I just want to point and shame this top-voted comment [0] that dismissed with the characteristic self-assurance of the armchair specialist the very possibility of it; and all the users who upvoted it, purely because it sounded like a “rational opinion”; and all the users who impulsively downvoted my post which provided partial evidence to the contrary.
They are forcing reboots, but they aren't communicating with each other to force reboots, as the article was speculating, and as the commenter was arguing against. Instead, it's just a 72-hour clock.
Also, they were calling the networking hypothesis "far fetched" and "pretty unlikely", not "impossible". I had also considered that hypothesis far-fetched, because it wouldn't just need the existence of local communication, it would also need a special protocol, trigger conditions, false-positive prevention, etc., all for that one feature.
The vehement tone was unwarranted and encouraging an attitude of self-assured “common sense” is very problematic, when there are many agents, both commercial and political, who can use it to avoid suspicion about their closed source ecosystems.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.
Related Cops suspect iOS 18 iPhones are communicating to force reboots (234 points, 7 days ago, 288 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42081874