Or not. You can still have a stateful firewall with IPv6, and it will provide exactly as much security as a NAT device. There's no reason to require that all of your devices be able to exist on the public Internet, which is actually a pretty tall order -- especially for IoT devices that tend not go get updated as much as they should.

Doesn't work that way. There are limits to what can be achieved with air power, and we've reached them, and they're not enough to deter Iran. Said a different way: Iran has won Trump's war... unless and until he's willing to put lots of boots on the ground. And doing that would mean thousands of American soldiers will die.

Everyone with a clue knew this was the outcome of an attack on Iran. That's why previous presidents didn't do it, and why Obama negotiated the "terrible" JCPOA (which, actually, was quite good considering Iran's position). But the dumbass we have in the White House now was too stupid to listen to the advisors who told him that. Much like Putin thought with Ukraine, Trump thought it'd last a few days and he'd win.

At this point, Donnie has two choices: Invade Iran with a few hundred thousand troops, or cave and give Iran the concessions they're asking for. Well, three, I guess. He could continue blockading Iran until the world gets desperate and joins the war -- on Iran's side. Because Iran's not going to blink. They have no reason to.

I expect a lot of comments on this article to be varieties of "this is terrible"... but it's really not, and I happen to have significant knowledge here. There is a big caveat, though, which I'll explain below.

First, the basic thing that makes strong, reliable age verification possible in the EU is national ID cards. In every EU country, as far as I know, you can get a national ID card basically from birth. A few issue at birth by default, but even those that don't allow parents to apply for cards for their kids at basically any age, and it's not uncommon.

I get the widespread American resistance to a national ID card, but I really think it's misplaced. There are risks, yes, but on balance the benefits are far larger.

Second, when the EU says you can verify your age without revealing your identity, they seriously mean it. I worked on the ISO 18013-5 mobile driving license standard, and its protocol is the basis for the age verification scheme (18013-5 also supports privacy-preserving age verification). The protocol enables cryptographically-secure privacy-preserving age verification, providing, essentially, a single cryptographically-verifiable bit answering the question "Is this person over age X", for specific legally-important ages. A great deal of effort goes into ensuring that the keys used to sign the bit cannot be linked to the identity of the person. One important element of that is the signing keys are single-use, so if your prove your age to two different web sites, they can't compare notes and notice that your proof of age used the same signing key, thereby proving that whoever you are, you visited both.

Note that under the 18013-5 design, if the verifier (e.g. the web site receiving proof of age) could collaborate with the issuer (the government), they could deanonoymize the holder (the person proving their age). Work is ongoing to devise protocols using group signatures or other cryptographic constructs that make verifier/issuer collusion fruitless. It's been a couple of years since I worked in this space, so I don't know if those new approaches have gone into production, but if they haven't, they will.

The big caveat I mentioned at the top is that there is no way for these systems to verify that the person who is providing age verification is the legitimate holder of the national ID upon which it's based. That is, a kid can steal their dad's ID and use it. Because the age verification is truly, strongly anonymous, there is no way for anyone to detect or prevent this... yet.

The "yet" is because people are working on incorporating privacy-preserving biometric authentication into the scheme. This is a little tricky because to provide privacy it's critical that the biometric acquisition and matching happen entirely in the user's device (or in the chip in the national ID card). But it can be done. Making it sufficiently secure, sufficiently reliable and sufficiently cheap is a significant engineering challenge, but it's being worked on. In another decade or so, the caveat may be removed.

If all of this seems silly to you... well, the age verification for porn may be, but the privacy-preserving selective proof technologies are general-purpose, and able to answer any age verification question any many other useful questions in a strongly privacy-preserving way. In any case where you need to prove something about yourself (age, city of residence, driving privileges, etc.) right now you need to provide the complete contents of your ID, which reveals far more about you than is necessary. The combination of cryptography, secure hardware and clever protocols used in this age verification can fix that, generally, enabling us to identify, authenticate or prove things about ourselves with only the minimal information absolutely necessary. It's a good thing.

And, honestly, it's a good idea to keep very young children away from porn.

Absolutely not. The charge/discharge round trip losses will be a few percent, maybe 10% if the batteries are in bad shape. The price difference between peak and off-peak is often 5-10X. Commercial users also get hit with demand surcharges based on the peak draw during the month and those can really make a huge difference. Using batteries to smooth out those peaks can be a bigger savings even than avoiding draw during peak times.

