You misspelled "vulture capitalists".

All of them are forced to drive. Some people admit they are terrible drivers, but have no options if they still want to have a life not revolving around commuting.

They also advertise on the bay area in the US by the highways one time we drove by. Although compared to all the AI garbage companies that promise the world on their billboards, it was generic "protect your privacy - mullvad VPN" and something like that. I only remember it because of the mascot.

Was the AI trained on that one Christiano Ronaldo statue?

What's the expected volume of records planned to be stored?

For a small volume on a school assignment (a few thousand records on each query), I would do a processor/filter on my base database access layer and do the encryption and decryption there for any field annotated as @Encrypt at the field level or similar (language dependent, not sure what you are using).

Some libraries use a similar approach during serialization and deserialization steps. I'm guessing you are required to write the whole thing, but reading how those work might give you ideas since they tend to have hooks to wire custom logic during the process.

This would add overhead during read and create, but would be pretty transparent to the rest business logic and as mentioned, as long as the requirements don't say you need to support searching over a few million records in X amount of time, it might be OK.

The hash idea sounds quicker at first (hashing vs on the fly encryption/decryption), but it does not sound like it would scale well either unless the message size is constrained like you mentioned. Another problem us that it could be extremely easy to brute force with a rainbow table which kind of defeats encrypting it to begin with. If pursuing that approach, you'd need to also store a salt with each hash to prevent that attack type.

Custom encryption solutions and security through obscurity tend to be the weakest points in an implementation, which sounds like is part of the assignment to think about.

E.g. see people from Venezuela here legally who got put into "illegal status" anyway due to orange man policies.

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Don't worry, with JFK Jr. Help you'll die old and sick on the farm.

You didn't knock you see..

Nice try 8-bit guy! We're on to you ;)

E.g.: companies that advertise on a large sporting event might preemptively scale up (maybe warm up depending on language) their servers in preparation for a large load increase following some ad or mention of a coupon or promo code. Failure to capture the market it could generate would be seen as wasted $$$

Edit: auto-scale does not count on non essential products, people would not come back if the website failed to load on the first attempt.

I found this video rather relevant. It made me enjoy some nice sunsets on the witcher 3 (started playing it recently):

https://youtu.be/uhCBhFovTVI

Maybe it will enhance your play through as well. I agree sometimes not much happens, but it feels more rewarding than trying to min/max the run for whatever reason.