data portability is one thing, but having the government decide that a company must provide an api seems absurd to me (so far: it's a new idea to me).

In the meantime, dear EFF: - Why hasn't the EFF created boilerplate privacy agreement clauses that companies could adopt to prove their ubiquitously claimed "utmost concern for user privacy"? - Why isn't there a vision of how companies could maintain the provenance under which each datum has been acquired (and therefore when they can/can't be shared/sold/etc.)? - What meaning does any privacy agreement have (no matter how consumer friendly) if it can be changed at any time? - Why do NO companies promise to protect user data in the event of an acquisition (in fact they promise the opposite).

These seem like action items right down EFF's lane and I keep waiting year after year for the basics to be covered. I criticize as a friend (and small donor).


> generally support the EFF and think netizens need far more protections than they have, and those need to come through legislation. But I don't get why this mandated interoperability is a good idea.

It does look like a solution in search of a problem to me. Plenty of social networks have grown up while Facebook existed. Off the top of my head Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, Viber, Tiktok, Yikyak, LinkedIn.

It's not clear what the practical impact of forced interoperability means. It (probably) upends the current revenue model. Who is going to maintain the back end API when the revenue is captured by the front end?


Why do we need 10 "different" apps to send messages between people?

Can you imagine needing a different email client to communicate between Gmail and Outlook users?


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