The dismantling is usually faster in other countries, as Telcoms owning this equipment either are or were state owned monopolies. In the US, the payphones were probly owned and swapped and back and forth between myriad providers.

Kudos for pulling all these into one database

Hmm, I wonder if we see, now since we are in a RAM availability crisis, more borderline to bad RAMs creep into the supply chain.

If we had a time series graph of this data, it might be revealing.

If you look around you'll see people already putting the new, chinese made DDR4 through its paces, it's holding up far better than anyone expected.

Every single time I've had someone pay me to figure out why their build isn't stable, it's always some combination of cheap power supply with no noise filtering, cheap motherboard, and poor cooling. Can't cut corners like that if you want to go fast. That is to say, I've never encountered "almost ok" memory. They're quite good at validation.

The danger is we’ll start to see more QA rejects coming into the market. The temptation to mix in factory rejects into your inventory is going to get very high for a lot of resellers.

Where does one find these? I'm looking for DDR4 ECC for my homelab.

I believe that you would not expect that level of interaction with LEAs for a "stop cop city" dude that hasn't even been charged with a crime.

I'd count that up as a hypothetical win of the self-hosted main in your own location.

If you are Dr. Evil, OTOH, other calculi apply.

I think your is statement is inaccurate to the point of being intentionally misleading:

Many devices, when running, and in some cases even if turned off but connected to their battery, will ping cell towers (maybe even BLE/Wifi) and get triangulated by the network infrastructure (such as cell towers) without actively broadcasting the GPS location.

That's why I don't quite understand why the gubernment needs to have finer grained data (esp around the US/Mexican border). Precision location info would only be needed if you need to track people in densely populated areas.

That location information is not available to apps or ad networks without user consent. The government can access it from the carrier with a warrant, but that's not what we're discussing here.

Carriers have also sold customer location data, no search warrant required. Though we can rest assured that the FCC has slapped the carriers' wrists with the utmost seriousness.

And sold it to not just the government but anybody _claiming_ to be a bounty hunter (and some other professions).

Couldn't you just maintain a list of cell tower IPs and figure it out with traceroute?

Cell towers are not working at the IP level, so no

IP doesn't handle roaming very well. If you got routed onto the internet directly from your local cell tower, then your connections would drop whenever you switched to a different tower, which is somewhat suboptimal. Cell networks handle it at a lower level and route your traffic through a central location which serves as the origin of your IP traffic. Geolocate your IP while on cell data and you'll probably see something pretty far away from where you are. My phone's IP address at the moment is about 400 miles away from the actual phone.

I think that's very much what is discussed in this whole thread.

Cell-site location information (CSLI) is not available to apps or adware and is protected by the Fourth Amendment.

You may want to look into the Third Party Doctrine.

If the government wants to tap your phone they need a warrant. If they want to buy it from a willing seller like Verizon they don’t.

It was freely sold up until a handful of years ago

My personal favorite is the song from the movie (not the show, haven't watched) M.A.S.H.

Or, perhaps, Vera Lynn's "We'll meet again some sunny day".

These are good movies to rewatch, especially in these interesting times.

In which way are other GUI “finder-equivalents” better? I’m not invested either way, but I’m quite curious. It would be a great biz opportunity to make an aftermarket replacement if there is huge gap.

They do sneak it in when a blog etc plays an embedded YT video. It treats that as non-signed-in, you have to stop playing and continue on YT to avoid ads in that scenario.

Actually, China does not support dual citizenship. All naturalized Chinese (now U.S.) citizens I know need a visa to enter China.

Well, I assume that they are at least not to attack their autonomous "comrades". Masquerading as such will be one obvious tactic, no ? You could argue that these guys would use e2e encrypted messages as FOF designation, but I would imagine a contested area would be blanketed with jammers, leaving only other options (light ? but smokescreens. Audio? Also easily jammed). So this isn't as easy as most people think.

Edit: No, I don't think a purely defensive stance like landmines is sufficient and what the people in command think.

We have landmines today. Why spend much more making marginally better, highly intelligent ones with LLMs?

Also, a longer quote from Douglas Adams might be appropriate here (also appropriate to agentic vibe coding ...)

Click, hum.

The huge grey Grebulon reconnaissance ship moved silently through the black void. It was travelling at fabulous, breathtaking speed, yet appeared, against the glimmering background of a billion distant stars to be moving not at all. It was just one dark speck frozen against an infinite granularity of brilliant night. On board the ship, everything was as it had been for millennia, deeply dark and Silent.

Click, hum.

At least, almost everything.

Click, click, hum.

Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.

Click, click, click, click, click, hum.

Hmmm.

A low level supervising program woke up a slightly higher level supervising program deep in the ship's semi-somnolent cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went click all it got was a hum.

The higher level supervising program asked it what it was supposed to get, and the low level supervising program said that it couldn't remember exactly, but thought it was probably more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn't it? It didn't know what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was getting. The higher level supervising program considered this and didn't like it. It asked the low level supervising program what exactly it was supervising and the low level supervising program said it couldn't remember that either, just that it was something that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which usually happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error look-up table but couldn't find it, which was why it had alerted the higher level supervising program to the problem.

The higher level supervising program went to consult one of its own look-up tables to find out what the low level supervising program was meant to be supervising.

It couldn't find the look-up table.

Odd.

It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried to look up the error message in its error message look-up table and couldn't find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its sector function supervisor.

The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It called its supervising agent which hit problems too. Within a few millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were also missing. Small modules of software - agents - surged through the logical pathways, grouping, consulting, re-grouping. They quickly established that the ship's memory, all the way back to its central mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mission module itself seemed to be damaged.

This made the whole problem very simple to deal with. Replace the central mission module. There was another one, a backup, an exact duplicate of the original. It had to be physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all would be well.

Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it, to the ship's logic chamber for installation.

This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authenticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into the void.

This provided the first major clue as to what it was that was wrong.

Just wait until you see an original print of the nice and accurate prophesies of Agnes nutter or the bugger all bible …