I still use search engines to look for retailers other than Amazon to buy stuff, because I like to give the little guy some business.
But nowadays it seems like Amazon is ALL there is for many products that I want. Either Amazon is driving many businesses out of business, or it is doing a great job completely dominating search engine results for several different search engines.

I have often wondered the answer to this question myself: how can I tell if a machine on my network is compromised?
So I set up a Linux box as my primary router, and monitored all the traffic going through the box, and holy crap, there is a lot of stuff.
Every time you hit a facebook web page, the javascript in there directs your browser to hit literally dozens of other web sites, and this is true of EVERY device in your house: your wife's laptop, your son's smartphone, your dog's water bowl. When you watch a video on Netflix video, the video player hits a dozen different servers at once, and those connections come and go constantly, old ones are closed, new ones opened to different servers throughout the world with all kinds of different names. And, of course a modern computer or smartphone uses all kinds of services: time services, location services, software updates, on and on and on.

It would be very difficult for a person to notice a low level bot doing something amiss. I have all the data, and I don't know how to do it.

I was just about to post that we need Brian Krebs back, and I saw that Krebs' website is back!
For those of you who do not remember, Brian's journalism was responsible for nuking more than half the spam on the internet in 2008.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Akamai does not like Krebs exposing out the DDoS attackers, because fear of DDoS is what brings Akamai business. This is a good excuse to try to get rid of Krebs.

I have said it before, and I will say it again: Brian Krebs rocks.

Good comment. I have moved on to using WebRTC in Firefox or Chromium. It's easier for relatives and me, and it works just as well.

Yes, on the days I was supposed to train my replacement I would bring a few beers and some chips to work, sit down, share them, and tell the replacement some funny stories and not to worry about those computer things.

I have never paid $100 for a phone battery in my life. And you should not either.

You do not have to put your battery in a phone to charge it, just drop it in the charger (that cost $10 on ebay).
You realize that "power bank" is really just a battery, right? A battery that requires an inconvenient cable.

I have noticed that x265 requires much more CPU for encoding AND decoding than x264. For example, my slightly aged laptop will not handle playing my 1080p x265 streams.

LG devices have standard connectors, microSD cards, removable batteries, and best of all: they are well supported by Cyanogenmod. My devices are always up-to-date and functional the way I want them.

Don't post here.
Post here

I'm fine with Wayland...
As long as it still runs all my wonderful diverse choices of Unix desktop environments.

I was up at 2 AM last night (2016-08-12-02-00 EDT) in upstate NY. It was dark and clear, the moon was down. The Milky Way was clearly visible. We saw meteors every 20 seconds or so. Some were truly impressive.

If I am a nerd why on earth would I own a device on which I do not have root access? I have root on all my devices.

This is incredibly dumb, because,
1. Any real nerd would know how to grab the video anyway. If it plays on your phone, it is already on your phone and you can save it.
2. Any real nerd doesn't use some crappy website and app that restricts what you can download.

This is probably the reason that Clinton was using her own email server: the government email systems sucked because they were run by incompetent people.
Does this "excuse" Clinton? I don't know. But at least she did what she needed to do to get shit done, which is more than what you can say about many people in government.