In principle, yes. But FWIW, here’s a good example of doing it poorly:

https://sopuli.xyz/post/45724372

I will say I find it interesting you are calling my use of mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world as not being open/the problem, but isn’t the isolation (setting as private) infosec.pub more of a walled-garden and less open?

Infosec.pub is not making a value judgement that permanently discriminates against demographics of people. It’s the difference between an oppressive US corporation arbitrarily systemically singling out groups for marginalisation to save a buck for the corporate as it bullies over 30% of the world’s web territory, and a small charitable volunteer instance with limited resources doing what is necessary to protect itself from an onslaught of attacks.

I can freely share the link of the community post I made even if it is hosted through cloudfare.

Of course. You can share Facebook links too. And those who are in the excluded groups will just waste their time on an unusable link. If you are going to be a pragmatist and not give shit about politics, it’s unclear why you are in the fedi as opposed to Twitter and Facebook.

I imagine mildlyinfuriating@thelemmy.club didn’t exist when I subscribed to lemmy.worlds community or maybe there were only 3 people in it. Surely the expectation is not to keep monitoring all my communities and check if a better version of said community pops up.

Subscribing is about /reading/, not /writing/. When deciding where to post, I often search communities because it’s a changing landscape with new communities emerging daily. Moderately advanced folks would do that by visiting lemmyverse.net which happens to have a filter you can use to filter out Cloudflare instances. I personally use a script instead which queries on lemmyverse’s dataset. If I were to make a post as you did, I would search the terms: infuri shitif shittif asshol dark%pattern (each token is an SQL “like” query surrounded with wildcards). So that gives:

🏰zerobytes.monster🌩|amitheasshole “Am I the Asshole?”
🏰zerobytes.monster🌩|assholegonewild “Gone Wild; Asshole Style”
🏰zerobytes.monster🌩|mildlyinfuriating “jukmifgguggh”
🏰pawb.social🌩|AITA “Am I The Asshole?”
🏰lemmynsfw.com🌩|asshole “Asshole”
🏰lemmynsfw.com🌩|assholebehindthong “Asshole Behind Thong”
🏰lemmynsfw.com🌩|godasshole “GodAsshole”
🏰lemmynsfw.com🌩|pulsatingasshole “Pulsating Assholes”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|actually_infuriating “Actually Infuriating”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|aitah “AmITheAsshole”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|amitheasshole “Am I the Asshole”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|asshole “asshole”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|assholebehindthong “Asshole Behind Thong”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|assholedesign “AssholeDesign”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|assholegonewild “Asshole Gone Wild”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|assholegw “Asshole Gone Wild”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|bassholes “bassholes”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|darkpatterns “darkpatterns”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|enshittification “Enshittification”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|enshittify “Enshittification”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|godasshole “godasshole”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|mildlyinfuriating “Mildly Infuriating”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|mildyinfuriating “mildy infuriating”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|notinfuriating “Not Infuriating”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|qualia “Qualia: Living Ad-Free and Breaking Away from Dark Patterns, Hidden Fees, and More”
🏰lemmit.online🌩|AmItheAsshole “Am I the Asshole?”
🏰lemm.ee🌩|amitheasshole
🏰sh.itjust.works🌩|amitheasshole
🏰sh.itjust.works🌩|furiouslyinfuriating
↑ Kingdoms under the imperial Cloudflare empire ↑

⚠lemmy.ml/c/aita “Am I the Asshole?”
⚠lemmy.ml/c/assholedesign “Asshole Design”
⚠lemmy.ml/c/mildlyinfuriating “Mildly Infuriating”
⚠lemmy.ca/c/amitheasshole “AITAH?”
🥧 fedinsfw.app/gaping_assholes “Gape”
🧺 thebrainbin.org/deshittification “Deshittification”
🗽☯ thelemmy.club/c/Mildlyinfuriating (39/0) “Mildlyinfuriating”
🗽☯ discuss.tchncs.de/c/amitheasshole (125/1) “Am I the Asshole? ”
🗽☯ sopuli.xyz/c/enshitification (40/2) “enshitification (not only enshittification)”
🗽☯ infosec.pub/c/assholedesign_web (92/5) “Asshole Design (web edition)”
🗽☯ slrpnk.net/c/asshole_crappy_design (49/12) “Asshole Design and Crappy Design”
🗽☯ slrpnk.net/c/enshitification (942/710) “Enshittification”
🗽☯ lemmy.cafe/c/disenshittify (147/37) “Disenshittify”

