The funny thing is that the US police state has its roots in the post-WWII anti-Soviet CIA, and these witch hunts spread for decades, being wildly accelerated by both Bushes and Obama. The past several decades have seen a drastic increase in media conglomeration to be owned by a few wealthy individuals while they push the facets of socialism to the unwashed masses (as we see on this site, thanks, BizX) to create a nation of dependents. What was there is now here.

Welcome to Soviet America.
Land of the fee and home of the slave.

What are the negative impacts of encryption?

1) Increased power requirements to perform encryption

2) Increased bandwidth requirements as caching servers are rendered moot

3) Automatic ability to identify you uniquely when using a service

4) Requires CA (Let's Encrypt helps, but modern HTTPS really does not promise who is on the other end anymore)

5) Most hosting services charge extra for HTTPS services and/or related additional resource use

6) Most of the "attacks" described could just as easily happen via malware, which is still an issue. This removes only one attack vector and even then incompletely (leading to false sense of security, see 4).

7) You are raising the cost of an information-only web site that offers no benefit to the operator and limited benefit to the user, but worse may cause the web site to effectively cease operation

8) You have created additional complexity for embedded devices that use an HTTP maintenance port

Who is Al, and why should I be afraid of him?

I voted--no joke--for CowboyNeal in the last election. I saw evil any which way I looked at it.

But what is up with all of this Trump bashing by the editors? Make no mistake: H-1B visas are abused by tech companies to keep salaries down. Persons from overseas are no more capable than citizens to fill positions. When I joined the workforce, there was this thing called "training" that has been since brushed under the rug by the man to keep the common person down.

“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still...In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words--in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?”

There's a kernel of truth to this. I know a few guys who work for the NYSE, and it's the same there. One of them told me to watch a few particular derivatives before they take down the system and watch them after they bring the system back online. Three out of four times this is to prevent a catastrophe and had nothing to do with a true hardware/software failure. But it does keep a '29 stock market crash from happening.

uBlock Origin here.

Keeps the Slashdot Spam in check. (TM)

Why do they insist on making every other article something with "...a report says" followed by a bunch of clickbait?

I wonder how much Booger King and Diarrhea Queen are going to pay for brand placement now.

(*ducks*)

Oblig. Simpsons reference.

They will continue doing things we hate unless we make the things we hate illegal.