Yup. Dell, at least, has an authentication chip in most of their chargers (the center pin in the typical Dell charger). The chip (or its wire) is invariably the first thing to break, and bam! laptop refuses to charge the battery, or even run the processor at full speed. This causes the weird behavior that the laptop speeds up when you switch to battery power. It also means that you have to ditch an otherwise fully functional charger.

The purpose of the chip is of course to prevent the charger from being overloaded, and not at all an attempt at extorting money from customers as well as frustrating third-party charger manufacturers.

Sigh. You're attempting to disprove one hoax with another? Why You Can't Have A Tacocopter Drone Deliver You A Taco For Lunch Today.

And I can see that your understanding of irony is on roughly the same level as your understanding of global warming.

There, FTFY.

They won't do that intentionally. But bog standard Linux machines can certainly be infected just by inserting a compromised USB stick.

First of all, the stick will be mounted. Typically, this happens automatically, but if not, the user will still have to do it manually. The USB filesystem can be modified to contain just the right corrupt data structures to trigger a kernel bug, leading to a compromise of the machine. If you think this is far out, think again. This was 2006, but don't worry, the NSA has zero-days on file if they need them. It is well-known that kernel "oopses" (such as this bug in ext4 from 2013) can often be converted into full exploits by a sufficiently determined adversary.

Assuming your Linux distro has a graphical desktop, you may next try opening the stick in a file browser, such as Nautilus. (Or it may even autolaunch when you insert the stick.) This too can cause your computer to be compromised, if e.g. the stick contains a PDF, which has been modified to contain just the right corrupt data structures to trigger a userspace bug in the program that generates the PDF thumbnail. By the time you think, "Wait, I never put any PDF on this stick", you're already compromised. If you think this is far out, think again. This was 2011.

If you're really paranoid, you'll forgo filesystems and desktop environments entirely and just dd plain ASCII files directly to the USB block device. But if your networked computer has been infected, you can never be sure that it's only doing that...

And someone posts your address on Twitter, and the death threats starts arriving in your mail? Don't open your mail. Simple as that.

Yup, it's all just a conspiracy. Applekid is in fact also a woman, only pretending to be a misogynistic douchebag in order to gain support for her radical feminist notions (such as allowing women to be depicted on bank notes!).

(Of course, by Applekid's logic, I am also just a woman seeking to defend my sisters and/or a man trying to gain favors with women by posting snarky comments on Slashdot. Because OkCupid is so last decade.)

That's another thing to like about DDG: The fact that all settings can be stored as URL parameters in your browser, instead of a cookie (meaning you can simply disable cookies for duckduckgo.com entirely).

And it's well-documented and easy to do:

1. Go to https://duckduckgo.com/settings, configure DDG as you please.
2. Click "Bookmarklet and settings data", then click on the prominent "https://duckduckgo.com/" URL.
3. Right click in the DDG search field, select "Create search" (Opera) / "Add keyword for this search" (Firefox) .

In other browsers, the process is more roundabout, but that's hardly DDG's fault.

The same way a bank account can be seized, despite not existing as a tangible object.

In this case, it appears the suspect actually made an account transfer to a DEA agent, making it extra trivial to seize the bitcoins.

Another way to size bitcoins is to obtain the suspect's bitcoin wallet (essentially a private key). Of course, multiple copies of the private key may exist, allowing other people than the DEA to access the bitcoins even after seizure. The obvious solution is for the DEA to immediately transfer the bitcoins to a new, DEA controlled, wallet.

Actually, what happened in the 70's was that IBM learned of differential cryptanalysis, at a time where the technique was not publicly known. At that point, the NSA had known about it for some time already. But yes, the gap has closed considerably in the mean time.

A more recent example is SHA-0, which was published in 1993 but withdrawn shortly thereafter by the NSA, because they had discovered flaws in the algorithm. It was only in 1998 that academia identified a flaw in the algorithm. So in the 90's, there was still a gap of 5 years between the NSA and the public.

Anyway, it's clear that cryptography has reached a level where attacking the algorithms is a waste of time. Sidechannel attacks, on the other hand, are numerous and easily exploited, and you can bet that the NSA is hard at work developing such attacks.

Yeah, and afterwards he's likely going to Denmark, to stand trial there for breaching servers belonging to the Danish police (hosted by the ever-incompetent CSC).

Remember, he's not serving time for his Pirate Bay involvement (yet?); he's serving time for breaching bank systems and using the access in an attempt to steal millions. Since he was extradited for this case, not the Pirate Bay case, it seems that the Swedish prosecutors actually consider this worse than file sharing. (Who would've thought?)

So, instead of making up a translation, why not try it out?

becomes

or

which are arguably much worse...

No. Getting credit for you work falls under the legal umbrella of moral rights, which is related to, yet separate from copyright, which is about getting paid for your work.