It lists the shitty Cloudflare places first because those are the least interesting and tend to scroll off the terminal screen. Then it lists non-CF nodes that are still centralised due to their sheer disproportionate size which is indicated with a “⚠”. The “🥧” means piefed and “🧺” means kbin (which the db unfortunately has no Cloudflare flags for, thus ethics is a crapshoot and needs a deeper look). Finally, it lists known open free world places using “🗽☯” to indicate freedom and balance. The paranthesis indicate (subscriber count / active users in a month) to give an idea of activity. Those who realise this decision is inherently political and who want to promote an open free world would choose one of the last 7 in the list. I will sometimes choose the /least/ active among them and then crosspost from there so subscribers in the more active groups can see that another interesting group exists – thus encouraging subscriptions that help improve the balance. Of course in the case at hand, we know infosec.pub is closed as it is under attack, so it would not be a good link to share.

Also, as an end user that is on Lemmy because I want a non techbro place to read news topics/share crap going on when appropriate

You can of course choose to be low-tech if you want, but you should know your bubble will be shaped by others on your node. The in-app search on the instance is limited in scope to content and communities based on subscriptions of others on your node.

If you want to expand your bubble help shape it, it’s useful to grok lemmyverse. I block Cloudflare nodes in my settings and I subscribe only to free world communities (“🗽☯”) to do my part in shaping the bubble for a more balanced decentralised space with minimal boot-licking.

W.r.t. “non techbro place”, I guess you mean to refer to a place that is not for tech experts. It’s worth noting that many read “techbro” as “tech millionaires”, such as the CEO of Cloudflare, Twitter, etc.

, like yesterday this type of stuff explains very clearly why Lemmy is and will continue to be a ghost town in comparison.

Lemmy is not a single town. It’s a vast collection of many towns and a good number of those towns are ghost towns. Network effect is a global problem that Lemmy /tried/ and failed to correct. The devs simply assumed that having a federation of instances would automatically counter network effect. There are several oversights and defects in the software which actually exacerbate network effect.

Lemmy certainly needs to improve but I doubt it will make much headway. It’s more likely that a different software package will emerge one day that fends off walled gardens and network effect.

The barrier to entry/understanding is up there which is not welcoming imho.

The dumb users pile onto the Cloudflare nodes. I doubt the tech is too over their heads to give a bad UX. The refined sophisticated users avoid the centralised instances and their understanding improves. The fact that there is more to learn does not create a “barrier to entry” AFAICT. You can get started and function without understanding the evils of Cloudflare and centralisation. You can make adjustments as your knowledge and wisdom improves.

Normally I would say the best link for sharing is that of the host for the community, not the host of your account. But in this case you posted in Lemmy.world, which is jailed in the exclusive walled-garden of Cloudflare™. I highly suggest not posting in Cloudflare. It’s a centralized walled garden by an oppressive US-based tech giant. Might as well use Facebook at that point.

There is one open free-world “Mildlyinfuriating” community: !Mildlyinfuriating@thelemmy.club. I suggest posting there first, and then share that link. If you cannot stomach the idea of less reach/engagement or cannot resist the urge to use LW, at least make your first post in the free world and crosspost into the walled gardens so the ignorant walled-gardeners at least learn about the existence of free world communities.

Now to answer your question, the infosec.pub admin is also the fedia.io admin. This post could¹ give some insight:

https://fedia.io/m/fedia/t/2188602/Fedia-io-performance-issues-and-blocking-anonymous-access

That is, anonymous access to infosec.pub could have been blocked for the same sort of reason.

¹ But you may need to create an account on fedia.io to read that… LOL.

update

Found this: https://infosec.pub/post/45546187

I erroneously assumed you would have already looked in !infosecpub@infosec.pub so I did not initially look myself.

They are microprocessors embedded within the microprocessor. Intel’s IME enables remote access (by intel’s own admission). If you are not a corporation who manages a fleet of machines, the backdoor can only be used against you. AMD’s variant called the PSP is similar but closed-source. We don’t really have a complete picture of the extent of the compromise with AMD because of the opacity of it (as AMD proactively denied a request for source code). What we don’t know /can/ hurt us, as we already got stung by a defective driver for the AMD’s PSP.

Even if the spychips were to be hypothetically designed to be aligned with the interests of non-corporate individual consumers, there is no such thing as bug-free software. They have added complexity that works against us and brings vulnerabilities. And we also cannot dispense of the deliberate design whereby some remote actor decides for the user what software is or is not “authorised” to execute. I alone should decide what is authorised on my PC.

