What this person paid $40,000 for is access to development kits for certain hardware, which with chip vendors like that usually also comes with support. The vendor cannot prevent you from exercising your GPLv2 rights after they hand you the code. In fact, if you manufacture and distribute a device that uses these kernel patches it becomes your obligation to enable your customers to exercise their GPLv2 rights. Chip manufacturers know this and (if they are somewhat reputable) usually license their code appropriately.

Granted, this setup does require that you do like Indian food and don't mind having the bulk of what you eat each month generally be of that cuisine. But in our case the restaurant has enough variety that with both of us having a different dish for each meal there are enough dishes to choose from that we don't have to eat the same thing more than once all week.

With all that said, we haven't even talked about how there is no cooking or cleanup involved either, so there are massive time and convenience benefits as well.

But I can appreciate that not everyone would be satisfied with this.

It's unusable. I have received full blown mortgage applications from couples in Mexico (including paystubs, tax forms, credit ratings, phone bills, passports). Mostly, these days, it's transaction notifications for a guy in Nigeria and phone bills for people in South America.

CDSI is Cogeco Data Services, Inc., a Canadian ISP, which later became Aptum, which in turn was acquired by Beanfield, also a Canadian ISP (the founder Dan Armstrong is actually well known in the internet community in Canada) that operates AS23498.

So I don't see how this would prove your data is leaving the country.

I've been running one of these Freifunk networks in my hometown since 2013. In all these years I only really had law enforcement reach out 4 or 5 times. One from Austria, the rest from Germany. One for CSAM, one for bomb threats, the rest were about fraud. After explaining the situation to them I never heard back.

They bought Lexmark in 2016 (which is why some Pantum printers look like Lexmark printers).

The company has origins in manufacturing third-party replacement ICs for building compatible consumables and as such has extensive experience reverse engineering many printer designs. Many compatible printing consumables outlets carry Pantum brand printers, as they are essentially buying them through the same channels they buy their compatible consumables.

Pantum has a program for identifying genuine Pantum consumables as well, as any respectable printer manufacturer would ;-) It's a fun little sticker with some tricks up its sleeve: https://global.pantum.com/support/identification/

I do sometimes miss living in Germany.

[0]: Press release in German: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...

I went the Android Bluetooth HCI snoop log + Wireshark route.

I wrote a Wireshark protocol dissector for that specific BLE protocol which you can use with the Android BT logs: https://github.com/kaechele/bonaparte/blob/main/contrib/wire... I found this extremely valuable when debugging, because it allows me to visualize both the packets the OEM app sends and compare this with what my library sends over the air.

I ended up documenting my findings here: https://bonaparte.readthedocs.io/

BLE hacking is pretty fun.