Sorry, no, won't work. See, in order to get a valid SSL cert installed, it has to match the FQDN, or you still get warnings. Which means the embedded device suddenly needs writable storage and routines for uploading said cert, which is a much bigger security risk than someone setting up a man-in-the-middle attack inside your home between you and your DVR.

There are thousands of different web-enabed devices on networks, accessible through unencrypted methods. Because most of them they don't need it. I don't need a certificate on my printer any more than I need auto-locking doors everywhere in my house.
It's only adding overhead, and not giving any tangible benefits.

SSL isn't a silver bullet. It's mostly theater, giving the unwashed masses a feeling of security. It's not implemented in a secure way, but relies on distributed trust - a system that doesn't work.
You have to be horribly ignorant to trust that none of the CAs in your browser's or OS' key store have been compromised, or handed out to someone. Do you verify that the certificate for "secure" sites you visit actually are from the signing authority the web site is expected to use? No? Then how can you possibly trust it?

It's worse than nothing in that it makes you feel warm and cozy and safe, and lulls you into a false sense of security, much like AV software does.

Security is a state of mind. Not a technical piece of shit you can force on everything and say "look, it's secure now!"

Norway hasn't had any school shootings that I know of, except one where a girl got shot in the arse with an airsoft gun about 20 years ago.

If you mean the UtÃya massacre, that wasn't a school shooting, but a right wing nutter first bombing a government building and then impersonating a policeman and shooting indiscriminately at a political youth camp.

Citizens being allowed to carry guns would have stopped neither.

And pray tell how, exactly, I install a certificate on a DVR on my home LAN (or switch it to using https for that matter)?
These are embedded devices.

That you can get free certs doesn't mean it's easy or in some cases even possible to install them. These days, you find web servers in lots of embedded devices. Should i have to click by a warning every time I want to access my DVR on my LAN?

Encryption is useful when it serves a purpose. It doesn't always, and then it's just a waste at best and a false sense of security at worst.
SSL is inherently a weak solution - it is never any stronger than the least strong of the enormous list of CAs built into every browser. If just one of them is compromised (or have handed over the keys to a three letter agency), visitors lose the protection against MITM attacks and similar.

Self-signed certs are actually far safer, if done right, where the user has to actually validate the cert the first time. But those gets warned against.

Make no mistake, Google doesn't do this because they have our best interest in mind, but because caching means they can't always tell exactly how many and who saw a particular page or ad. They hate caching unless it's them doing it. Going https instead of http defeats most caching, at the expense of the web sites easily having to serve twice as much data to serve the same number of visitors - some of that from the overhead of https, and some of that because of less caching.

Again, follow the money trail, and you'll get the answer for why Google wants to push everyone to https.
The guys over at squid-cache.org are not amused.

What kind of idiot modded this drunken drivel insightful? A sock puppet account?
Look at the GP post - the guy didn't predict anything. He correctly used the present tense for describing timeline events, and drew no conclusions. If you drew your own conclusion and then knock it down, that is not insightful, nor any skin off his back.

Good. There are supposed to be droughts and forest fires. That's why the tall conifers were everywhere in California - trees evolved to survive droughts and fires.

Those not willing to live with the natural climate of the land they have settled on better be prepared to pay high and continuing costs for fighting nature.

That there will be years and even decades of less precipitation than normal is normal. Droughts happen. Floods happen. Hurricanes happen.
People planning for what's out of the ordinary happens less often. It's much easier to pretend it won't happen and then find someone or something to blame.

Please explain how hosts entries would block:

- Any host on the 123.64.0.0/11 network.
- Any host that ends with .2o7.net regardless of hostname[*].
- Requests that embed a hostname or IP address in the URL

[*]: You are aware that some trackers use pseudo-random hostnames that are resolved through wildcard DNS entries, right? That way they can track exactly where you came from too, because the hostname will be unique for just you.

All you have to do is give examples that do the above. It's you who claim hosts files are the panacea - the burden of proof is on you, not others.
Put up or shut up.

No, Privoxy won't help if you have to go through an external proxy. You know, one that you don't have control over, but where work can log who visited what pages. Work, like what you don't have because you're a kook and unemployable.

With a remote proxy, no local resolving takes place at all (other than the address of the proxy server). No matter what hosts tables you have set up on your local machine doesn't matter because the resolving doesn't happen on your machine at all.

Adblock works great, because it filters before you send a request. Neither the resolving nor the request goes anywhere.
Of course, it can filter IPs and wildcards too, unlike a dumb hosts table.

The answer is NO to all of the above, because I have to go through a proxy.

The Do Not Track option is defined in the RFC draft as not doing anything except sending the DNT: 1 header to a remote server. Having it do more goes against the specification.
Of course, browsers can implement other functionality to thwart tracking, but not as part of Do Not Track, which has a very specific meaning.

Pray tell us how to use hosts files through a proxy server.
It's the proxy server that looks up the host names, not your local resolver.

Also, how well does it work with wildcards? There are ad companies that use thousands of random hosts, of the form 47db.adcompany.com, 1a74.adcompany.com, 357f.adcompany.com. With a hosts file, you have to fill out every single possible entry ahead of time, because it doesn't take a wildcard like *.adcompany.com.

Nor does it block IP addresses. How would you use a hosts file to block http://61.174.51.194/ ?

Never mind that big hosts files slow down the system, because it is traversed linearly, not through a hash like better resolve (and blocking) mechanisms.

Using hosts files was viable up until the late 80s, but now it is a joke.

This deserves its own reply. No, it's you who are confusing the two.

Eugenics is when people choose who should live and who should die. This is abhorrent, for a variety of good reasons. It's not only morally repugnant, but from an objective point of view, it is detrimental to the species because when you kill those who are different from you, you also kill the good mutations, i.e. those who are fitter than you.

Natural selection is when those who survive due to their own abilities have more viable offspring, causing a propagation of successful genes and mutations, not selected genes.

If anything, vaccination is more like eugenics than anti-vaccination is. Money and culture controls who gets vaccinated and who doesn't, and most people want their own children to have an advantage, even if unfair.

There is no reason to belive that Stephen Hawking would not have made it into adulthood. ALS isn't a disease that decreases resistances in any great way, and it is also a progressive disease, and most of his childhood he was doing pretty well.

But even if some of the brightest would not have made it, those would be compensated for by the increased number of children born to replace those who didn't make it. By chopping off the tail on the left hand side and increasing the magnitude of the Gauss curve, you cause an increase in the long tail on the right hand side.

And I have never said anything about it being the strongest that survive - of course it is the fittest. Those who are less fit get reaped by predation in species that maintain a healthy base. Whether it's because they can't see the predators coming, can't run away, don't have a immune system fighting off diseases, or otherwise. Those with detrimental mutations are less fit than average, and thus less likely to live to propagate their detrimental mutations, and the culling of the herd leads to the average herd member being fitter than otherwise, especially over multiple generations.