Other Central American countries too. Noam Chomsky wrote extensively on this, examining how the language used in New York Times reporting papered over the reality experienced in the countries involved.
I remember reading a back-of-the-envelope guesstimate of just this phenomenon, and it did not amount to anything significant. It's about the change in albedo.
I imagine that there might still be a way to swing by with RF equipment and tip the scales in your favor. And if you're important enough, I'm sure there'll be someone motivatd enough to do this. After all, Polymarket was motivating enough for someone to take a hair dryer to a weather station...
In the sense that RF noise can be a source of entropy: Sorta*. But one doesn't need the whole thrift-store television set to do that; the visual aspect of a CRT displaying analog video snow just adds style points**.
*: Sorta, because if someone discovers that the entropy is derived from an analog TV tuned to channel 3, then they also know how to influence it from outside.
**: Style points can have value; it's OK to have fun with work. But that's a secondary function.
The noise probably makes the lava lamp wall just as effective as pointing the camera at the Mona Lisa - the lamps themselves are not that unpredictable frame-to-frame.
For the record, the lamps and camera are present in their lobby afaik, so you can actually go there, stand in front of them, and slightly affect the entropy.
Speaking of ants, Fourmilab (i.e. John Walker, of Autodesk fame) used to provide a random number generator powered by background radiation: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/
Similar, no. The basis of the internet is that each node announces who they are connecting to. Each node is expected to know which messages (packets) they can handle and which they cannot. This works because connections on the internet are stable. Nodes in an unstable ad-hoc mesh network don't know how they are connected, who they can pass messages for. So every node takes every message and repeats it to whatever other nodes are in range. It is a fundamentally different problem.
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