Comment by Sebb767
7 hours ago
Each of our devices spents a lot of energy dedicated to encryption. By now, all disks you did not set up manually are most likely encrypted and hardly any unencrypted package will travel out of your network. That's not to mention the tons of load and dedicated hardware we have just to terminate https and scan traffic for suspicious activity or the hardware being replaced because it's internal security triggered/broke.
In a perfect world, we could send all traffic completely unencrypted and never scan for a malicious payload, saving all that energy and hardware. But we do not live in that world and drawing the line with this minor, mostly unintrusive security feature seems strange.
That's the judgement made with all consumption of energy. The benefits weighed against the costs.
Because of the harms of environmental change, there should be pressure placed to avoid damaging ways to generate that energy.
When people complain about the amount of energy being used, they are making the judgement on the benefits. This is subjective and people do not agree on the benefits. The argument you shouldn't do this because of the energy consumed is implicitly saying "My judgement on the worth of this supercedes yours"
Pretty soon it devolves into criticizing the energy use of things you just don't like.
A society has to accept that people have different opinions on things. That includes what it is worth using energy for.
Producing clean energy is something everyone should be able to get behind. There is a solid consensus that it would make a better world.
Producing cheap energy is something everyone should be able to get behind. There is a solid consensus that it would make a better world.
See what I did there? As long as you preach any ideology of yours without talking about its trade-offs you can claim everyone should get behind it. Obviously.
I don't see a problem with that statement.
If you get the situation where the two are in conflict then you have to bring in a judgement, but it makes it explicit what you are prioritising.
Luckily for the case of energy, solar meets both goals.
> In a perfect world, we could send all traffic completely unencrypted and never scan for a malicious payload, saving all that energy and hardware.
In a world with such social cohesion, we'd be defeated by an alien species being able to quickly interpret and exploit our technology like in the hit film Independence Day(note, we're the defeating alien species in this example). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DIjBGierkA
Shouldn't we sacrifice some security for convenience? And shouldn't we at least have a public discussion where to draw the line?
I already don't encrypt my Pinebook storage, because the device is low-powered.
I now disabled ObscureKeystrokeTiming on the ssh clients where it does not matter. And it should not matter in 99.9999% of cases.
P.S. There's a good reason airline frequencies are unencrypted AM and I hope IT "security" mindset does not reach its dirty hands up the air.
Airline isn't about power consumption but rather reliability. You don't introduce failure modes to safety critical systems unless absolutely necessary.
Meanwhile the power consumption of a few extra packets or even AES on your block storage device is approximately nothing relative to the other things the device is doing. Unless the CPU or GPU is going full tilt the screen on a mobile device consumes more power than the rest of the system combined (not sure about a laptop but it's likely a similar story).
It's a bit like worrying about saving a single glass of drinking water, then turning around and hopping in the shower for an hour. Or not flushing the toilet then immediately drawing a bath.