He got the Charles Babbage anecdote wrong. There was a need for reliable computers at the time. At that time, computers were people.
Creating navigational charts was the application. Human error propagated and it was a big problem at the time. That is how he got funding.
I also take exception to the claim it was never built, as that is not entirely true either.
For anyone interested, I recommend the 1990 book by Doron Swade. It is excellent. I stumbled across the difference engine at the science museum in London while I was reading that book! I didn't realize the author was from there until after the fact. What a lovely coincidence. Such a fascinating device, the difference engine will always have a special place in my mind.
Assuming the aren't well programmed, it might be preferable to spoof them with junk data.
Is anyone MITM-ing and publishing the data these devices are sending? It would be nice to reverse engineer and document their APIs. Somebody needs to be watching the watchers.
Without jailbreaking, I don't think you do. You can do it at the router level with dnsmasq, but then you'd always have to be VPN-ed into that network when you are out and about.
Although, I believe Cloudflare DNS app on iphone uses a VPN iOS API to do it's thing, so it should be possible to put dnsmasq-like functionality into an iOS app. I don't know if this exists already.
Oh hey, I made that[0] at a previous apartment! It sat on my LAN and I'd VPN in if I was out of wifi range.
I struggle to find time/motivation for stuff like that these days. I was contracting back then and had downtime between jobs.
[0] https://github.com/jeremy21212121/doorman-building-arduino