So the fix is to use an AMD processor made before ~2014 (roughly speaking), or a pre-2009 intel. AMD chips were behind intel in terms of performance, but probably not 5 years behind. So I figure 2013 AMDs are the most interesting. But we only have a fuzzy idea of which AMD chips are spychip-free.

Used PC charities and shops tolerate a certain age limit of hardware. My local charity tried (and failed) to sell PCs with linux installations. So they will only accept used hardware that can run a relatively non-ancient version of Windows. They said generally they do not want anything older than 5 years (but somewhat contradicted themselves by saying if it has a Win7 or later sticker on it, it’s young enough to accept). Anyway, 2013 hardware is on the chopping block because the FOSS platforms that do not demand high-performance hardwrae are unpopular. Most people are naive about the spychips and used PC shops are oblivious to their usefulness.

It’s sad that the spy chips were discovered over a decade ago, and now 13 years after AMD began making them we still don’t have info as basic as which chips have it.

I personally want to know which 2013 hardware to grab before it gets melted down as scrap metal.

I am not sure why you are getting downvoted for this post.

That’s the problem with Lemmy – it was designed to support silent downvotes. Some admins realize it’s a bad idea and have the wisdom to disable downvotes instance-wide until the Lemmy design improves.

My guess in this case: among AMD subscribers must be some loyal fans who “chase the shiny” and to avoid their own cognitive dissonance they would want to suppress anything negative about AMD’s later chips in an /emporer wears no clothes/ fashion. But w/silent votes, we can only guess.

Arm has trustzone, so you can’t simply nix x86 chips and be done with it. We would need to do the same research for arm chips.

This means we could create a demand for old phones by separating those without spychips from the rest. Although it’s a bit sketchy when considering all phones have a dodgy gsm stack designed for remote compromise, IIUC. Maybe Osmocom neutralizes it - not sure.

I appreciate the link. I wanted to see what you saw, so I opened the ZIP file and it expands to 27 files. I believe the relevant file is USB_PD_R3.2_V1.2_2026_05_20.pdf, page 42, which states:

3.2.5.2. SPR Programmable Power Supply (PPS) Programmable Power Supply (PPS) is Optional. When included, the voltages and currents a PPS Shall support are as defined in Table 3.4.

If it’s optional in rev. 3.2, I assume it’s optional in rev 3.0. I’m a bit astonished because PPS is probably the most signficant feature of rev.3. The industry is not competent enough to even tell consumers which rev a device conforms to. But if it did, typical Wikipedia-informed consumers who see PD “rev.3” advertised would naturally expect PPS. As you are correct that PPS is indeed optional, many consumers will get burnt by the misunderstanding.

A potentially interesting follow-up question would be whether the laptop’s mainboard PDO tells you the laptop supports PPS even though its power brick doesn’t.

What’s PDO?

The problem seems to be that a laptop could be designed to /need/ PPS, e.g. if the voltage it needs is well below 20v. While most PSUs do not advertise USB-PD 3(+) compliance, much less PPS.

So anyone not following the tech chatter, here is a TL;DR Cliff’s notes of the scenario…

Imagine Howard on Big Bang Theory

is in the shop buying a robot. Conversation goes like this:

Howard: will the Dell robot give me a hand job?
Sales person: I have no idea… cannot guarantee anything about that. Nothing in the specs says that it can do that.
Howard (to the Dell robot): do you have a program to give hand jobs?
robot: yes I offer services to the PD (Personal Delight) specification.
Howard: I’ll take it!
…(at home after naming the robot “Della”)…
Howard: Della, give me a hand job.
Della: no, I cannot execute the handJob() program. My hand is only spec’d to grab objects using 40 newtons of clamping force. My programming does not support a variety of levels of force in small steps. Objects I grab also must meet a minimum size constraint.
…(back in the shop)…
Howard: I would like to return this Dell product. It refused to execute my command.
Sales person: Sorry Howard, I told you I did not know if the robot had the capability to inquired about. There are no returns.

In short, it’s a problem where the sales info and literature does not lie, but the machine can itself lie about its own capability.

It’s not clear. The testing device claims the PSU is PD3. But why? Is the testing device guessing? Or is the PSU outright announcing in the protocol “I am a PD3 PSU”?

IOW, it’s a standing question. My conjecture is that the PSU makes this claim electronically, when handshaking in the USB PD protocol.

