What the heck is this place?

Absolute horseshit. Bulbs don't have microphones. If they did, any junior security hacker could sniff out the traffic and post about it for cred. The article quickly pivots to TP-Link and other devices exposing certificates. That has nothing to do with surveillance and everything to do with incompetent programming. Then it swings over to Matter and makes a bunch of incorrect assertion I don't even care to correct. Also, all the links are to articles on the same site, every single one of which is easily refutable crap. Yes, there are privacy tradeoffs with connected devices, but this article is nothing but hot clickbait garbage.

Sure, the internet is more practical, and the odds of being caught in the time required to execute a decent strike plan, even one as vague as: "we're going to Amerika and we're going to hit 50 high profile targets on July 4th, one in every state" (Dear NSA analyst, this is entirely hypothetical) so your agents spread to the field and start assessing from the ground the highest impact targets attainable with their resources, extensive back and forth from the field to central command daily for 90 days of prep, but it's being carried out on 270 different active social media channels as innocuous looking photo exchanges with 540 pre-arranged algorithms hiding the messages in the noise of the image bits. Chances of security agencies picking this up from the communication itself? About 100x less than them noticing 50 teams of activists deployed to 50 states at roughly the same time, even if they never communicate anything. HF (more often called shortwave) is well suited for the numbers game. A deep cover agent lying in wait, potentially for years. Only "tell" is their odd habit of listening to the radio most nights. All they're waiting for is a binary message: if you hear the sequence 3 17 22 you are to make contact for further instructions. That message may come at any time, or may not come for a decade. These days, you would make your contact for further instructions via internet, and sure, it would be more practical to hide the "make contact" signal in the internet too, but shortwave is a longstanding tech with known operating parameters.

That’s a very emphatic restatement of your initial claim. I can’t help but notice that, for all the fancy formatting, that wall of text doesn’t contain a single line which actually defines the difference between “learning” and “statistical optimization”. It just repeats the claim that they are different without supporting that claim in any way. Nothing in there, precludes the alternative hypothesis; that human learning is entirely (or almost entirely) an emergent property of “statistical optimization”. Without some definition of what the difference would be we can’t even theorize a test

Even if they're wrong. It's too late. You're already on the list. .... The only option is to destroy the list and those who will use it

Realistically, you don't need security, NAT alone is enough since the packets have nowhere to go without port forwarding. But IF you really want to build front end security here is my plan. ISP bridge -> WAN port of openwrt capable router with DSA supported switch (that is almost all of them) Set all ports of the switch to VLAN mirroring mode bridge WAN and LAN sides Fail2Ban IP block list in the bridge LAN PORT 1 toward -> OpenWRT running inside Proxmox LXC (NAT lives here) -> top of rack switch LAN PORT 2 toward -> Snort IDS LAN PORT 3 toward -> combined honeypot and traffic analyzer Port 2&3 detect malicious internet hosts and add them to the block list (and then multiple other openwrt LXCs running many many VPN ports as alternative gateways, I switch LAN host's internet address by changing their default gateway) I run no internal VLAN, all one LAN because convenience is more important than security in my case.

The genre itself has become neutered, too. A lot of anime series have the usual "anime elements" and a couple custom ideas. And similar style, too glossy for my taste. OK, what I think is old and boring libertarian stuff, I'll still spell it out. The reason people are having such problems is because groups and businesses are de facto legally enshrined in their fields, it's almost like feudal Europe's system of privileges and treaties. At some point I thought this is good, I hope no evil god decided to fulfill my wish. There's no movement, and a faction (like Disney with Star Wars) that buys a place (a brand) can make any garbage, and people will still try to find the depth in it and justify it (that complaint has been made about Star Wars prequels, but no, they are full of garbage AND have consistent arcs, goals and ideas, which is why they revitalized the Expanded Universe for almost a decade, despite Lucas-<companies> having sort of an internal social collapse in year 2005 right after Revenge of the Sith being premiered ; I love the prequels, despite all the pretense and cringe, but their verbal parts are almost fillers, their cinematographic language and matching music are flawless, the dialogue just disrupts it all while not adding much, - I think Lucas should have been more decisive, a bit like Tartakovsky with the Clone Wars cartoon, just more serious, because non-verbal doesn't equal stupid). OK, my thought wandered away. Why were the legal means they use to keep such positions created? To make the economy nicer to the majority, to writers, to actors, to producers. Do they still fulfill that role? When keeping monopolies, even producing garbage or, lately, AI slop, - no. Do we know a solution? Not yet, because pressing for deregulation means the opponent doing a judo movement and using that energy for deregulating the way everything becomes worse. Is that solution in minimizing and rebuilding the system? I believe still yes, nothing is perfect, so everything should be easy to quickly replace, because errors and mistakes plaguing future generations will inevitably continue to be made. The laws of the 60s were simple enough for that in most countries. The current laws are not. So the general direction to be taken is still libertarian. Is this text useful? Of course not. I just think that in the feudal Europe metaphor I'd want to be a Hussite or a Cossack or at worst a Venetian trader.