In early 2020, I tried to visit a US newspaper's website. This is the message that was dumped on me: "We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time."

This happens on a regular basis to Europeans all the time the last 5 years from American media. Then one just passes by.

No idea why the media think they are saving electrons or whatever or how it builds goodwill.

Anyway, good comment all round.

This would be the last thing on my mind.

I recently disabled AdBlock Plus --- after just using it for years unthinkingly --- and found my browser memory dropped by a third. Using Icecat ( = Firefox 24, because Firefox just sucks like a minimalistic Chrome twin now ), but also tested on my Firefox installation.

AdvertBan and Ghostery seem to do the same, without sucking RAM.

Kind of strange how all these reports of Open Source vulnerabilities are increasing recently. Despite the fact that, as in Heartbleed, hyped to the max, very few actual bad things seem to happen. Almost as if it were coordinated.

Your parents should be proud to have such a good daughter.

He was always cautious about this internet fad.

I do not live in the US and I own a number of .coms --- none of which have any relationship to business: which goes for most .coms.

Ideally there would be no tlds; since they are not a physical requirement for urls which mask numbers: http:/// or http://www./ or ftp:// etc are more than enough to indicate an address.

Get rid of all of them except .com. Just don't issue any others, and leave the ones already there until attrition destroys them.

There's no actual value to having different tlds for the website xxxxxx, other than to make money for domain sellers, who frighten the owner ( renter ) of xxxxxx.com into buying more domains for the same site to stop competitors from using xxxxxx.net or xxxxxx.org. I have never come across a real site whose domain name led to an entirely unrelated site run by different owners based on the .yyy.

Should one imagine this would lead to not enough site names, there are enough words to be combined in any language and enough languages to accommodate millions of sites. Plus losing the fake/crap sites ---scraper-sites for just one instance --- would not harm the internet at all.

Mission statements are rather praiseworthy but uninteresting; despite my love of KDE I used the time profitably by imagining Microsoft enunciating those six principles.