It doesn't matter as the messages are end to end encrypted and the way it is done is continously verified by multiple leading/up-and-coming cryptographers as far as I understand.
This is the huge advantage that Signal has over mail, the default mode in Telegram and pretty much anything there is: it does matter if NSA, FSB, MI5, Mossad, Google and Facebook all have root on a server that all the traffic passes through. To the best our knowledge - long as they don't compromise one of the endpoints - the only thing they'll get is metadata and the only thing they can do is disrupting the service.
NIST 800-63b actually recommends against character class requirements[1] in favor of minimum length requirement and blacklists of breached passwords and other obvious passwords. Sites that require special characters are not following the current best practice.
The thing is running a marathon isn't that hard and there's little to no luck involved. By following a rigid plan most people can do it in about a year. Millions of people do it every year.
However if you followed all of Sam's advice to the letter you could remain relatively unsuccessful despite all that advice. That's what survivorship bias is about: there's a significant luck component to success.
> I think you underestimate how many people blindly copy examples without understanding them. Safe example code results in more correct programs.
Even if this is true, the reasoning here is disturbingly short-sighted. Copying code that you do not understand is unacceptable behavior, and I'd say the sooner it blows up in your face, the better. The goal of code examples is to illustrate how things work in a simplified way, and code without error checks is often easier to understand at first. Imagine a hello world with all the possible error checks. That would be incomprehensible.
That goes without saying, and isn't an interesting answer in this case.
When I mentioned panopticon benefits, I was more directly implying the complex "cui bono?" question of whether or not this data continues to entrench Google's behavioral analysis arms that use such data to sell our every behavior to advertisers for the purpose of buying our attention. It's not the websites using reCAPTCHA that benefit from all that extra advertising information stored on Google's servers, and it's not necessarily the individuals like you or me using those websites that's benefitting from all that extra information on Google's servers.
Especially given that in v2 it seems very clear that Google has been using reCAPTCHA as their own personal Mechanical Turk to also entrench their positions in map data and possibly automated driving image recognition, this is not an idle question.
Whenever free will comes up I like to bring up Conway's Free Will Theorem[1].
If you define free will as future choices cannot be predicted based on history, then it turns out that if humans have free will, so do elementary particles. To me, this doesn't mean we don't have free will, but instead the linear, deterministic model that's often used to discount free will is just not how the universe works.
Note that this result does not depend on statistical randomness like some of quantum mechanics, but just three simple axioms. I highly recommend reading the full paper, especially the end, "Free Will Versus Determinism".
He didn't own the name, he found a way to change the DNS records; while being registered at MM, google.com is still pointed to Google's own DNS servers.
They're a reseller like everyone else. If I'm not mistaken they actually use eNom for customers buying domains on any of their platforms (though not for their own domains).
I get emails for a friend's domain that was originally registered through Google Apps (G Suite) many years ago, and I see emails with "enom" in them going back all those years.
Don't let it discourage you. It was a really cool finding. I've done everything right before when it comes to disclosing bugs, and I've still had people dumping on me.
You should consider security as a second career if you ever get bored with marketing.
