It used to be a literal, physical device, similar to the technology used by Sonic & Knuckles[0].
I remember someone explained to me, after the family PC got infected with some malware that folks get MUCH angrier if you're messing around in a networked game like Starcraft than something offline like... Pokemon.
This was back when they were transitioning to CD-ROMs to distribute the games, and IMHO understandably afraid they'd spend R&D money on things like which controller designs work best, then go pirate all the games.
Anyways, I suspect of years of treating minors abusively is catching up with the world, as you see things like this exploit, Solarwinds[2], the Texas grid failure[2]... these are all separate "cyber" issues connected by a common thread: the United States has some that have a state income tax, and some that don't, and people can move freely between them.
Like... seriously... did people not plan for a future when people sigh, pretend not to understand your weird Myspace drama, and pay for a quad espresso in cash so they can go do whatever they want on the wifi?
I've seen so many people say that X shouldn't be done because something could be a server for a hospital, or an airport or something.
But I don't think any hospitals are running the FTP server to upload crime scene photos on a Playstation.
Maybe for Devil's night someone should brick every single one of them to cut down on the amount of bored teenagers running around with... command line skills.
(Sorry to ramble, I'm doing what I started sarcastically referring to as my "executive time" during the Trump administration -- if the signal is sometimes useful you can't complain it's also sometimes weird as hell.)
- Greg.
-- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameShark [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_%26_Knuckles#Lock-on_tec... [2] https://www.npr.org/2021/02/17/968577281/what-went-wrong-wit...