Humour aside, many larger shops now provide free public wifi to encourage comparison shopping (so that punters will realize, "sure I could get it for 50p less if I drove 12 miles, but is it really worth it?" and buy whatever they're looking at locally).

I'm pretty sure you could build a RaspberryPi circuit board and a small power supply into a brick the size of a British 3-way mains adapter, along with three working, fused mains sockets—so that it would actually act like the real thing.

For those of you who don't know, here in the UK our mains electricity runs at 230 volts and we use ring mains to distribute it. All mains plugs contain a fuse, and they're extremely chunky because they were designed in the 1940s with safety in mind—inserting the big fat earth pin opens a shutter to allow the live and neutral pins to enter the socket, the better to keep toddlers with paper clips from frying themselves. From a safety angle they're great, but the 1940s weren't so hot on miniaturization, so this is what a 3-way mains adapter block looks like (for scale, the long edge is about 7-10cm high):

There'd be some interesting topological problems to solve to route all the mains-voltage circuit paths around a small circuit board, but a BSI standards-compliant adapter is pretty hefty, with walls that are solid slabs of plastic several millimetres thick, and a fair bit of dead space inside. I expect to see templates for printing the various structural components on a RepRap to turn up via the Pirate Bay.

Let us postulate that you can build such a computer into a mains brick, equipped with wifi, and powered off a mains socket. It should be configured to piggy-back on the shop network and broadcast a file share, containing a TPB mirror.

In a large department store or supermarket it'd be very hard to track down such a device if it was sitting behind a refrigerator or under a point of sales unit or a PC in the back office, or plugged in in-line with a display item of electrical goods. In a store with literally hundreds of mains outlets, who in admin is going to notice that the public wifi network (not the one the store's own EPOS and stock control systems run over) appears to be carrying a read-only network file share full of magnet files? They might notice some odd-looking punters lurking around the shop for too long without buying anything, like shoplifters, but if Security track them via CCTV or even pull them aside and search them they won't find anything unusual.

So. Is LOSS actually just a red herring?

Second order consequences: RaspberryPi can of course drive sensors, collect and aggregate data, transmit data via VPN ... give it a couple of microphones or a penetration toolkit and you've got an espionage tool. Of course, such things already exist, but RaspberryPi promises to drop the price of entry by an order of magnitude. James Bond, eat your heart out ...