When you're talking about duplicate content, you can't limit yourself to "just hashes".
In this case, with pictures, just opening one and saving it again might produce a different hash, just by recompression or changing the file format. How does all these "just check the hashes" solution works for that?
Finding duplicates image is not that easy.

I have hope that a strong enough AI will not allow this kind of censoring :)

And even if it become really hard, you have to be pretty confident about the appeal of your website.
I can understand why they want their ads to go through, but if some webmaster take aggressive action to force the hand of the user, there's a little side effect called "not going to this site anymore" that might hurt them somehow.

Yeah, no.
Is donating a large sum of money to a charity a good thing? Of course!
And the fact that they did it to buy themselves a better public opinion doesn't make it less than a good thing, but it's certainly not helping their reputation: "hey, we screw up big time, so we douse money left and right to fix it" usually don't works by itself.

No. Firewalling, virus protection, malware detection... all these techniques can be flawed, either by design, because of oversight...
It is acceptable for most system (because these issues get fixed after a while), but for a SCADA system you don't want a zero-day to be exploitable *at all*. Your system can have a ton of backdoor/vulnerabilities/exploits, if it can't be reached by any other mean than physical access they are not an issue.

testing (noun): the action of releasing your program in the wild and cross fingers.

Only if your very confident that B will never ever get it's input from anywhere else, or that if it happen, the "anywhere else" will also properly check it's input. Oh, and you should know for sure that A will never change and suddenly spit something that B won't accept. Better document your code, and hope that the future maintainer will actually read what you wrote.
In large, long-lived project, these assumptions are all hard to make.

From what I muster, it's far from exploitable in real-life scenario. Still impressive though, and this might broaden the way peoples see side-channel attacks on general computers, and not only on specific hardware.
Still, http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2821

It's kind of funny; in the instance of a network that log connection with very few tor users, NOT using tor would have been more efficient at hiding is identity. Should have gone the easy route of seven proxies.

Yeah, you might want to take some vacation, far away, and fast.

Because the drive itself have no concept of filesystem, and wouldn't know what some specific patterns means. A sector full of only 0xFF might mean "I don't need this anymore" as well as "this file have a sector worth of 0xFF stored there". So, no way for the drive to know where there is actual unused space.
Using trim, the FS/OS/whatever's on the line can tell the drive "ok, this part I don't need anymore, go play with it" in a non-ambiguous way.

Hotfile should just suppose that all takedown sent to them from the form might be bogus, and ask for handwritten letters to be sent to them to verify that a human was behind it.

but you don't understand, peoples *have* to use google. I've seen it, if you don't use google's services, someone come at your house, put a loaded gun on the side of your head, and whisper softly in your ear "would you kindly log yourself into our services?".
Or maybe not, my memory is fuzzy on the details.

The CNIL (a French agency checking privacy issues on internet) is almost powerless: they can barely "suggest" stuff to be done, maybe, once every new moon, even on France-only related issues. They can't propose laws or impose anything on anyone. I believe google is well aware of their power and responded adequatly :-)

Not saying that nothing should be done on the issue, but it won't work at such a small scale.

- Last time I checked it wasn't slashdot.us either
- Yes, even americans do wander in some "foreign" websites (as if it meant anything on internet) and voice their opinions. What's wrong with it either way ?