That's not what "brick" means.
Words mean whatever its users decide they mean. You are aware, I hope, that "brick" didn't mean anything related to computing, right? Somewhere there's a bunch of annoyed bricklayers fuming about how the nerds are using the word all wrong.
Because cities have a lot of different kind of people, different kinds of shops, art spaces, restaurants, performances and so on. Suburbs are far more homogenous. They're like that bar in Blues Brothers that have "both Country and Western".
And cities are a lot more accessible; when you get older you may no longer be able to drive or get around easily, and you will certainly start to appreciate the closeness to various medical specialists, nursing facilities and emergency services.
One major trend here in Japan is that as the population grows older, so does the move into urban centers accelerate, and that's exactly for this reason. Baby boomers are selling their suburban homes and rural houses to get convenient, accessibility-adapted apartments in the city.
Kiva wasn't exactly first with any of that either. Quite often some new ideas are "in the air", as technology improves, with everybody taking and adapting bits and pieces off each other. It makes little sense to try to rank the different entrants as knock-offs or copies of another.
A speed bump is no obstruction if you're driving within the legal speed limit.
Sounds like they should put up a speeding camera or radar trap in that neighbourhood of yours.
Patents have become another "must-have" item in a scientists resume. It presumably shows you're able to create practical applications from otherwise abstract research results.
In practice, of course, you can patent pretty much anything you want if you put your mind to it, and the vast majority of granted patents are never implemented in an actual product and never make any money at all. So researchers just jump through another set of hoops to pad their CV with, usually, a completely worthless patent or two.
The researcher is happy since they got another item on their career-critical CV. The university is happy since granted patents counts toward university rankings. The granting agencies are happy since it shows their research grants are producing tangible results. Too bad the actual end result - the patent - is utterly worthless.
A lot of research can be very high quality and still not a good target for a patent (or patentable at all). Patents really cover the industrial application resulting from, often, many layers of increasingly abstract or obscure research results.
Can I get some food that gives me lots of energy and no calories? perhaps you could sell it using your not-ad promotions?
The point is, getting around encryption is too costly to do it on a mass scale, so they can only really do it for the small portion of targets judged worth it.
It's like with door locks. Your door lock is good at stopping casual probing, but pretty much useless against a determined attacker. If a government agency (any government) decides that they really need to enter your home then they will enter. It may be with a warrant, with an armoured bulldozer or with a covert penetration team. But it's much too costly and much too risky to do so unless you have really good reason. They can't do it for every house in the city, on the off chance somebody might have something interesting stashed away somewhere.
Same thing with crypto: it may not stop them if they decide you are a high-value target. But it stops mass surveillance dragnets in their tracks.
I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.