Even for residential use, the savings can be significant. I have batteries and I'm on a time-of-use plan that charges me 5X as much during peak hours (6-10PM) as the rest of the day. I make sure the system is set up so that I never draw any power during peak.

Incredibly unlikely. If the claimed violations are legitimate, and webXray reported them to the state plus the attempt to lean on them, Google would get slammed, hard, both legally and in the press. No way in hell Google would risk that.

No one can make session tracking with form variables or URL arguments as reliable as it is with cookies.

I have a lot of success with obscure, mostly-undocumented systems. Which models are you using? There's an enormous difference in capability level between the top-tier models and the next step down. Also a pretty big cost difference.

It can be, sure, but it's less reliable and more painful to work with.

If the law is about sale or sharing, not collection, then Google doesn't have to change anything, because Google doesn't sell or share data. That would be wasteful; Google's ad business is all about monetizing the data at Google, not giving someone else a chance to monetize it.

Sure, but isn't it interesting that the number of photos -- fuzzy or otherwise -- didn't massively increase when everyone started carrying cameras all the time? In fact it declined significantly.

The only logical conclusion is that the little gray men realized there were a lot more cameras about and became much more careful.

It's possible the companies are flagrantly ignoring the opt out indication.

It's also possible that webXray is confusing ad/tracking cookies with cookies required for normal site operation, viewing any set-cookie command as a violation.

Based on my experience working at Google, I'm betting on the second possibility. But, we'll see. Either we'll hear some stories about the companies being fined, or sued, or prosecuted (depending how the law works), or this will just quietly disappear when someone educates webXray.

You are absolutely feel free to argue what you think the law *should* say. But the Bill of Rights, including the fourth amendment (which is what you meant, not the fifth), definitely does not restrict what private citizens and corporations can do. It only restricts the government. And, as TomWinTejas said, it didn't even restrict the states or local governments, only the federal government, until the 14th amendment modified the meaning.

When it comes to search and seizure there is a different concept that protects you from private individuals and corporations: property rights. But the way property rights apply to your face is... complicated at best, and under present law doesn't give you the protection you think you should have. The law gives you protection against someone producing images of your face for commercial use, but that's not what's happening here.

And as for privacy rights, the Constitution really doesn't address that except in the narrow case of government searches. SCOTUS did actual find a right to privacy in the "penumbra" of the Constitution in Roe v Wade, but only ever applied it in the context of one very particular medical procedure, and anyway that court opinion is widely considered to be one of the worst examples of motivated legal reasoning in history. It's pretty clear that the court didn't apply that privacy right in any other cases because shining more light on the incredibly shoddy reasoning could only result in Roe getting overturned. As it did.

Anyway, the point is that you can and should advocate for laws that enact the privacy protections you want, but don't fool yourself in to believing that they already exist in the law, because they don't.

The left wing does its own share of screwing stuff up. The center-left is pretty good at governance, though.

We're talking about manufacturers, whose customers aren't consumers, or even retailers, but distributors who want to keep their pipelines full and their business operating. The worst thing a manufacturer can to do their customers, the thing that is most "disloyal", if you want to put it in those terms, is to be unable to fill orders. Distributors mostly don't really care what the unit price is anyway, they operate on a percentage markup basis. They care about dollar volume, so as long as that stays constant (or rises!) they're good.

So the smart thing for a manufacturer to do, and the thing that their customers (who are businesspeople who understand supply and demand, not end consumers who are confused about how economics work and throw around ridiculous concepts like "price gouging") understand and appreciate is a supplier who responds to increased demand by investing in manufacturing capacity... and it's higher prices that facilitate that.

I hope you're right, but I'm not convinced. I see a lot of people on the right are getting tired of Trump's craziness, but I'm not sure they wouldn't be fine if it were just dialed back a bit, say to Trump 1.0 levels. In a way it may actually be a good thing that we're only a year and a quarter into a four year term. Assuming Trump doesn't keel over he's got a lot of time to convince Americans that it's a really, really bad idea to elect someone like him. Of course, he'll do a lot of actual damage along the way.

And you're absolutely right that we need the Democrats to avoid the temptation to go hard left just because they have a particularly-hated opposition... but I don't think it's at all certain that they will avoid it.