The guidelines don’t completely rule out politics, and in this case the topic is of interest here since it dovetails with other political issues of long-running concern in the HN community: who owns devices with outside service dependencies, right to repair, etc. The question of whether someone who physically controls an ECM pod can configure it feels a lot like the question about whether John Deere can prevent a farmer from configuring their tractor’s software or an IoT vendor can shut down a service without providing an alternative.
One area where this is especially of interest is everyone considering their dependency on U.S. products. If you live in a country under military threat, questions like what happens if the first strike against Canada involved a malicious Chrome or Windows update or holding back a patch for a vulnerability the NSA wants to exploit is quite an interesting problem.
Given how pervasive politization has become this would suggest that strict adherence to any "politics is off-topic" rule would necessarily involve making the site permanently read-only.
The guidelines seem just vague enough to allow for suppression of topics that the oligarchs are touchy about while appearing reasonable. Tech is inherently political.
