Setting aside the cryptographic merits (and concerns) of designing your own encryption, can you explain how a URL redirector requiring a key would provide plausible deniability?

The very fact that a key is required – and that there’s an option for adding decoy targets – means that any adversary could guess with reasonable certainty that the sender or recipient of such an obfuscated link does in-fact have something to hide.

And this isn’t something like with encrypted messaging apps where the payload needs to be saved offline and brute-forced later. Rather, an adversary would simply start sniffing the recipient’s network immediately after seeing the obfuscated link pass by in plain text. What their traffic logs would show is the subsequent connection to the real link, and even if that’s something protected with HTTPS – perhaps https://ddosecrets.com/ – then the game is up because the adversary can correctly deduce the destination from only the IP address, without breaking TLS/SSL.

This is almost akin to why encrypted email doesn’t substantially protect the sender: all it takes is someone to do a non-encryted reply-all and the entire email thread is sent in plain text. Use PGP or GPG to encrypt attachments to email if you must, or just use Signal which Just Works ™ for messaging. We need not reinvent the wheel when it’s already been built. But for learning, that’s fine. Just don’t use it in production or ask others to trust it.

Riders are not permanently affixed to a bike, so I’m struggling to see how a tuned mass damper could actually be tuned in this case. The very act of lifting off the saddle would briefly change the required tuning, and it’s illogical to tune to just the bike’s resonant frequency when the rider would change that value.

If this were touted as a simple “mass damper”, that might be alright. Though static mass dampers – and tuned mass dampers that are improperly tuned – can exacerbate oscillations under the wrong circumstances.

For more about tuned mass dampers, Practical Engineering just released a video on Nebula available now (and free on YT soon) about liquid mass dampers, which is a type of tuned mass damper.

A phone playing a video would not be sufficient to establish that you were at home, but merely that the phone was powered on somewhere. But if YouTube had records that indicated your phone was connecting using an IP address at your home, then the phone’s location could be ascertained.

But that still doesn’t say anything about where you are, since not everyone – even in 2025 – carries their phone every time they leave home.

But if YouTube also registered a Like on a video at a particular time, and it can separately be proved that no one else could be at your house and no one else connected to your home network, and that your phone was not modified in such a way to fake such an action (eg a VPN), then this would be enough circumstantial evidence to convince a jury that you were probably at home.

And if home is nowhere near the murder scene, then this could be a defense.

Maybe. As you can see, a lot of "if"s are needed to string together an alibi, let alone a good one.

In much of the USA, the county-level is the administrator for deed recording and for land parceling. Municipalities (eg cities, towns) within the county may have their own zoning rules, and so the question can be divided in two:

1-meter-squared chunks

Zoning laws can enforce minimum lot sizes. For example, an agricultural or business district might disallow plots smaller than 5 acre or 2000 sqft, respectively, because anything smaller would become economically infeasible for those purposes. A legitimate goal of zoning is to make land more economically productive, and plots that are oddly-shaped or impractically small would be counterproductive. The county and cities would also be concerned with tax revenue per area, which scales up with productivity of land (for whatever use is permitted in zoning). Note: I’m not a fan of American-style zoning, which has proven to be quite overburdening and frequently racist over the last 100 years.

But setting aside zoning, there’s also the matter of land administration. Subdividing a parcel into smaller lots is common, but since those small lots will take up ledger and deed records at the registrar’s office, that adds a non-insignificant cost per plot. Easily several hundred dollars per subdivision, as the process is normally meant for larger real estate transactions in preparation for development.

sell each of those sections to different people

Land transaction costs in the USA are not uniform throughout the country, but they often amount to several thousands just to verify title to land. Part of the problem is that most states don’t keep an authoritative land registry that shows exactly who owns what. Instead, title insurance companies make money by assuring the title after a process that investigates the land’s title history. Here in California, that history often has to be traced back to Mexican land grants in the 1800s, which is kinda nuts just to sell a small home.

Sure, for a 1 sq meter plot – which no one should ever buy using a mortgage – the buyer might not need/want title insurance. But the lack of title provenance inflates purchase prices, simply because people do want to know that they’re actually buying something real and it’s not a worthless deed.

(as an aside, it’s entirely possible in California and other states to sell a deed for land you might own, but which the seller makes no guarantee that they do in fact own. It’s kinda like a fork in cryptocurrency, where if the fork is later rejected, then that part of the ledger history is entirely dead and you’re SOL. Again, we could really use a central land registry, and not a process based wholly on easily-forged deeds…)

If I wanted to ensure that my land would never be used for a shopping mall or sports stadium

The simple answer is to donate your land to a conservation group, who often buy land to protect it from development. They can and do pay market rates, but if you did want the land to be something that isn’t a wildlife preserve, then alternatively, you can sell the land but retain the development rights. That way, you (and your heirs) would retain a choice in whatever future development happens, though how long this deed restriction lasts will depend on jurisdiction. Or you can sell the development rights to a conservation group, so that the party owning the land and the party owning the development rights are separate entities with different objectives.

You can’t just point your spacecraft into space, give it a boost and be flying off into the void forever.

To be clear, is the reason this is not sufficient for flying forever is due to orbital mechanics making “point and shoot” not feasible if aiming in a straight line for the void? Or because the boost isn’t sufficient to escape the planetary system’s influence and thus still predominantly subject to its gravitation pull? Or both?

shouting style betting

I don’t have the answer to your question at large, but your description reminded me of the old method of how stock trading floors used to work. My understanding is that it involved lots of yelling and hand signals, with video of the whole process likely available online.