It turns out that the Pacific Time Zone is the only one where the bug caused a user visible difference because:
1. Daylight saving time starting or ending changes the time zone offset by just one hour.
2. The bug only has an effect when the difference in the number of hours goes from less than a day to at least a day, or vice versa (e.g. 23 to 24 or 24 to 23).
The only hour of the day that satisfies those two conditions is 11:00pm, and the only time zone where daylight saving time starts and ends at 11:00pm is the Pacific Time Zone.
I would not say that. It exists because practical padding oracle attacks (which are adaptive CCA) have been known for decades. CCA2 very much captures real-world attacks. Is there any realistic attack that is captured by CCA1? (Or vCCA).
Padding oracle attacks also generalise to any kind of parsing after decryption. Padding tends to be studied because it is independent of any particular format/application and also part of several encryption scheme definitions. The definition of CCA2 captures very realistic scenarios - almost all applications do some parsing after decryption and so are quite likely to reveal an oracle. Would vCCA also capture such attacks?
That was not in their comment though, there wasn’t any mention of people telling others what they can eat. The comment just states that the existence of vegans is counterproductive somehow.