The difference is your example uses bool values, the code in question uses expressions that (should) evaluate to bool. && is short-circuited if a is false, such that b is not evaluated.
A network for Amazon devices is certainly one use case. Another is selling network access to other IoT devices.
I would expect most residential broadband TOS would explicitly prevent reselling their network bandwidth/access. That's what you are doing with networks like Helium, even if it is in the form of a token instead of dollars. Amazon has gotten around this by just not paying. You buy the Amazon device, you provide the network access, Amazon gets the revenue.
That makes sense, I had wondered about the crypto angle on Helium. Then again, even if you were relaying a lot of messages from sensors etc. I wouldn't expect it would actually add up to a very big percentage of your total usage (I guess it'd be 24/7, unlike your Netflix/Zoom consumption). So it seems a little implausible your ISP would care (or notice), unless they wanted to get into that business themselves?
Yes, Amazon already offer a Sidewalk SDK as part of AWS IoT offerings. I didn't even think about the cost angle, which is a really interesting point (although, I think ISPs have an argument against the Amazon devices here still as it's effectively connection sharing, which they also usually ban in ToS). My consideration was just for the customer sales pitch, which is "your IoT devices Just Work magically."
The author is conflating max allowed bandwidth from the bridge to Sidewalk server with per-end-node bandwidth. The 80Kbps includes the bundle of all of the LoRaWAN messages it has received for all end-node-devices within range. This is a marketing point to show the Amazon device owner that this won't consume large amounts of their bandwidth. The Things Network suggests a maximum expectation of 250 BITS/s. This is not going to replace cell networks.
https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/limitations.ht...
I really enjoyed the author's perspective on this, and I like well-reasoned arguments from people whom I probably don't align with politically. To confirm my assumptions, I checked the About page
> Matt Stoller is a Fellow at the Open Markets Institute
Ok, what's that? A Koch sounding name, but I'm guessing more Soros because of the repeated calls to government action on this (and the Dodd-Frank connection). A quick search led to a Politico article https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/14/open-market-instit... which contained this nugget:
> Despite its small size — 15 or so employees operating out of a shared WeWork space in downtown D.C. — Open Markets...
