Right.

That's a classic model for attacking with a MITM. MITM the http page (because you can). Get a cert for say irs.taxservices.com instead of irs.gov On the switch to https, redirect to the irs.taxservices.com. Continue to MITM, proxying to irs.gov while the user enters all their secrets.

This is why the home page should be https.
 

Sorry. 4 bits. 1/16. 6.25%

The 'hard' questions where things like 'what was your monthly payment on that loan'. There were 2 hard question, each with 4 choices. So that's 3 bits of information. You would expect to guess correctly 1 in 8 times. So if you have a database of SSNs and names and DOBs, you can succeed first time on 12.5% of them on average.

My point was that a typical taxpayer might go there and not even know there's an option to sign up. Not everyone reads Slashdot. I only know because I read the Slashdot article.

I did. That's how I found the place to sign up.

I signed up.

It gave password rules and validated the password on the fly with four green ticks, one against each rule (> 8 chars, special chars etc.). I used a 32 character password generated from my password manager.

The web page then errors out each time I tried to enter the password, saying it needed a valid password, even though the password was declared valid each time. In the end I got it to work when I reduced the password length below 20 characters. This may be due to the length, or some other difference, since my password manager was creating a different password each time I fiddled with the generator rules.

The whole thing sticks of basic programming incompetence.

I just went to www.irs.gov

The advice to sign up there may be reasonable, but the words 'sign up' or anything semantically similar do not appear on the front page. It's not obvious where you would go to try to sign up.

It's not https either.

An electric heater heated by electricity from nuclear or hydroelectric generators is in no way worse than the alternatives from a carbon and/or sustainability point of view.

But a standby to listen for a remote need not take more than a few 10s of milliwatts.

The reason they have a stupid standby draw is because it's cheaper to just use the 200W power supply and not put in the extra components for a standby power supply.

Are you saying it's unfair that the person who wrote emacs isn't a woman?

Right, but plasmas are a bit thin on the ground where humans live and humans are the ones who call things things. There may be aliens who call plasmas and gasses things, but they probably have different words for them. "No Fnakquar, an antivacuum is called a 'congressman' " or some such.

An antivacuum is usually called 'gas'.

I've done that. CeBit in Hanover. I didn't get to wear chaps though.

I was envisaging one of those black, spikey gaming mouses. I can see how that mouse might work well.

Sometimes brute force is preferred.

No, I don't.