that noone has posted this yet: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/partner/+files/canonical-census_0.1.tar.gz
It is a simple bash script with the following comments:

#!/bin/bash
# Send an "I am alive" ping to Canonical. This is used for surveying how many
# original OEM installs are still existing on real machines. Note that this
# does not send any user specific data; it only transmits the operating system
# version (/var/lib/ubuntu_dist_channel), the machine product name, and a
# counter how many pings were sent.
#
# (C) 2010 Canonical Ltd.
# License: GPL v2 or later

simply unpack the tar.gz file and see for yourself what info it is transmitting. IMHO the whole thing i harmless.

How hard is it to say; change a disk in one of the submerged nodes ? or fix a loose ethernet cable ? If the nodes are separated in compartments, and you could isolate and drain one while servicing it, this would be really nice indeed.

my favourite: 00:FA:CE:FE:ED

and for some more fun hex strings: hexspeak

If you are the kind of person that are in the danger zone of this happening (not that you would leave a computer with such sensitive information in your hotel room.); You would probably feel a lot better if you were able to checksum the bootloader when returning, maybe from an external usb drive. This would offcourse run it's own OS, not being done from the bootloader(for obvious reasons).

I think that this is exactly what they are doing, only that all the small tools are bundled in the same tarball.

i was just about to check out ncat. Seems interesting. The only downside is that is can never reach the same critical mass as the vanilla nc, and hence you cannot rely on the more advanced functions on an unknown computer. would be cool though, SSL could be handy in some situations.

they seem to be filtering the signal quite a bit (obviosly), and a bandpass filter at a known frequency would take care of quite a lot of the random noise from the rest of the system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEMPEST - the fact that these guidelines exist, means that this is in not new.

nobody expects the spanish inquisition!

This is actually quite interesting. With China putting a lot of prestige in being "better than the west", they may actually be able to pull of something good with this one (and hopefully, later missions). There is nothing like a bit of competition to get the party started. Their Changâ(TM)e 1 probe was a sucess, so why not this one ? they have at least proved themselves capable of space exploration, and the more space exploration, the better!

They could consider following the same model the Norwegian government used when oil was discovered in the sea outside Norway; create a lithium fund managed by the government, paid by taxes and exploration fees from the companies wanting to mine the lithium. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Oil_Fund. It worked for Norway, it might work for Bolivia too.