I wonder how long it will be until the Supreme Court overturns this one.

I share the DIY repair sentiment, but the other commenter was right. You saved them money by opting yourself out of their warranty, which is free to you, but costs them money. Now, if you had used the warranty and then repaired things yourself after it's no longer free, that would be a nice FU to them.

The funny part is that rather than respecting this, they chose to cryptographically pair the parts, so they stop working if you replace them...

According to the post linked in the article, it's under ~/Library/Application Support.

The good news is that ~/Library isn't world-readable by default. The bad news is that it's still very easily readable by any process running under the user and by any other user with admin privileges or access to sudo.

With MacOS, specifically, it's stupidly easy and unintrusive to enable disk encryption. Outside of that, programs can save key-value pairs to Keychain (a credential store) and use that to store a randomly-generated encryption key.

It's true that any program running with the user privileges and within its session can open the file, but once the user logs out it's unreadable.

If the data was saved to the login Keychain, it should only be accessible while that specific user is logged in. The existence of vulnerabilities notwithstanding, it should actually be reasonably secure as long as System Integrity Protection is enabled and the program in question isn't running. SIP stops users (including root) from messing with system files or processes, and the Keychain requires a user password prompt to give programs access to entries created by other programs.

Now, considering all the above... it would have taken a day at most to figure out how to encrypt the data before it gets written to the file so it's not just sitting completely out in the open.

You don't at all see how this could be abused in the exact same way as what you're complaining about, do you?

For example, maybe Trump relaxes some restrictions on China, and the Chinese government just so happens to decide to host an expensive event at one of Trump's businesses afterward. It's not a bribe; it's business as usual™

In other news, the NSA is soon to be adding blackmail to their income sources.

If Gemini has shown us anything, it's not even useful AI. Like you said, the solution is as easy as turning it off.

I wouldn't call it surprising or confusing, unfortunately.

I subscribe to the theory that they do, but instead take inspiration from them.

But think of the profit improvements!

The other half are rich pricks. That also checks out. The kind of privileged douche who would buy a BMW is the same kind that thinks they're above the law.

Two things can be bad at once.

I think we all know that one of those two things will never happen in the land of the free and home of the mass-produced automobile.

Oh, I don't give a crap about the realtors. I'm just not a fan of STEM being placed above other fields when it's inaccessible to people without either having been born into money or taking on substantial debts.

What a waste of public resources just to be petty and spiteful.

A little privileged there to be specifying jobs that require tens of thousands of dollars of education as a prerequisite, no?

Sovcit can stop it from happening by simply not paying. Whether or not they will be jailed for contempt of court and/or have their car impounded is another story, however.

Cardiovascular disease is a bitch, eh?

Thinks that water destroys magnets.

No no, you see: water is 2 parts hydrogen and 1 part oxygen. Hydrogen is a key component of nukes, and nukes destroy magnets. Trump was telling us in code, because the baby-eating Dems are looking for an excuse to have him replaced with a body double so he can't give obvious messages.

—Some Qonspircy Theorist

^{I hope the satire is obvious}