If you plug your power-only USB cable into a modern charger, you'll find that your phone charges quite a bit slower than you'd expect. Modern chargers use the data pins to negotiate whether a charger supports higher currents.
You don't want a phone to try drawing 2A from a charger that's only designed for 500mA.
These boards have quite a bit of logic on them. If they were just cutting the data pins, that would all be unnecessary.
The product page is light on details, but I'd be surprised if that logic wasn't there precisely to negotiate charge rate.
Have you used powerline ethernet? In an old house, you're lucky if the signal gets to the other end of the building.
More seriously though, Homeplug AV networks are optionally encrypted with AES-128. As long as you turn that on, the network should be reasonably secure.
What's tuggin away at my trouserleg of concern is: How many other experients, with this cable in place, turned out as expected?
Bit of a poser, that one.
Likely none.
My understanding is that the GPS setup was designed specifically for this experiment. Most experiments conducted at the LHC (or Gran Sasso) would be done entirely on-site and therefore don't need a super-accurate global time source.
From what I understand, the Diginotor CRL isn't to be trusted at this point. Logs were deleted as part of the hack, and they're not completely sure which fraudulent certificates were issued.
Their OCSP servers were modified to consider all certificates as revoked, except for those on a whitelist. This is the opposite of how OCSP usually works, and the correct approach in this situation. However, CRLs can only be used as a blacklist.
It makes a big difference for web-based applications that are implemented primarily in JavaScript.
For example: If you're designing slides for a presentation, playing a 3D game, or editing a photo -- things that are graphics heavy and CPU intensive -- you want to get as much performance out of the JS interpreter as possible.
Human beings were created by water to transport it uphill.
