The insurance company would win that battle in court.

Welcome to Detroit.

You've obviously never experienced a situation where you'd actually need to defend yourself. I've lived in areas where I've had shots fired in the apartment upstairs in one instance, a TV stolen from our house in another, and a multitude of crime in the area. If you think it's irrational, then you're an idiot.

Your assumptions are not backed up by the facts.

The only places where it's "civilized" enough in the U.S. would be very rural, and lack jobs.

Depend where you live...
http://www.wxyz.com/news/detro...

Are you joking? I thought it was well established that there were chemical weapons in Iraq we just only found weapons designed by us, built by Europeans in factories in Iraq. And therefore the US didn't trumpet their achievements. In the case of Iraqi chemical weapons, the US established that Iraq had chemical weapons not because they said so but because Western countries had all the receipts.

You're off by about a decade. I was playing chess on machines like Boris, and Chess Challenger back in those days. And while they were easy for a serious chess player to beat, they'd typically beat a novice. This is from http://www.computerhistory.org...

Until the mid-1970s, playing computer chess was the privilege of a few people with access to expensive computers at work or school. The availability of home computers, however, allowed anyone to play chess against a machine.

The first microprocessor-based chess programs were produced by hobbyists who shared information openly through computer clubs and magazines. As computer chess became commercialized, the increased investment in programming and marketing produced better programs and a larger audience. Even beginning chess players could learn and improve their game without the need for a human opponent.

The sophistication of microprocessor-based chess software had improved so much by the mid-1980s that these systems began winning tournaments against supercomputer-based programs and even top-ranked human players.

I recently moved from hand-written HTML for my personal site to Jekyll, which is the engine that powers GitHub pages. It does exactly what I want from a CMS:

• Cleanly separate content and presentation.
• Provide easy-to-edit templates.
• Allows all of the content to be stored in a VCS.
• Generates entirely static content, so none of its code is in the TCB for the site.

The one thing that it doesn't provide is a comment system, but I'd be quite happy for that to be provided by a separate package if I need one. In particular, it means that even if the comment system is hacked, it won't have access to the source for the site so it's easy to restore.

How is your LAN secured? If it's wired, then I assume that you know about ARP poisoning attacks. If it's wireless, then I assume that your post was intended as a joke.

That's the best way of securing a connection, but it doesn't scale. You need some out-of-band mechanism for distributing the certificate hash. It's trivial for your own site if you're the only user (but even then, the right thing for the browser to do is warn the first time it sees the cert), but it's much harder if you have even a dozen or so clients.

The 'brought to you by' box on that site lists Mozilla, Akamai, Cisco, EFF, and IdenTrust. I don't see Google pushing it. They're not listed as a sponsor.

That said, it is pushing Certificate Transparency, which is something that is largely led by Ben Laurie at Google and is a very good idea (it aims to use a distributed Merkel Tree to let you track what certificates other people are seeing for a site and what certs are offered for a site, so that servers can tell if someone is issuing bad certs and clients can see if they're the only one getting a different cert).

It depends on your adversary model. Encryption without authentication is good protection against passive adversaries, no protection against active adversaries. If someone can get traffic logs, or sits on the same network as you and gets your packets broadcast, then encryption protects you. If they're in control of one of your routers and are willing to modify traffic, then it doesn't.

The thing that's changed recently is that the global passive adversary has been shown to really exist. Various intelligence agencies really are scooping up all traffic and scanning it. Even a self-signed cert makes this hard, because the overhead of sitting in the middle of every SSL negotiation and doing a separate negotiation with the client and server is huge, especially as you can't tell which clients are using certificate pinning and so will spot it.

Every HTTP request I send to Slashdot contains my cookie, which contains my login credentials. When I do this over a public WiFi network, it's trivial for any passive member of the network to sniff it, as it is for any intermediary. Worse, because it uses AJAX stuff in the background, if I briefly connect to a malicious access point by accident, there's a good chance that it will immediately send that AP's proxy my credentials. I've been using this account for a decade or so. I don't want some random person to be able to hijack it so trivially.

Given hoe poorly most people secure their WiFi, having a warning if you're using a DVR on a LAN and it doesn't support end-to-end encryption sounds like a good plan to me. Of course, this raises an interesting question about built-in obsolescence, given that certificates have a valid-until date.