Abandoned hotel rooms? How is anything abandoned in NYC in 2025?

Builldings get abandoned when the owner is unable to rent them out: Either due to regulatory reasons, such as the city won't issue the necessary permits, Or due to the lack of anyone willing to currently pay the demanded per square-footage rent on the rooms or the space. Large property owners will Not reduce the rents much -- as it can impact the market rates on their other property. It benefits certain owners more to take their property off the market in that case to avoid reducing market rates on their own product.

If anything, a building still otherwise in use would be superior, more noise to hide the power draw in.
The BBC's version of the article stated abandoned buildings.

But sure. Find a room not being used at the end of some hall. Create some means of covert entry into the space from outside like a new hatch cut behind a bush, or whatever. Quietly frame up new walls inside the building during some holiday while everyone is gone and nobody's looking.. Fresh coat of paint to match surroundings, coat rack, or old spare fridge stuck in its place, so the hallway is just blocked or obscured and ends early. Space likely to be forgotten and available for nefarious uses forever, then.

Abandoned hotel rooms? How is anything abandoned in NYC in 2025?

Just bc rent is high in NYC does not mean they have no buildings being kept empty.
There must be, since the news indicates the seized network was scattered across 5 sites. In short; they were hidden within rooms in 5 different abandoned buildings - not just one.

If not, why and under what authority was it dismantled?

Police can seize equipment in order to investigate possible crime, so long as they have probable cause to suspect the gear might be evidence, then they can take it in.

Also, the location being Abandoned hotel rooms, and the unauthorized nature of the presence of many racks' worth of gear being installed there by the owners of the property is probably plenty probable cause.

Was the installation used to commit a crime?
It sounds like they are still investigating. The article does not mention any crime as being alleged, Only that the network they seized in theory would be capable of causing disruption if the operators had wanted it too.

Having an f/.95 aperture doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot the surface area of your sensor is a fraction of a square millimeter. My S24 has an f/1.7 lens on its main camera and it still produces pathetic output compared to a $400 mirrorless camera with a kit lens.

That TLAs cannot actually break the TOR system itself?

Probably not true. Presumably the third-letter-agencies can break TOR, but I would guess the criminal spies they're trying to recruit from the Russian government or whatever to betray and sell their own countries' secrets aren't just hopping on Tor from a device identifiable to them without additional safeguards.

It's likely for example that possibly the US or UK can track down Tor users much more quickly, and the Russians can't get physical access to the nodes to subvert the crypto as easily.

I dont know, I would like to have a an HTML page back as an option

Microsoft just needs to add option of "pinning a Window to the background". To make the Window become fullscreen with no title bar, and prevent focus or interaction with the Window while it is pinned -- with your Desktop Icons and UI simply stacked on top of the Window, so your background could be any Window.

if you want HTML, then you could pin a shortcut to open a dedicated chromeless full-screen browser app.

This would be better than having a Video file or a HTML file as background - the background can be any application.

This... was the worst part of the outcome of the anti-trust loss... Microsoft had to remove active desktop from the UI, and now 25 years later they are getting a shittier version back. In the day it was fun to throw dilbert on the bottom of the screen, random stock quotes down the side and slashdot on the other side. This would just show you things you would want to see on a daily basis and didn't take opening a window. You just embedded the browser rendering engine into a chunk of your desktop.

Of course the best thing was to grab someone and put hamster dance as their windows desktop - especially if they had sound anywhere. Always fun at the office

That's what you think.. but AI makes coding so easy in management's eye that they can create temporary seasonal coding positions for the winter each year - bring on a bunch of Desk Clerks. Add AI usage and basic coding to the job skills equirements, and stick them in the coding positions.

H1-B, you're only going to need a reasonably low number of people in the team to setup a remote office for the entire team

This is why we should make sure Offshore work performed for a US company by contract employees has to be legally classed as US source income - offshored services, and establish a tariff rate per hour on that higher than the H1B visa costs.

Import Duty on transferring the work performed in a foreign office into a US company.

The more they modernize in China, the more expensive their labor will get

The country China is the global leader in industrial automation worldwide; Robotics and AI are among those areas they have an advantage. The cost of human labor may be getting more and more expensive, but they need less and less of it.

Furthermore in all likelihood the price of labor in the US HAS to decrease in order to compete. Therefore the rate of wages in the US may decrease due to them.

Reddit gains an irrevocable, sub-licensable, royalty-free license for user-created content posted on its site.

You mean Reddit claims to have an irrevocable royalty-free license. Based on an assumption some clause they stuck in the fine print of a user agreement would be upholdable against every user of their website - including for completely unforseen users by users who posted them 5, 10 years ago, etc --- Including some users who are unaware of the terms at the time of uploading items to Reddit's service, And some users who are under the age of 18, and therefore lack the legal capacity to bind themself irrevokably to a contract at the time of submitting some content.

And Likely based on an ignorance of 1. Termination of agreements including irrevocability due to some contributors having passed away. 2. the Termination of Transfers and Licenses Granted Under 17 U.S.C. 203 - Which allows termination of a grant of copyright license after 30 years under set conditions regardless of a prior licensing agreement.

As soon as 10 years from now: There will be Reddit users who will have been posting to Reddit for 30 years, AND there will be some users who could issue Notices of Copyright License Termination for all rights from Reddit under the grants termination clause. As soon as 20 years ago there can be users asserting a revokation or that their license grant is invalid was not valid at the time content was submitted, because they lacked legal capacity - being a Minor, or being unaware of the attempted copyright agreement, at the time of writing that content.

This is not true. The legal term is declaratory judgement.. If you have a reasonable belief that you'll be sued

False. Subjective beliefs are irrelevent; however reasonable you think they may be. Declaratory actions are governed by US 28 U.S.C. 2201(a), and actual controversy is a requirement.

Meaning you have to bring proof to court that you are already in a dispute with another party. You cannot just reasonably be afraid of being sued or have a personal belief that they will grounded upon whatever reason. You have to have a tangible cause that can be put into evidence that indicates a dispute exists, and they are going to sue you; typically in the form of a written letter or Notice from the other party indicating the dispute and indicating that they will sue.

Disney reserving rights and declining to offer legal advise or a free pass does not amount to a threat to sue. It's quite possible that under various permutations they would consider it, and the exact details of what you are doing with your advertising are not born out yet - The civil and criminal cases against you as a trademark infringer are Not as of yet ripe before you post your product misusing a Trademark, because your details are not final, and the impact on the market is not known until after you begin to market your product. It would be dumb for Disney to try and ascertain the details of any lawsuit they would consider filing before a substantive infringement has been committed against their rights.

Well whatever they call it.. Theoretical disputes or rights another party might attempt to exercise are not properly actionable by a filing in court. You have no standing to sue a trademark holder based on your planned future projects and a personal theory that the company might regard your business as an infringement. Unless the whole thing is a USPTO action claiming the trademark is invalid and should not be granted.

The first time the case goes to court; I suspect they're quite liable to have the judge throw them to the wall with their case -- Disney may very well end up getting an order that this Injury firm pays their attorneys' fees on top of a hefty fine.

The odd question I have.. How is it that massive amount 1000lb explosives is planted with nobody noticing it for so long?

Seeing as it's enough to level everything within a 1 mile radius; that is rather extreme and scary if any of that has been sitting nearby for so long. We could be looking at a surprise disaster any month or day weeks or years from now then...

Surely there would have been an effort to survey the damage after a bombing, and an unexploded thing larger than a car shouldn't have been overlooked by an aerial examination and thorough search of the spaces surrounding populated areas.