I could be wrong, but this sounds like a number of people had to be involved to pull this off.
I suspicious of the whole story down to wondering if there really is a "David Rush" and if so, was the person arrested even that David Rush".

I'm older than DSL and was an early adopter.
Unless the technology has changed recently, DSL has a limit of about 18,000 feet of good wire between the house and exchange, and much less if on a concentrator. Almost all places where DSL might work already have fiber or cable.

It's not an option for most people in rural areas.
Also, DSL sucks.

He got off with a very light sentence. Kelvin Evans has lengthy criminal record, near two dozen arrests with a half dozen trips to jail.
And he was on parole when he stole Beyonce's stuff.

My belief is that Beyonce didn't want the hassel of being involved with a trial and giving depositions and so on, so her lawyers were looking to just be rid of him and let the prosecution know that.

Kelvin Evans has lengthy criminal record, near two dozen arrests and was on parole when he stole Beyonce's stuff.

So they want to place boxes full of ddr5 ram in people's back yards thinking they'll still be there tomorrow morning.

The instances like this that I was aware of had in common that a person in the hiring process was from the same community as the chosen applicants.
It's a safe bet that a department head from China did not preselect a group of men from India for these jobs. It could happen that way, but I'd bet it didn't.

All that is irrelevant. This is driven by Project 2025's general antipathy to science.
This specifc action wasn't called for, but it was a necessary step to eliminate "wokeness" in research such as climate change.
A lot of the administration's weird dismantling of agencies can be found in here. Everyone should have read it because it drives a lot of what has happened.
https://static.heritage.org/pr...

A few miles away "Nearly 20 people in their 30s stared at their cellphones for a few minutes. Then they set them down and looked at their bared palms for a while. Then those of their neighbors."

That almost made me nostalgic for the days of my youth and lsd.

The DOJ says it only patched affected devices within the USA. Once modified, the device has become a part of a criminal enterprise, so there's probably a law somewhere in the US allowing the court's authorization.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr...

The zone where integer math crosses with the tyranny of small numbers.

I, too loved that book. I had been already been working for 6 years for Burroughs on mainframes and peripherals as a so-called Field Engineer and had been thoroughly de-romanticized. I think that book re-energized me.

I wondered why anyone would make a computer that would easily fit through a door. Wouldn't someone just steal it?

Persistent malware by definition leaves code on the target so it can reload after a reboot.
What they call memory resident doesn't leave code on the device and therefore doesn't persist across reboots.

There is a meme for this American tendency:
https://imgflip.com/i/8g6qg7

True that about casting bullets - lead vapor wouldn't be the problem. My friends and I were black power enthusiasts in a rural area in the 1970's and cast many thousands. Some of the most fun I ever had.

Anyway, the problematic battery recycling Is like this:
https://dialogue.earth/en/poll...

The problem is the same whether the batteries are used for cars, storage for solar, or storage for unreliable electric grid. But "solar" in the article title gets more clicks.

According to the linked report, the problem is that a great deal of the battery recycling is done by back-yard/garage operations that lose up to half of the lead into the environment. So the government needs to get involved somehow, stop the unregulated small operator recycling, and also do something about the other sources such as lead paint. Tragedy of the commons and that sort of thing. This is very much like the USA before the EPA was created in the 1970's, thank you President Nixon.