Counter question: where does it say on there that it’s PD3.0?

Nowhere. I found no mention of PD anything which inspires some of my questions.

Perhaps it follows since stuff from the PD3 specs and that’s why that tester said it, but this is guesswork.

That’s indeed the sort of answer I was looking for. The testing device detects PD3. This somewhat suggests that electronically the PSU (falsely) identifies itself as PD 3.0-compliant.

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you but the gist of your text is “why is this item not saying what a random guy said it should say??”

I want to understand the contradiction. The testing device declares that the PSU is PD3. But the test results led the blogger to claim it’s not PPS. So where is the lying occuring? I expect the PD protocols to establish a handshake whereby each side of the handshake discloses the PD revision it adheres to. Otherwise the protocol is quite shitty.

If we assume a non-shitty protocol, than the Dell PSU is falsely announcing itself as PD3 and the tester is just a messenger.

Edit: remember that companies need to pay fees when they advertise with the standard - they can just follow its spec without advertising it at all, I can see that happening for laptop producers specially as they don’t sell their power units as generic products (i.e. with a focus to market them).

That’s interesting. I suppose the fees finance a certification effort. And I suppose that’s fair enough. But if a device claims to be PD3 not on the label but makes this claim in the electronic protocol, the claim is still a claim nonetheless. People and machines rely on claims made by protocols. And I suppose it’s all legally dicey. Dell could not be easily prosecuted for false advertising if they wrote nothing on the box or label that a buyer would see. But the hardware is still lying about its capability and I would think that would (or should) have consequences.

Oh, so to be clear, an asus laptop that expects a USB PD supply can still detect whether or not it’s an OEM charger? And when it’s non-asus, it distrusts the capability and only draws 65w even if the PSU can do 100w?

IIUC, that’s a bit fucked up. I’ve read claims that either USB PD or the proprietary 3-pin predecessors are supposed to be smart enough so appliances can go easy on PSUs that are not up to the full load, but I was expecting USB PD to not have vendor favoritism problems like that. I appreciate the tip. Seems like another gotcha that can even burn above average consumers who know to a reasonable extent what they are doing.

(update) found this

Myth #2: “Original Chargers Are Always Best” Truth: Not anymore.

Many manufacturers use cheap chargers to cut costs. A quality USB PD charger often beats what’s in the box.

So I have to wonder if an asus laptop would actually nanny a non-asus PSU that is better than the asus oem psu.

You’re misreading the blog post. That adapter has 19.5V written on it, but it requests 20V. 19.5V is not a PD voltage.

We know the /result/ is 20v, not what was requested. It’s a lie and abuse to print 19.5v on an adaptor that is actually just requesting 20v. It’s certainly /possible/ that is what is happening, which obviously proves my point nonetheless. It’s yet another demonstration of the USB PD shitshow. Either way in fact. Whether the negotiation is a lie, or whether the source is saying “close enough, will send 20v”, it’s a shitshow either way.

But now it’s worse because consumers who know how to pay attention to voltage are getting a product that’s not delivering what they signed up for.

Worth noting that the PPS spec of the PD3 standard allows for 20mV step adjustments to the fixed voltages. If the 19.5v adapter is not lying, it’s trying to down-step the 20v (which will only work if the source PSU is PD3 or higher). And indeed the author’s PSU supports PPS. Yet despite that, consumers are still not getting what they believe they signed up for.

The latter is pretty much impossible to make to spec, because it can’t negotiate voltage. A barrel jack is single-voltage by necessity.

First of all, the adapters exist. Not impossible. If you meant to say a smart negotiating one is impossible, I don’t believe that either. It could detect whatever the barrel passes and use that result to negotiate only for that available voltage. It could even have a voltage converter that supplies voltages that differ from the source. In fact I have a DC-DC adaptor. You probably have one and don’t know it. A USB charger that plugs into a car’s cigarette lighter converts 12v to 5v. I have one that has a variety of tips and a range of voltages. Detecting the source voltage may not be cheap, but not impossible. It would also be possible to have a cheap manual switch to specify input voltage.

Respectfully, I’m going to have to disagree. It’s much more interesting when it catches fire, and I’d rather have a protocol that sometimes doesn’t operate in order to avoid the excitement of one that sometimes explodes

If you find explosions interesting, you can go play with fireworks or watch war movies. It’s not academically interesting that tech illiterate consumers find countless ways to shoot themselves in the foot. When engineers — who /should/ know what they are doing, push a shitty standard that burns even consumers who have the basic knowledge to match devices, that’s academically interesting because it’s people we expect to be smart fucking up. When a whole industry fucks up, that’s academically interesting. I cannot charge a 5v bicycle light using a USB PD spec’d PSU because the industry fucked up on the meaning of “default”.

