Exactly. The only solutions is to make keeping people’s data a liability rather than an asset. That if there is any sort of beach there are criminal investigations and make the company liable for any and all losses stemming from that breach. Plus if their security was found negligent, than every one of their customers gets cause of action to personally sue them.

The next company to have a breach like this will go bankrupt. And that will sufficiently frighten the others.

AI or not, I feel like everybody has had “the incident” at some point. After that, you obsessively keep backups.

Yup!

Also totally unrelated helpful tip- triple check your inputs and outputs when using dd to clone a drive. dd works great to clone an old drive onto a new blank one. It is equally efficient at cloning a blank drive full of nothing but 0s over an old drive that has some 1s mixed in.

It is absolutely foul play.

OpenAI made secret deals with DRAM manufacturers, not for memory chips but for finished wafers straight out of the Fab. Then announced them both on the same day, meaning they had a one fell swoop purchased 50+% of the world’s memory supply for 2026.

OpenAI does not (as far as anyone knows) have the machinery to process these wafers, to slice them up and package them into memory chips.

Which means the only purpose of this move was to kill the global DRAM supply and drive up prices for the competition.

Personally I wish regulators would take a hard look at this deal.

Welcome to the world of electronic gadgets. You’re right there’s nowhere near $100 worth of hardware in this thing. I’d also love a color touchscreen. But I’d rather a color touchscreen that I could integrate in HA than one running some proprietary cloud connected ThermostatOS.

You could do that yourself- put an old tablet on the wall, run power to it, then get something like a zooz zen16 multi-relay or an ESPHome relay board to drive the hvac. Then the thermostat becomes a totally software defined virtual thing in Home Assistant that pulls data from a temp sensor in the room and controls the HVAC as appropriate.

https://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-Home-TH6320ZW2007-Programmable-Touchscreen/dp/B0BHTQF8NL

That is the one you want. Honeywell t6 pro Z-Wave version, specifically that link which is the newer Smart start version.

Z-Wave is 100% local, not Wi-Fi, and secure.

I use these in my house and couldn’t be happier.