It’s a nice ‘Edison vs Tesla’ type story - but I’m pretty skeptical that there’s any truth to it. It just doesn’t seem viable enough to bother doing, for how much of a hardware setup you’d need versus how much electricity you’d be ‘harvesting’, to the extent that it meaningfully impacts the signal range itself.

Like unless this engineer built the Russian woodpecker array

Can you siphon power from the sun so other people can't get its radiation, without you covering the entire surface with something like a Dyson sphere?

If your object is roughly the size of a wavelength or less, it can siphon off power that would be a few wavelengths away.

So a bacterium might be able to annoy their neighbor. But that's about it.

If the sun was in some kind of equilibrium with stuff around it (ie. There was a big mirror acting kinda analogously to a ground plane) you could effectively cast a shadow much bigger than yourself.

But that's about it. Visible light is very small.

Mr. Burns managed to do it.

In moderation, isn't that a potential upside of space based solar farms?

Are black holes allowed?