No matter what charging standard you use, some idiot could cut off the end, wire it to a stun gun, and send 100,000V into your phone. That doesn’t make the standard bad, it makes the adapter bad.

Dumb consumers are not in short supply. It used to be that only tech-illiterate consumers were getting burnt. Which created an incentive for consumers to gain knowledge. The nannying attempt at a remedy has enabled informed consumers to get burnt. At the same time, it dumbs down society. When expert consumers can get burnt, of course it reflects a poor standard.

And poor practices. A good standard anticipates what the market will do. They did not anticipate different product makers having a different interpretation of “default”.

but as long as nothing breaks, I’d consider it as foolproof as anything reasonably can be.

It’s now clear why you have no problems with the standard – you have a low expectation. The Lenovo PSU that supports 5v /should/ be able to charge a 5v appliance. But they botched the negotiation and absence of it. When both sides of the negotiation are compatible in terms of physics but they cannot work together because of a miscommunication, it’s a shitty standard.

The whole point of a standard is to establish an expectation that different components /function/ together. Doing that without fires is a given but not the end game.

The blog shows situations where voltage is substantially less. It’s a general rule of thumb that supplying too little voltage usually does not damage things, but I do not think that is absolute.

That’s just how electricity works.

I was describing how /people/ work.

I’m not grasping what you’re saying. What is it that asus is doing on their USB PD laptops and tablets?

Look it up on youtube

I don’t do youtube, which has descended into a shitshow of Google blocking both Tor and also killing off invideous instances. But I have seen some hacker pages with pics of this hacking. In any case, it’s a mess. It used to be that only dumb consumers got burnt (as they would mismatch voltages). But now smart consumers can get burnt too because even when the levels are good the nannying protectionism cock-blocks.

I’m getting the sense from your comments that you think that USB-PD will deliver a higher voltage than requested. This is not accurate. A device can request any of the voltages specified by PD, and the power supply will supply that voltage if it is capable of doing so. If not, it will provide 5V. It’s very possible to get a sippy that won’t power your device,

See the experiment I linked in the post that you replied to. If 19.5v is requested, 20v is supplied. If 12v is requested, 9v is supplied (not 5v). But also since 9v is optional, some PSUs would push 5v. So the voltage you get depends on what the PSU makers feel like sending.

but a working, PD-compliant power supply will not damage a working, PD-compliant device.

Yet they will fail because compliance is subject to interpretation and the ambiguities are disputed. Try plugging a USB-C bicycle light into a Lenovo USB-C PSU. Even though they both handle 5v, it fails. The Lenovo device makers believe all voltages, even 5v, must be negotiated. The bicycle light makers believe a 5v “default” /means/ they should get 5v without negotiation. The Lenovo PSU makers believe “default” means 5v will be the result of a failed negotiation (but not absence of negotiation).

And other device makers believe USB PD requires supplying the closest voltage when negotiation fails, not 5v. Those people probably also believe 5v should be sent in the absence of negotiation.

Obviously, if you get a barrel jack adapter that requests 20V and then plug it into a 5V device, you’re going to let the magic smoke out, but that’s because barrel jacks don’t do negotiation. The power supply correctly supplies 20V as requested, and then you plug that 20V into the wrong thing.

You’re mixing up the different adapters. You can have a USB→barrel and you can have a barrel→USB. The interesting case is what I described, when the appliance and PSU are compatible in terms of voltage but still fail because of the protocol. Also consider that a 20v barrel PSU could feed a dumb usb-c adapter which then fries a 5v device. In principle, the adapter /could/ do a negotiation and refuse to supply 20v to a 5v device, or even just cut-off anything above 5v, but the shitshow that we have is a marketplace with dumb adapters. And in both situations (usb→barrel and barrel→usb), it’s not foolproof. Countless consumers cannot handle the voltage matching task so if the plugs fit, they will try it.

Oh I didn’t think of that. It’s native French speakers who use “mail” for “email” (when speaking english).

Interesting to see his take on “e-mail” vs “email”. I bet he changes his tune on “email” vs “mail” – where gen-z has decided that it’s okay to save keystrokes by dropping the “e” because no one uses snail mail anymore. Indeed I am always disguested when someone says “send a mail”. I have to ask for clarification and they always confirm that mean email.

