In my area, some people put small solar nodes on top of high buildings (office, university, and apartment). The node on my roof can directly communicate with one of these nodes ~20km away. Pretty crazy tor something that can run indefinitely on a 18650 battery and small solar panel. I’ve heard some people just place “guerilla nodes” to extend coverage.

I always thought it was pleasant. Kinda like MXE. Have to be careful to get the ones with no other active ingredients though.

Yeah, I’m guessing it’s so if you “hide” the network, it will still connect to it. Anyone can scan these advertisements, then go to wigle.net and likely get a good idea of where you live/work.

Modern phones rotate random MAC addresses. For WiFi, capturing SSID probes can be enough to track somebody though (some phones also have some mitigation for that too, like not probing for an SSID after it hasn’t been seen for some amount of time). Even when turned off, many phones, including iPhones, turn into BLE beacons similar to AirTags, which can be used to track you.

I once saw an old lecture where the guy working on Yahoo spam filters noticed that spammers would create accounts to mark their own spam messages as not spam (in an attempt to trick the spam filters; I guess a kind of a Sybil attack), and because the way the SPAM filtering models were created and used, it made the SPAM filtering more effective. It’s possible that wider variety of “poisoned” data can actually help improve models.

China is now the world leader in science by most metrics (largest proportion of the top 1% most cited papers, most publications to prestigious journals, etc). It makes sense, with their high population and their government willing to fund research. I’m guessing their culture is much less anti-intellectual than the West too, especially the US.

Nvidia