Work being done to it will show up as heat, which indeed is subject to e=mc^2. But when it cools there's no residual mass.

The data doesn't actually have weight because they aren't going to store a 1 or a 0, but rather do something like store 01 vs 10.

Which is the same reason storing data to a HDD doesn't add weight. You can pack the data tighter if you are writing basically balanced 1s and 0s. Thus you can pack more bytes into a given area by encoding them into patterns with even distributions even though that means you need to write more bits.

Memory isn't the only resource.

I'm thinking perhaps they turned on some idiot AI. And they don't want to back down and admit they did it wrong.

Delete without opening shouldn't be treated as negative. I generally keep the stuff on your list, but I almost never open the it's-your-turn e-mails--the title contains everything I need to know. And, likewise, Meetup notifications--I dump most of them unread as the title is enough to tell me I'm not interested in that event.

In other words, the difference between men and women is cultural, not actually gender. I'm not surprised.

The basic problem is that if subversion is possible black hats will trick people into subverting it.

And a huge incentive for the black hats to undermine the issuers. They aren't going to remain secure.

And some of us do not believe the identity bit can be truly solved.

In the real world it's always people looking to suppress information or dissent that are pushing for such schemes. It always masquerades as protecting minors (protecting them from what? The one proper attempt to prove sexual materials are harmful found no evidence of said harm.) or as hunting for CSAM (and if you do implement an effective system it will get circumvented by putting relays in hostile countries.)

Blocking said search indexes is probably a good thing.

I'm thinking perhaps a system where you feed it a credential, a small program runs and maintains a pool of tokens that has some reasonably finite lifespan. The server that issues the tokens restricts the number of uses of the credential. Timing attacks are impossible because your token requests are normally not associated with your uses of the tokens.

And when you use a token the site gives back a session key, further access just replays the session key (so long as it's HTTPS the key is encrypted, hard to do a replay attack) up to whatever time and rate limits the website permits.

> Blocking said search indexes is probably a good thing.

I feel like "we should ban all search engines" is going to be pretty unpopular.

> And when you use a token the site gives back a session key

And then you have a session key, until you don't, because you signed out of that account to sign into another one, or signed into it on a different browser or device etc.

> The server that issues the tokens restricts the number of uses of the credential.

Suppose I have a device on my home or corporate network that scans email links. It's only trying to filter malware and scams, but if a link goes to an adult content barrier then it needs tokens so it can scan the contents of the link to make sure there isn't malware behind the adult content barrier.

If I only have a finite number of tokens then the malware spammer can just send messages with more links than I have tokens until I run out, then start sending links to malware that bypass the scanner because it's out of tokens.

Search engines should not be using website search capabilities. That's putting an undue load on the systems. A board I'm involved with recently had to block search for guests because we were getting bombarded with guest searches that looked like some bot was taking a web query and tossing it around to a bunch of sites. Many of them not even in English.