The Plain Text Manifesto

I'm pretty sure this is a joke, and I'm a fool for taking the bait, but just in case it's not:

Basically everything on this page is bogus.

Encryption doesn't affect cacheability at all. If a large fraction of data transmitted across the internet used broadcasting or multicasting, then network bandwidth could be conserved by only encrypting and transferring one stream instead of many -- but almost no data is transmitted this way, because having to coordinate transfers with other users is inconvenient.

Does encryption for privacy add CPU cycles and thus use energy? Yes, asymmetric encryption (needed for private channels like https) is slow and expensive, which is why the first thing all asymmetric encryption algorithms do is agree on a shared key and switch to using it for symmetric encryption -- which is blazing fast and often implemented in hardware.

But doesn't this more efficient form of encryption nevertheless burn more energy (which BTW is not measured in watts) than not encrypting a byte of data at all? Yes it does -- probably around 0.1% of the energy required to compute which pixels should be illuminated to display that byte on a modern monitor.

While I certainly agree with the sentiment, this would only work in an ideal world, or in a small community like the early Web was. In the world we all live in, people, companies and governments deceive, stalk and steal, and you can be bullied, ostracized, fired, fined, jailed or even killed just for something you wrote.

They talk about the waste of computing cycles but then deliver their message with an AI generated website?