The past few weeks of people ripping into it have demonstrated that SE is mostly reality distortion and does not offer any unique or meaningful protection. I have no doubt the old modems had deficiencies, the new ones assuredly do too. Just a changing of the guard for however long it lasts.
I wouldn't call it scheming though. The approach of choice to (scare quotes) ensuring continued access has traditionally been one where there is no overt coordination or communication. The ideal case is one where every engineer, pm, qa, leadership earnestly believe that they have done a good job/the correct thing... and then there is some deficiency that handily bypasses all of that, exposed publicly, without any authentication and a convenient lack of logging, or some oversight in the specification/standard everything operates against. Real world examples of this include backends to vehicle telemetry/connectivity apps that hand over complete driving histories with the right ip, json and a vin, or flock somehow deploying ~nationwide with a static password and no append only logging in each device. They're flagrant violations of best practices, without conseqeuences or liability.
That's one of the more incredible things about LLMs, the rate at which they are finding these needles in haystacks is only going to accelerate. It's the end of an era. These things were never used for what they should have been, I struggle to imagine a legitimate argument in favor for them that isn't carrying water for the wrong team.
