It is, but at the same time it's already bad enough that search engines stopped being boolean in nature and have started using synonyms and other like-words to where the results are watered-down.

Al might well contribute to that phenomenon even moreso.

There can be many reasons for blocking particular websites, and among them is the ability to content-moderate. If DuckDuckGo didn't allow for K12s to set policies that would limit exposure to explicit material then the site would be blocked.

IIRC Google made it fairly easy to react to organization-installed cookies that told the search engine to filter explicit results to the degree requested, but that doesn't mean that all search engines had that capability or that those tasked with implementing it were going to go through the effort to make it happen for other search engines.

And replacing them with Al tools seems to be the new-hotness of the moment.

Which is of course hysterically funny given that compromised Al tools were the instrument of the breach.

One of the headaches with the modern Internet is how so much beyond just HTTPS traffic runs on destination TCP Port 443 as encrypted traffic. If the rogue device connects outbound to a command-and-control server to port 443 it can be difficult to determine what the traffic is for, particularly if the nature of the flow of traffic looks superficially like a lot of other encrypted traffic. If it's all outbound from the subscriber's connection then it may blend in with all the other non-HTTPS traffic.

If the command-and-control server operator is smart then they'll have a whole slew of IPs, even possibly using DNS with a whole bunch of DNS entries retrieved via DNS over TLS to obfuscate the domain lookups themselves, allowing them to rotate the actual IPs.

The botnet compromised endpoints don't need to use some special port or have incoming connections to them, they can do it all via pulls rather than requiring pushes.

I like the sticker, "DANGER: Do not connect this machine to the Internet no matter how much it asks"

Unfortunately I've found that no single search engine does a particularly good job anymore. I end up searching in Duck Duck Go, Google, and even Bing of all things because they all do a crap job of returning good results now.

I suppose if altavista.digital.com was still working I'd try it too.

well, their chips are coming out of a foundry after all...

Not sure about the assembly of small electronics. It looks like that's still a fairly hands-on, manual process.

One of the barriers to automating the assembly of commodity microelectronics is that the revisions iterate fairly quickly. It's difficult to build an automated assembly line that can handle those changes. It usually just ends up being easier to have a person do that assembly work if the product is going to change in a few months and it would take a couple of months to retool for the change.

A broken clock might be right a couple of times a day.

Unless of course someone rips the hands off. Or if it's a digital clock that simply doesn't display anything. Or probably for a bunch of other possible reasons.

MTBF calculations are a bit of a scam in of themselves.

...is normally preferred with a good, crisp apple.

I'm curious how the nuclear decay of sodium 22 produces antimatter to begin with. Does something transmute, for lack of a better word, into antimatter when its nuclear bonds are broken?

Unfortunately to an extent your former roommate was correct; that having personal ethical/moral guidelines generally does reduce the amount of money one can rake in and attacking those who do have and advocate for morals in society to discredit them is one way to help secure that income stream.

Right now we seem to be living in an era when the amoralistic are generally winning, they've convinced millions upon millions of people to embrace their selfishness. But this only works out for a subset of those trying to practice it, particularly when they aren't smart enough to understand when they're easily manipulated by those who are much more experienced or are good at motivational speaking to compel the listener. Those late to the party end up going against their own interests to support those they idolize to their own detriment.

That depends, are you a robot?

Wouldn't any robot's mustache be a fake mustache unless it was literally shaved off of someone else and somehow affixed intact to said robot?