I don't know if some present or future government could be offended by people reading this comic but it shouldn't be a question we even need to ask. If you want to live in a world where surveillance is not the default then the very least you can do is remove the tracking from your own websites.
Thus I applaud the author of this website. And I'm really bored of the dullards who chip away at my freedom saying "but it's only a tiny transgression, what does it matter?"
You haven't addressed the actual point. Which was that we shouldn't need to think about whether any particular comic is or is not of interest to people carrying out surveillance.
To give one example: Windows Explorer has been extensible since Windows 95. That was 21 years ago. Dropbox has to pull nasty hacks to integrate with the macOS Finder [1]. That's now.
That's not really an OS level thing, though. That's an application level thing. Finder was chosen not to be extensible, and Explorer was. There are Finder replacements that are.
This is basically national security letters with oversight. Which is part of the problem. When any of the major democracies introduces a law like this, it normalises it for the rest. Which then gives encouragement to the more oppressive countries. The whole world seems to be in a race to the bottom.
This is kind of what LINQ does. You write a query in C#. The structure of the query (like an abstract syntax tree) can be exposed to the query provider which can interpret it or compile it to the CLR or compile it to SQL or whatever.
A sufficiently advanced LINQ (http://wiki.c2.com/?SufficientlySmartCompiler) would do wonders in some cases, but I haven't encountered it. AFAIK, LINQ to SQL only knows about joins and some aggregate functions.
One thing that makes improving it cumbersome is that the semantics of many operations are slightly different in the database than in C#. For example, SQL Server doesn't do NaNs and infinities, supports a zillion string string collations, and its date types may not 100% map to C# ones.
Also, databases may run stored procedures faster than the SQL that LINQ genrerates on the fly because they can cache their query plans (most databases will detect that an on-the-fly query is equal to one run recently, though, so this may be somewhat of a moot argument)
At work we've got a LINQ query that gets passed around a few functions, eventually getting into a core of 60 lines of LINQ logic. Colleague verified that chaining selects produces different output, but gets ran at the same speed (Chain selects in order to somewhat declare variables, Select(x => new { x, y = <query-x> }) then you can Select(xy => new { use xy.y multplie times }))
Sometimes I think I should just be using sql.. (which we do on other projects)
Yeah, I've been pretty happy without ORM in node.js, I even wrote a semi-nice wrapper so I could turn template strings into parameterized queries. Made writing a bunch of migration scripts a cakewalk.
Sometimes it's really just easier to write SQL directly.
There is a major issue here where objectively false facts are presented and defended with a truly awful source and yet its uncorrectable due to the deeply unhinged individuals that present their opinions as fact on Wikipedia and have been promoted to the lofty heights that allow them to constantly undo any change you might try to make.
I long ago stopped contributing to wikipedia, its written by an ever reducing group of people who are not only uncivil but also quite often delusional. The system its designed has excluded normal people.
An HSM consists of some secure memory to store a secret and a program, and a processor to run the program to perform computations using the secret.
A Yubikey consists of some secure memory to store a secret and a program, and a processor to run the program to perform computations using the secret.
The programs are different but they are basically the same thing. The author wonders why there isn't a simple general purpose gadget you can load your own program on to. As long as the action of loading a program clears existing secrets, the device could be secure.
Or to put it another way, consider a Raspberry Pi acting as a router and as a Raspberry Pi acting as a media streamer. They have completely different purposes, but they are the same thing.
They certainly are real letters, though you're right in that they might be hand delivered by an official process server. Either that, or just mailed with a return receipt and signature required.
But in every company I've worked for mail is signed for by whoever and, if it's addressed to an executive, delivered to a secretary who reads it and decides what to do it.
Given the requirement for secrecy, there is zero chance that an NSL will be treated in this way. And it won't be served by a random process server. Most likely it will be served by an NSA employee, in a discreet situation of their choosing.
A NSL is a legal document that originates from the DOJ (via the FBI) that requires no judicial approval. Nevertheless it is a legal document. The NSA does not participate, authorize, approve, initiate, or distribute NSLs.
Thus I applaud the author of this website. And I'm really bored of the dullards who chip away at my freedom saying "but it's only a tiny transgression, what does it matter?"