It is very clearly written so individuals won’t be able to buy a printer without this junk in the firmware. Afterwards maybe they can fix it, but according to the article it includes a provision that 3D printers (or CNC, etc) can’t even be bought online in NY.

The two that fired the shots have been named.

Thankfully Costco stations don’t do that. I’ve not seen an ad at a pump in years.

That somehow doesn’t surprise me

That’s true, and I should have been less absolute in my language. However all of those activities were niche and actively scary sounding to the ‘normies’ (and to a lesser extent still are)

I actually did find “warez” on BBSs before I had Internet access. But I really think even finding BBS numbers in the back of a magazine and trying them out put me outside most computer users of the time.

Security by obscurity would have made a lot more sense before global communications allowed people to share the results of poking around like this.

Even after the Internet was invented probably 99% or more of users would have no clue about digging into the systems.

I’ve mentioned this before, but on one of my early contracts I found an ‘encryption’ function with a keyspace of 32… values. I don’t mean 32-bit. The key was prepended as the first byte to the stream, and the decryption function could accept the full 8-bit range.

Fortunately that was replaced by real encryption some time before I left. But I’m pretty sure nobody actually cracked it before then, because I think nobody thought to try it.

It’s frustrating that they are spending money and bandwidth on ‘AI’ at all, but it’s not all bad news:

"Also, launch “AI controls” into Firefox, giving people a clear way to turn AI off entirely - current and future AI features. . "