Sorry, I meant theoretically as in “at some distant point in the future where we’ve figured out how to make it work.” I probably read too much science fiction.

Unfortunately it’s a hard limit due to the speed of light. Theoretically you could use quantum entanglement to get around it, but then of course you wouldn’t need the satellites anymore.

Unfortunately the amount of delta-V you’d need to boost it to a parking orbit of some kind, or to the moon, would be deeply impractical. And it doesn’t have the shielding required to support any sort of deep space habitation.

I’d love to see some or all of it returned to be displayed in a museum, but it would probably be more expensive to do that than it was to build it in the first place. The vehicles to return it in whole or in pieces simply don’t exist right now, and on-orbit disassembly would be incredibly difficult and dangerous for astronauts to carry out.

Can’t speak for the person you’re replying to, but I’m a security engineer and stuff still makes its way to me that you would think would get filtered out by others (and isn’t my job to fix). It just takes the right person thinking “this is obviously a problem with $system, let’s just send it straight over to them so they can fix it quickly!” And then we get the fun job of proving it’s not us and has no relation to us.

We got a ticket today for packet loss between two systems, neither of which have any of our tools on them…

That’s great! Like I said, it’s dependent on your employment contract. But for people who aren’t as certain, separate work and personal devices as much as possible just to protect yourself.

Depending on where you work, your employer may be able to take that personal device you’re using for work in the event of a lawsuit against the company (where they need to retain anything that may be relevant to discovery), or in the event of a security incident (where they may need it for forensics).

I work in information security, and I practice strict isolation for that exact reason. Two laptops, two phones, because if anything ever happens they can and will take devices for analysis or evidence. If you are using an issued device, they’ll assign you a new one; if it’s a personal device you’ll get it back when they’re done with it, which could take years.

Edited to add this is dependent on your employment contract, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Cover your camera and use your work computer.

I’m a security engineer, and encryption is great, but can be bypassed. Relying on encryption assumes it was implemented properly, that the system was shut down properly so all keys were flushed correctly, and the encryption algorithm doesn’t have weaknesses.

Generally if somebody dedicated enough can acquire physical access to a system, they can probably find a way into it given the right resources. Did that happen here? Probably not. Could it have? Absolutely. That’s why most enterprises or government hard drives are shredded rather than just relying on them being wiped or encrypted.

Encryption is part of the solution, but it’s not automatically the complete solution.

We don’t know what was on those servers, but it was apparently sensitive enough that the government redacted descriptions of the data in court filings.

The US government brief said the relocated servers were not wiped before being moved to a new data center. The type of data on the relocated servers was apparently so sensitive that it could not be described in the US court filing, which redacts the sentence that describes what the servers contained.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/us-government-slams-musk-in-court-filing-describing-chaotic-environment-at-x/

I run those calls through my own phone system, which I host on a system in my basement. There are a couple main options out there, I used FreePBX for a while but now I’m using 3CX. They don’t require a ton of computing power-- mine runs on a virtual server inside a larger system, but you could run one off of an inexpensive thin client from eBay if you wanted to.

I get my phone number from VoIP.ms, which is pretty inexpensive and has worked well for me for years.

For a phone, you can either use a soft phone (an app on your computer or smartphone), or use an older IP phone off eBay (which is what I do since I also have a Plantronics wireless headset that connects to it).

It’s pretty easy to get started, but you do need to make sure you’re configuring everything correctly since selfhosted services can open up security holes in your network if you don’t know what you’re doing.

This is why I always record calls with major corporations when I’m talking about money. I’ve never had to actually resort to sending them recordings, but I have used the “Well, every call made from this phone is recorded, so I can go back and pull the recording of what I’ve been told if you don’t have it in your system” line a couple times.