This isn’t new, cell tower triangulation is a fact of the network operation and is part of how your signal gets handed off between towers as you travel. Airplane wouldn’t do anything unless it where to actually disable the sim entirely, and functionally even that doesn’t cut it in the USA given that a device without one can still connect to emergency services via any tower in reach.

This is just the carrier giving a customer the data that would already exist, for a price, which I thought T-Mo actually used to give for free…

More a speculative thought, but if those who do pay attention to negative feedback no longer see any, they may not take that into consideration when they put things up.

Say someone put up a post, saw no backlash on the front end, but then comes to look at the responses and sees a cesspit of hate. That’s hardly going to soften any mental harms it might otherwise impose.

Another thought here is messing about with such things, particularly in making them a default behavior, could disrupt comms where there is a strong voting aspect to it. The ‘am I the asshole’ type place that, despite the usual attempt to have them adjudicated by some nuanced comment system, inevitably end up using votes as a agree/disagree dynamic.

I’m not sure there’s a purpose to it the way things are clustered here. Particular for anything of a political/news nature the very same post on one instance and com may get a completely different reaction on another. There are a fair number of people that I think of as ‘fire and forget posters’ in that they simply fire off posts but rarely interact with them after. Making this the default would likely encourage more of the same behavior, possibly leading to more spam.

My guess would be an online connectivity check. Most systems try and reach some domain to say if they have network or not. Would be a logical place for them to try.

Interesting, I get a couple feeds that reference them but thought those where all gathered info rather than self published.

TOR is just slightly harder to keep up on as far as being listed on the same tables as commercial VPN hosts because it’s so dynamic. Anyone can spin up a node and be a relay or, for the brave/foolish, an exit node in a few minutes.

Privacy largely comes from a plausible deniability in that the person asking for a site could be the originator or they could just be relaying a request for the originator. Freenet, or now called hypha net is similar that way.

My perspective on internet privacy has long been that while I don’t expect to be a ghost, I can make the picture as muddy as I can to make whatever profile they gather be as useless as possible.

From the infosec practitioner perspective the number of bad actors coming from public VPN pops is exceptionally high compared to any other random IP, so they get put on a naughty list. We often cut out entire countries just because they have such a high ratio of bad 2 good traffic, particularly if it’s a country that we have no real expectation of user traffic originating from.

It’s not so much a VPN bad, but just that you’re hanging out with others that act bad. Kind of the Nazi bar thing but for hackers. If you set up a private VPN somehow on a random cloud host you likely wouldn’t see the same issues, how to keep the ownership anonymous though is another problem.