It’s not just public knowledge, Lufthansa tested it in commercial airliners a few years ago. it’s just a FUD article to make it look like this is some new unknown super tech.
Austria was the country. There is a few wrinkles here. They found cp on one of the hard drives, they had text logs of him offering to host cp on a server, and in the end he was sentenced to 3 years probation.
I’ve done this with almost every computer I’ve built/owned from MacBooks to desktops, and it depends on your use. Want to use it to spin up say a small private nextcloud/plex/lemmy/Remote Desktop/NAS/whatever server? usually works pretty well! if you have no use for the computer then it could be worth it to just get your feet wet in linux/FreeBSD/HaikuOS or something like that. Otherwise it’s probably better to just recycle or sell it if it’s just going to collect dust either way.
These authors don’t sound like they have a very good grasp of the tech they’re “reviewing”…