Once the chips are there in a EU datacenter, no geopolitical change can bring them away. And that already makes some difference.

We use self-hosted Mattermost (team version, i.e. without limits but no enterprise features like LDAP). Fine for a small team (around 40 active users here) where you can script account actions via the API, probably not fine when users become a lot more, or you might need access to the compliance functions for audit purposes, etc.

For us the free version of Slack was insufficient, the commercial one too expensive, and anyway, given that it's a cloud-based system, it's not compliant with our internal rules for confidential information (unless we can get some specific agreement with them). On the side, there is a bit too much analytics/telemetry in the Slack client.

Article says:

  New York’s budget bill S.9005 buries similar requirements in Part C, sweeping   
  in CNC mills and anything capable of “subtractive manufacturing.”

So CNCs might be part of it. But I didn't check the actual bill text.

> Anything that can be done in a terminal can be scripted and automated

Sure, next time I'll need to quickly edit a configuration file I'll setup a complete CI/CD pipeline to run vim (or nano, or whatever) inside it.

Calm down, they wrote "can", not "should".

Sure, but unfortunately most people are now using iMessage, Whatsapp, Signal, Facebook messenger, and so on, and Pidgin can't connect to any of them AFAIK.

well now you know ;) https://pidgin.im/plugins/

Interesting, there are apparently working plugins for both Signal and Whatsapp! Both appear to work as secondary devices. What would really be great is to have the possibility of using Pidgin as primary device...

I'm pretty sure it should be possible if one really wants to do it. Think of a high-power IR flash and a high-res camera synchronized with the flash, with fixed focus on where the VIN would be passing. If the flash pulse is short but strong enough, it should be possible to read the VIN. Maybe some polarizing filters to remove glass reflections are needed.

> The plate is pretty trivial to fake though.

Sure it is, but people can't realistically think to randomize their plate numbers to avoid tracking... IANAL but is it probably a criminal offense to do so.

Signal is not Swiss, though, although I'd like they to be ;-)

There's a (not so visible) info button top right. It says:

    cachemonet is an exploration into the serendipitous collisions that
    occur between two randomly generated arrays. the arrays contain a mix
    of custom and found .gifs sourced from tumblr and are set to
    music. the output is autonomous, generative, art made possible through
    curation & code.

You can even turn on sound...

and it sounds like "cash money"

That probably depends on what is being displayed... at some point I had sounds of USB connect/disconnect (possibly from the Windows 7 era).

I think GP is referring to the name of the site, which sounds like "cash money" if you pronounce it with a thick American accent.

Indeed, I just understood the same when reading it again... I answered too quickly

It has already been done... albeit on short distances. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910263 (2017 IIRC). This said I wouldn't expect it to work miles away as an analog phone would.