Teppic

Ernest has made a few updates to improve moderation recently e.g.
https://kbin.social/m/kbinDevlog/t/615294/kbin-RTR-9-Protection-against-spam-and-several-optimization-improvements
https://kbin.social/m/kbinDevlog

If you use kbin you can even see who has made each upvote, so yes easy to then look for patterns of voting together and also at the profiles to see if the accounts looks like real people etc.

Posts and comments are federated (synchronised). Upvotes are actually a bit of a fudge, they are actually ‘Favourites’ if considered from an activity pub (e.g. Mastodon) perspective, and yes favourites are also federated.
Downvotes don’t exist in activity pub and, as a result, they do not federate between instances.
At least that is my understanding.

Not even sure it’s EEE, they just clone and provide the clone of a good product for free and/or as part of windows.
Their products are usually only second best, but kill the market leader anyway.

Very much so, and equally possible in theory (interference patterns with light exist, light cancellation could work somewhat like noise cancelling) but also equally impossible to do at anything much above an atomic scale.

Logical next step, hacker sues the developer for copyright infringement?