Confirmation of anecdotes or gut feelings is still science. At some point you need data rather than experience to help people and organizations change their perception (see: most big tech companies lighting billions of dollars on fire on generative AI).

Believe me it’s better to be ignorant about this…

Or… They do what they did last time the lifetime was cut down from 3-10 years down to 395 days… Just issue you a new certificate when the old one runs out and up to whatever the time period you bought it for…?

Let’s Encrypt isn’t the only CA to use ACME, you can auto renew with basically any CA that implemented it (spoiler: most of them have)

I’ve been using this to automatically skip ads on my Chromecasts (youtube ads and in video segments) for the past year.

https://github.com/gabe565/CastSponsorSkip

It’s literally sponsor block but for all of my Chromecasts

You must be new on the internet…

You’d think, but then again they probably ripped some open source repo off Github that had more features than necessary. Then proceeded to not turn any of those off, hack in their own features that aren’t very optimized because the board has like 4 gigs of storage and who cares. Finally bake in some firmware blobs for other components that probably allow them to figure out what sports you play or what pets you have so they can sell that info so other companies can show you ads.

Add all that together and you probably have a firmware image that’s like a gig.

Due to the hacked in features, they probably need to release patches frequently or add new “features” nobody asked for. It probably also has a phone-home “feature” so it can automatically update itself because you obviously need the “Defunkifier” setting on your washer right now.

It wouldn’t supprise me if it the amount of network traffic from something like a “smart” washer was a few gigs a day because it’s constantly looking for new updates or sending whatever other telemetry data it’s collected to the mothership.

IANAL; However Usually the contracts have a severability clause, meaning even if some parts of that contract are null and void the rest of it stands minus the parts that are illegal. Does that mean those clauses are also null and void depending on locality? Again IANAL, but I believe it’s pretty settled contract law at least in the US.

Out. In, you’ll smash your thumb into oblivion.