Why are these messages encrypted? Is that just a standard thing?

I don't think that's standard, probably just manufacturer crap but i never tried to hack christmas lights

Gross. You can do the search on amazon (“bathroom spy camera”) and there are tons of results. One is even a shower nozzle !

Needs examples.

Does anyone ever use MetaFont/MetaPost to create fonts (typefaces)? Does FontForge have any scripting capability? I’ve never used it … only read about it. But I down all 5 “computers and typesetting” books by Knuth

Almost no one, but see e.g. this one: https://thottingal.in/blog/2022/10/05/nupuram/ https://twitter.com/santhoshtr/status/1577596445917470722 https://smc.org.in/fonts/nupuram https://typoday.in/spk_papers/Santhosh_Thottingal_Typoday202...

FontForge embeds a Python interpreter [0], which lets you write Python scripts that start with `#!/usr/bin/fontforge` and just `chmod +x` and plainly execute them later on. That said I've only ever personally used it for basic reproducible manipulation of existing fonts with small issues with individual glyphs I wanted to fix, so your mileage may vary depending on requirements.

[0]: https://fontforge.org/docs/scripting/python.html

My thought too.

https://tozny.com/ sells a service that enables this for any app, not just Google.

I have a Yubikey and I find it too obnoxious for day-to-day use. I'd rather use an authenticator app (such as Google's or LastPass').

For TOTP on non-Google sites, I find LastPass better than Google's Authenticator. First, LastPass locks the app with a PIN. Second, it can work with the browser extension to fill out those 6-digit codes for you.

https://duo.com/ also provides a service (with free and paid tiers) to enable this in a range of applications.

Also questions I'd like to know the answers to!

My layman guesses. The ratio of baryonic and dark matter remains unchanged because the new galaxies come with their own dark matter and we can determine the ratio from looking at individual galaxies. The amount of baryonic and dark matter in the universe goes up by a factor of ten unless the new galaxies are exceptionally small or large which would change this factor accordingly. Finally the amount of dark energy goes up to yield the observed expansion rate, no idea if that also means a factor of ten in which case the relative composition of the universe would remain unchanged.

tozny.com provides a fantastic password-free authentication scheme as well.

* How is it possible to construct all the previous "search tokens" on the server side?

* The client stores does a lot of work (storing a map of all keys, for one). Could the client get away with ONLY generating a new search token when a document is updated/inserted? That is, could the client only be responsible for creating "UTc+1 ← H1(Kw, STc+1)" and "e ← ind ⊕ H2(Kw, STc+1)" (in the update portion of "Algorithm 1")? In other words, could the map W be stored on the server, as well?

Hope these questions make sense!

-Usually the SSE model accounts for a malicious server that just stores every search token it's given, so the server doesn't need to reconstruct them.

- You could store W on the server, but you would leak additional information to the server during an update - namely, the per-keyword update frequency. Section 5.5 describes an extension to reduce client-side storage at the cost of additional computation.

I did a part-time master's in CS while working full time. I was able to take one course a term and it was really rewarding. I could dig into the material for each course without worrying about 2 or 3 other classes - really nice. I also wrote a thesis rather than just taking credits. It took me a lot longer (1.5 years start to finish on thesis), but it was immensely rewarding. I learned so much beyond my thesis + class topics - a lot more than I expected when I started out. Also helped that my employer paid for the whole thing!

Never thought a part-time PhD was possible (US), but maybe its worth thinking about.