USB PD is also a shit show. You might want to read this:

https://goughlui.com/2025/12/01/tested-usb-c-barrel-connector-adapters-5-5mm-od-2-1-2-5mm-id/

Which shows those USB PD negotiations can get dicey. It chooses voltages thought to be close enough to what’s requested.

I’ve run into a nasty problem where a USB-C appliance needed 9v. Says in the manual something like “only use Kenwood power supplies on this device”. I thought, fuck that, USB PD is a standard for a reason. I’m not going to blow money on a proprietary OEM Kenwood USB-C PSU. Then found that many power supplies actually skip 9v. The USB PD standard makes some voltage steps optional, and some mandatory. IIRC, 9v was one of the required ones, yet it was easy to find USB-C power supplies that skipped 9v but offered 12v (or 15v, I forget). And yet 12v or 15v was one of the voltage steps that’s optional. And IIRC, the Kenwood OEM PSU /only/ did 9v, which is also not USB PD compliant, so the Kenwood PSU could not be used on other things.

So the USB PD strangely and arbitrarily makes some voltage steps optional, and manufacturers ignore the standard anyway.

I have an adapter that goes from barrel to USB-C. Recipe for disaster. Even if a 9v PSU uses that adapter and a USB-C appliance wants 9v, it will fry shit because any non-5v appliance expects to negotiate the voltage. I don’t recall how it leads to frying (I think b/c it tries to start at the 5v default before negotiating for 9v but instead it just gets hit with 9v), but the fact that there are USB-C-barrel adapters that just hardwire without the needed logic is scary.

So in the context of copious dumb users plugging in anything that fits the socket, the data PIN may¹ have prevented a lot of damage while at the same time enabled HP to rack in lots of money on replacement OEM proprietary PSUs. Indeed I have seen on many occasians clueless plebs at the street market selling 2nd-hand appliances and quickly trying barrels from a pile of tangled PSUs until one fits, then trying to include that with the device they are selling without looking at voltage or anything. It’s common and I’m sure lots of gear gets fried because the general population is just not smart enough.

I know how to match voltage, polarity, and current demands. And I got stung by the nannying to protect me from myself. Spent a lot of time disassembling a laptop, trying different RAM sticks, removing wifi cards and other components as I was baffled about what this fucking blicking LED means when it is not blinking in any way to convey an error code. Removed the CR2032 battery to reset the CMOS. Wondered if my slower than spec DDR3 RAM was causing this, so I went to the trouble of tracking down a RAM stick the precisely matched the specs. Still just got a steady non-stop blink, which the manual falsely states means it’s in sleep mode. So I was ready to conclude that the laptop was trapped in sleep mode and irreparably hosed. Perhaps I would have tossed a working laptop.

Whether it is a good design to protect from incorrect PSUs (despite that the obscure barrel connector is probably only 19.5v systems anyway), most certainly it’s a crappy design to not inform users. To fail to assign an error code. Sure, it vaguely says in the manual something like “use only approved HP power adapters” – something /smart/ consumers do not take seriously because they know how to match PSUs to appliance and know that shit is always a branding hussle. The data pin should not be a secret that is concealed from both the user guide and the maintenance and service guide (which HP says is not for end users… yet they still withhold the info from service people).

Perhaps good design as far as the PSU goes. But shitty to not document the situation and to not implement an error code.

¹ I stress /may have/ prevented damage because I have seen a lot of street market goods and only seen this obscure barrel tip on HP and Dell laptops, both of which are 19.5v.

I can’t speak for @ShutUpWesley@piefed.zip, but I boycott both Google and Microsoft. This means 95+% of prospective people, corps, and gov agencies I would exchange email with are not getting email from me. They are also not getting an email address out of me.

I have been done with email for nearly a decade now, mostly. So, to answer your question, I use fax and snail mail. Not joking. I feel liberated and don’t give a shit about postage or inconvenience. There is still that exceptional 5% or so who I will exchange email with, which does not have GAFAM in the loop.

(edit) should add that I give friends and family an XMPP address (of my own, but often I also give them an XMPP acct for themselves). Google bounced from XMPP a decade or so ago and AFAIK Microsoft has no XMPP service. So it’s mostly snail mail and fax for govs and corps. XMPP for people.

Any friends or family who resist XMPP are mostly stuffed. They can either proxy through a mutual friend or call me if they are local.