Couple of suggestions: Oracle's OCI has a free offering. One could use that as a mail relay.
Also SpamHero has been a pleasure to work with with very reasonable pricing to filter most of the junk that comes in, re-delivery service and outbound relay
Let's not forget that these policies fostered the development of encryption in Canada, Australia and other countries (See SSLEay for example).
So it ended up being counter-productive.
The simplest way to stop competition is to subsidize a product. In this case, offer the tools openly.
There are lots of systems that don't support ACME. Enterprise firewalls for example are just starting to support it. Lots of embedded devices still do not support it. Older enterprise servers have either very poor or not compatible enough to make it work reliably.
Sometimes in 2016 we were working on a kitchen renovation and decided on a built-in double oven, and went with GE's offering. I seriously considered $ 300 more for the top-shelf offering that included convection on both ovens and Wi-Fi connectivity.
Back then Haier just bought GE Appliances and that made me waver. Also I knew their fridges with Wi-Fi were running Windows CE, what I didn't think it would have a long future, and integration through a now chinese/american company didn't quite appeal me.
In the end bought the version without Wi-Fi and only one convection oven, which has proven more than enough.
The advantage of Wi-Fi we though would be to be able to set the oven to cook the food left on it by the time we arrived from work.
But then again food had to be left at room temperature most of the day, so we figured it wouldn't be something we would use too often.
Now after two years of working from home, this became more irrelevant.
Now my house is as automated as I can possibly make it, but running local mesh networks (Z-Wave and Zigbee), and the few Wi-Fi devices are HomeKit enabled, which means it should not depend on 3rd party cloud offerings for standard functionality, and has been mostly limited to decorative lighting developed in North American or European companies.
When I had a 2016 Mazda, I regularly downloaded their firmware, which at some point came fairly frequently.
Like other manufacturers, their dealer portal posts firmware upgrades along with other service bulletins, and occasionally the firmware leaks out from some of their dealers, so enthusiast would go on upgrade it by themselves.
The 5G twist is pure BS. These cars (Circa 2016) have no modem that connects directly to the head-unit, and if they do are a separate module that's 3G only.
My theory is that the radio station sent some unicode characters on their RDS feed that crashes the system, it probably cached it (These head-units run on Linux, and is well known in some hacker circles), so now it's in some kind of loop.
It won't be the first time that RDS feeds with some unusual combinations crash the head-units.
If Mazda has a new firmware, these can be upgraded via the USB ports by booting into a recovery mode.
I had Surface 3 Pro and it was a nightmare. In the end, the SSD died and the way the machine is glued together, it's impossible to open without breaking the screen.
Before its final death, it had problems with sleep/wake functions. A standard reinstall wouldn't fix it. Eventually had to take it back to Microsoft for a full re-image. That did the trick.
There is minimal effort in a CLI app compared to a full-fledged web app.
I also appreciate how much faster things are when there is a CLI REST APP instead of a GUI front-end for the same application.
Actually, as a tidbit, Chromium is a fork of WebKit, which is Safari's rendering engine, which for some reason started as a fork from Konqueror (KDE Linux desktop's browser).
Google did however replace the javascript engine in Chromium.
The Javascript engine in Chromium deserves a different discussion, since it also powers NodeJS.
Back in the day, WebKit was quite popular as a rendering engine and is also used by Qt.
I made the mistake of buying a Chumby clock (With Firmware signed by Sony, which likely maintained a VM somewhere to boot their clocks until they decided it wasn't worth the effort) without realizing that it needed an internet connection tho even boot and show the time of the day.
'authoritarian regime' is a slippery slope.
There can be clear human violations, but at what point does a government become authoritarian?
USA has plenty of violations on its shoulders, perhaps complicit in many others. I would not call it authoritarian but it has been repressive (Citing USA as a clear example, not picking on particular politics).
Genocide is distinctively clear from freedom of expression, so by no means should this be constructed to justify that.
A war has many battles, so perhaps in this case there would be compromises.
Why these companies are working with China needs a deeper discussion.
A suggestion would be to treat destinations that do not need to traverse a gateway (ie local network) differently.
Browsers would need to implement this.
Further, they could present an initial dialog to 'trust' the local network. Obviously we don't want to do this in public Wi-Fi networks, but the OS already has a concept of 'private' vs 'public' networks, and the browser can easily know if the destination needs to be routed or it's local.
I had the 1st two generation Pebbles, and now I'm using a Versa Lite. I do find a lot of resemblance on Pebble. Granted it's not open at all and their 'store' is, to me, much less inviting. Yeah not open source at all.
However, I also recall that Pebble was looking into Android with their 'Pebble Core'.
I do miss their e-ink screen
Years ago, I worked on a project that required generating PDF invoices. Used the FPDF library and I was shocked how small the files are (including a properly sized logo) when generated compared to most other PDFs 'rendered' from word or print processors.
So Facebook users are not the people using its service, but the advertisers that pay to collect data from them. Glad they made this abundantly clear.
Facebook users are the product they're selling.
The problem isn't much about labor costs in the US, but the dismantling of the supply chain.
Even Apple had problems sourcing screws when building a handful of its computers in the USA, which is well documented.
To re-build a domestic supply-chain, one has to start somewhere.
China started by exporting 'low-tech' products (plastic utensils, some toys) and it inexorably moved up the chain while USA and Europe eventually divested of much of their manufacturing infrastructure.