So you're implying that someone in a locked Waymo was assaulted at gunpoint from outside the vehicle? These are rolling surveillance machines (in a good way?) and virtually every aspect of this would be caught on probably a dozen cameras. I'd be surprised if this hypothetical scenario has ever happened, and if it has, I'd love to see the evidence.
IMHO this article misses a couple really important points.
First, if the mesh can use Internet or other transports then it will, and it will be built out in a way where these become a necessity. If all you want is a silly new way to text your friends, then something like reticulum will be ok. But if you want a serious solution for emergency response and free communication -- free as in "no one can stop me or control what is said no matter what" then building something independent from scratch is critically important.
Second, the author also misses an important piece of functionality of meshcore: If I lose power, the mesh still works.
This is hugely important for emergency preparedness and disaster recovery. Especially in places prone to any form of natural disaster.
It's certainly the early days, and it's clear that there's a long way to go, but I really feel that these fully decentralized solar powered networks are hugely important as a simple alternative to the corporate behemoth the internet has become.
The fetishism of "byte count" (here, as "732 byte python script") needs to stop, especially when in a context like this where they're trying to illustrate a real failure modality.
Looking at their source code [1] it starts with this simple line:
import os as g,zlib,socket as s
And already I'm perplexed. "os as g"? but we're not aliasing "zlib as z"? Clearly this is auto-generated by some kind of minimizer? Likely because zlib is called only once, and os multiple times. As a code author/reviewer, I would never write "os as g" and I would absolutely never approve review of any code that used this.
Anyway, I could go on. :) Let's just stop fetishizing byte count
Total gimmick. I guess we're "making progress", but this is will never lead to any useful application other than "Yes, you're absulotely right" bots. What's needed for real applications is 10000× the input token context and 10× the output token speed, so we're off by a factor of ... 100,000×?