Can’t even watch it with my always on VPN.

Hello, this was never about kids. Do you routinely believe what politicians are telling you?

The point the blog author was making: “I’m bothered, as I have been since the original iPad introduction 16 years ago, by the unnecessary restrictions placed by corporate powers to run third-party software and operating systems on devices we own.” Open source/libre operating systems do not restrict the freedom of the user.

You can run your VPN on your firewall (mine is opnsense, behind a cable modem in bridge mode). E.g. wireguard with Mullvad is a good option. Or you can set up a VPN client on your end devices – Mullvad gives you 5 endpoints for one account.

I also don’t trust my ISP nor my national government, which is the bulk of my private Internet use goes over a fail-close VPN.

People willingly buy blatantly proprietary systems, then publicly muse why they don’t have freedom to do with them what they want.

Yes, so people should stick to the legal options. It isn’t hard.

You have no idea about the NATO-Russia war nor how modern attrition wars work. Can’t blame you, MSM are a hall of distorted mirrors.

They don’t even have state in the weights blob. It’s all tokens in an input vector.

But if your house burns down because of your unlicensed configuration, the insurance won’t pay, and if people got hurt there will be a criminal investigation.

Oh yeah, agentic AI going all agile with lobster claws.

Yes, starting up a downed grid is a difficult problem. Recovering from a large scale failure could take weeks. Longer, with blown transformers.

Too high, too low, or out of frequency range.

Of course you can buy whatever you like, and whatever is being sold has to be compliant with local legal requirements.

If you buy illegal stuff and cause problems, you will have problems with your insurance and potentially, legal ones.

And that’s all I’m going to say on the matter. HAND.

I’m assuming people are buying a new system. If you have legacy hardware, that’s a crapshoot. If you’re a gamer and are moving to Linux that can become difficult, due to your special requirements. Good luck with your migration.

I am buying new hardware when the old one breaks or becomes unusable. My LOS Poco X3 Pro from end 2021 has a bad case of ghost touch, so I bought a new Pixel 7a end 2024 for GOS. My LOS Galaxy Tab S5e from mid-2022 refurbished is somehat usable, but my main driver since mid-2025 is a Pixel tablet with GOS.

These are reasonably long lifecycles, and I try to buy refurbished when possible.

By now over 1.2 million people in Germany have registered (and even more have not registered) their legal small scale solar system and are producing their own electricity (mine covers 2/3rds of my total demand).

If you think that’s a problem, be my guest.

You are required to notify your utilities that you’ll be operating a direct plugged small solar PV installation, that’s it. They can’t forbid you from doing this.

The utilities don’t monitor compliance, the manufacturer is.

It is a commercial product, connected to the grid via a standard schuko plug, sold in Germany. It has to be compliant with the local law to be sold legally.

It all shouldn’t be so difficult to understand.

I have never lost the hardware lottery, by virtue of not playing it. I buy my hardware to support the OS I run, not the other way round.

I know it because it’s in the spec necessary for licensing. It shuts off in under 20 ms so you can’t even get shocked by the prongs of the plug if pulled out.