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The Mexican cartels use actual cell/mobile equipment, and have kidnapped engineers from South Texas to gain additional technical knowledge. Also, these areas su
by jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
The Mexican cartels use actual cell/mobile equipment, and have kidnapped engineers from South Texas to gain additional technical knowledge. Also, these areas surround SLC are not territory they're trying to control in the same way. What utility would there be in this network vs simply using encrypted communication over the internet?
On the other hand, solar powered mining with just good enough radios to do C2 and send back any hashes found would be an exact match to this scale of equipment.
- Manuel_D 4y agoBut why not just install solar panels on your house? Or legally, in some remote property? On top of the mountain is probably one of the most expensive places to deploy infrastructure. The elevation is almost certainly to provide radio reception coverage.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoThere's networks like Helium that are based around LoraWAN mesh IoT miners. Assuming there's some financial advantage to having maximal connectivity to other miners, putting a few on the mountains above a major metro area seems like a very straightforward idea.
- boring_twenties 4y agoIt's not above a major metro area though, it's above Salt Lake City.
- RF_Enthusiast 4y agoThe Salt Lake City Metropolitan Statistical Area is #24 as ranked by population, so it depends what one would consider "major". To me, top 25 seems major, but to someone else top 20 would be major. I don't think "major" in the context of metro areas is an official term.
- Retric 4y agoI’ve heard major metro area as roughly being top 100 cities in the world which Salt Lake City is nowhere close to. If anything Salt Lake seems about average size for a city, it’s just located in the middle of nowhere which makes it seem more important. This is also why they need this kind of backup communication system so close to the city.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoYeah, let's just derail into a subthread bickering about what threshold counts as a major metro area, vs meaningfully engaging with the actual topic at hand. This place is cursed with the worst pointless nerd sniping behavior.
- Retric 4y agoComplaining because people are pointing out you’re wrong is a complete waste of everyone’s time. Talking about metro size is actually relevant because if it was a major metro area like say LA they could actually use the cellphone network that would blanket the area. Instead it’s a modest city in basically the middle of nowhere thus the problem.
- deet 4y agoThis conversation is indeed a distraction, but for posterity and those curious the population for the SLC area is slightly confusing because of the population proportion of the central city itself with the legal name "Salt Lake City" is small relative to all the adjoining municipalities that basically blend together into one city (even including street addresses, grid system, public transit), and the way the metro areas for Provo, SLC, and Ogden are reported in the census separately even though people commute between them in the same way people travel between SF and San Jose. The numbers are more like: 1) Salt Lake City: 200K people 2) Salt Lake City Metro Area (MSA): 1.25-1.3 million 3) Salt Lake-Ogden-Provo Combined Statistical Area (CSA): ~2.7 Million. FYI this region is also called the "Wasatch Front" To understand these levels of breakdown the equivalent for Bay Area naming would be: 1) San Francisco itself (the 49 square miles): ~800K people 2) San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley MSA: ~4.6 million 3) San Jose-SF-Oakland CSA (think the whole "Bay Area"): ~9.5 Million It's the Combined Statistical Area of SLC (the "Wasatch Front") which is now ~22nd-24th in the nation, not the MSA itself. It's similar in size to Charlotte or Sacramento, and larger than the respective CSAs of eg Pittsburgh, San Antonio, Kansas City, Nashville, or Las Vegas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area)
- LarryMullins 4y ago1.2 million people. And probably geographically the closest metro area to the people who did this; I assume whoever did it lives in or around Utah.
- flatline 4y agoWhy on earth would cartels kidnap engineers when they could just pay them? This seems like the kind of specialized knowledge you cannot meaningfully get out of someone with a $5 wrench, just how they hire lawyers and other professionals to work with existing modern infrastructure that you cannot just avoid.
- giantg2 4y agoWhy would they pay someone when they could kidnap them, like they've done to many others?
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoYou vastly underestimate how intense the cartels are. They want total control, not bribes. One of the more medium size cartels, Jalisco New Generation, specializes in training assassins against their will. Let that just sink in. They do this by advertising jobs, kidnapping the people who show up to interview, and then torturing them in horrific ways until they get the total compliance of learned helplessness. Then they send them on suicide missions. I don't want to go into the details of the torture because its bad stuff, involving cannibalism even. If you are morbidly curious there's a couple interviews with survivors you can find somewhere on youtube. And this is far from the only instance of this sort of thing. Sinaloa has been known to kidnap entire buses and make folks fight to the death, winner gets the dubious honor of becoming a member. These are people who assume every single person in their world is plotting to overthrow them in an instant, and leave nothing to chance vs that. They don't want to hope their bribe is enough to keep you loyal, they want to know you're loyal because you've seen them torture to death countless people. You don't get any agency in the matter.
- toephu2 4y agoHow do you know all this? Were you a former member?
- playingalong 4y agoI don't think organizations like this have any former members.