There are few options for low-damage area denial. Which ARE acceptable and why?

I think water cannons can be pretty effective and don't typically cause injuries. And they can be made more effective by adding Skunk into the mix.

So basically, they want to microwave protestors.

And chain mail with fine loops of chain suddenly becomes very popular...

Many employment agreements have an NDA that survives for a certain period after employment has ended. But that typically covers trade secrets, customer lists, financial data, etc. I doubt anyone can stop you from talking about your subjective experience at a place of employment.

Given that the US military's very strength kept the world relatively peaceful

That was true from 1945 through 2024. But in case you missed it, that old world order has been destroyed by the current US administration and it may never return. It's not simply a matter of the current administration being "warmongering". It's actively attacking the rules-based order that had kept the world relatively stable and peaceful for about 80 years. The future looks very uncertain and quite scary to me.

I never said that having web files not owned by the web user makes your site secure. I just said that it's not a good idea to have files in the WEBROOT that are writable by the web user because that makes defacing a site or even running malware in clients' web browsers trivial.

My personal web site uses PHP, but I don't use a database because the site is simple enough not to require one. I use PHP more-or-less as a templating engine to include standard boilerplate headers and footers on all of the pages.

Having Web server files owned by the web user is a security risk; if someone executes code as the web user, they can change those files.

If the files are owned by root, then they can't be defaced by the web user.

If you need to have writable files, then those should be in a separate directory that's not part of the WEBROOT.

So we go from a useless resource page, to a useless and annoying chatbot. Progress!!

Yes, absolutely. Advertising is unethical. It is psychological coercion designed to make people buy stuff they normally wouldn't think they need.

The only ethical ads are PSAs that impart helpful and useful information, but they're not really advertising in the commercial sense.

Huh, I haven't experienced any problems. I also set it up for my sister and she has whitelisted 8 domains (unnecessarily, IMO, since I doubt they were blocked, but she might have misinterpreted things.)

I run Pi-Hole. When I'm not on my home network, I connect my device to it over OpenVPN and force the device to use my Pi-Hole as the DNS server---it's an OpenVPN option. So I have Pi-Hole protection wherever I am.

And this, kids, is why everyone should be running multiple layers of ad-blocking. Get your Pi-Hole set up. And stick to a browser that lets you have multiple ad-blocking extensions. And for the love of $DEITY, don't use Facebook, Instagram, etc. on your phone.

So Google put some spin on it, AKA lied...

Shocked, I am.

On an open-source OS such as Linux or {Free,Open,Net}BSD, you can, if you want, write code that runs in kernel context. So you really can do anything you want with the hardware.

But I think most people understand that the OP meant more along the lines of running one's own apps that don't have anti-features like telemetry or ads or whatever.

My first computer was a Radio Shack Color Computer. It had no real OS as such; just a BASIC ROM. And if you were willing to write 6809 assembly language, as I was, you had absolute control over the hardware. There was no "OS" to mediate.

This is exactly right. And what's even sadder is that the USA is hurtling towards financial doom ($40T debt and going up by $2T/year; spending more to service the debt than on the military) so that we'll all get to "enjoy" living under the last remaining superpower of China. Really tough times ahead.