The perverse incentives that nobody spell out: this is good for monopolies.
from soy farmers in brazil to local contractors bidding on government road work in new york. Everywhere the bigger company, that can have several more machines than it need for the daily operation, all leased with warranty, will destroy the competition that can't lease because of bad credit etc and so will have downtime/missed deadlines/lost harvests because they cannot get repairs on time.
Some big pockets benefit a LOT from all this, not just the dealers.
Also, the root cause for this was when car dealerships start doing this with cars and nobody cared.
I never understood why domains used to NTP and Package mirrors depend on external, commercial, certificate authorities.
It could be a fallback, with a red big warning to manually check the certs are alright when you need it (e.g too long without synching your root certificates package). But for most cases there is no excuse not having it local at all times.
I mean MITM a domain essential for the "distro" should be at least just a little bit harder than regular MITM.
Ironically something that solves all of the above and actually decrease costs: adopt GPLv3 for everything that receives or ever received federal funding. From technology to research data.
But I guess you will never see the guy who built an empire on top of GPLv2 with insignificant contributions back mention anything like that.
end to end without self hosted open source servers have (among others) a tradeoff: either opaque server you can't trust at all, or no offline messages. Which one you decided on?