Hector Martin

I'm talking about the LED supply. 20mA at 3V is the max any indicator LED will be powered at (a lot less these days). LEDs are current limited, so you don't get to draw more. That's 60mW. So no, not possible. Not going to draw any significant power off of the Ethernet pins either

*Maybe* if the LEDs are low side switched *and* the current limiting resistor is on the low side and you wire up yourself between anode and the connector shield you could steal more power, but that's a lot of maybes and assumptions about the board design.

Also, multiple jack parts have access to more led pins, so more power.

16 LEDs are still not enough to run dual 1000BASE-T PHYs + a CPU capable of using them.

Even in short bursts? Let's say you just want to MITM DNS requests. You don't need to run the jack full time. 0.01% of the time is plenty.

How do you know when there's a DNS request happening without actually running the PHY?

Look, I'm sure at some point you'll come up with a scenario that is Just About Plausible, but this is just dumb engineering-wise.

I agree. But do intelligence agencies only make smart engineering decisions? I think the killer here is the supply chain traceability. The engineering... who knows? I follow you partly because of all the dumb engineering you report on!