Why "OR"? The NSA is really more of an "AND" agency. I think we can assume that anything and everything that could be done to intercept traffic is being attempted at some level or another.

We have India offices staffed with employee developers, not contractors. And that really is the best thing about our organization - we're all in it together, so there isn't an us-versus-them mentality. It's convenient to hold contractors at arm's length, and blame them when things go awry, and it's easy to say "let's end this contract." But it's very hard when you're all reporting to the same boss. That's had a lot to do with our success.

And you're absolutely right about the time difference being an issue. But you can make it work to a degree.

They've shifted their working times to start later in the morning and end later in the evening, and we have shifted our mornings to accommodate earlier meetings. We can get two hours of overlap every day with few problems, and depending on the situation we can get an additional couple of hours. It's enough to have hand-off kinds of meetings, and to discuss a project or specific problem, but not enough to work with them in a coaching, mentoring, or close partnership kind of role. That takes expensive travel, so it doesn't happen as much as either side would like. But when it does, it's great. I have some very good friends who just happen to live on the other end of a long plane ride, and I appreciate that globalization introduced us.

Brace yourself, they're probably Journey fans.

Or a warrior princess...

Whose moons are these, some stinkin' committee, which allowed a bunch of frauds to demote Pluto to "dwarf planet" with disgusting act of skulduggery?

You may assume that the knowledge gap between the NSA and civilian cryptographers has closed, but since we don't know their capabilities, that's only a guess.

The few things we do see coming from them look very carefully chosen to meet the public expectations. See Bruce Schneier's commentary on Skipjack. One thing we can be reasonably certain of is they never reveal all their cards when interacting with civilians.

The gap could have widened as easily as it could have been closed. The NSA hires a lot of very bright mathematicians, as well as physicists, engineers, and a lot of other skilled folk. They have proven themselves capable of not only researching novel algorithms, but of creating novel hardware on which to run it. Consider what they could be doing today if they managed to mass produce 4096 bit quantum computers. They could be intercepting all SSL traffic in real time.

That's the thing about a secret organization. We don't know their capabilities, and we may never know. We only know it's not safe to rely on an assumption that we've caught up to them.

Nobody's going to roll this out unless Google or another larger player starts rolling it out and making the existing 6 Mb/s connections unpalatable to consumers.

We'll probably see this in about 10 years.

Are you kidding?!?

Steve Ballmer's Chair-throwing Battledrome will be a massive hit!

Don't forget: Chair! Chair!

True. They also all tend to come at once and then none for ages.

You'd see Putin running away after lighting the fuse.

Now that we have that out of the way...

So glad this was only 3 satellites, rather than 3 cosmonauts. That 0:18 mystery plume would have been guessed, second guessed and investigated. As it is, they'll still need to retrace the assembly and prep of the rocket to try to identify where a flaw was introduced.

Where are the reliable rockets coming and going like London buses?

Wasn't a navigation, but propulsion problem. Go back to your model rocketry and read the manuals again, and not the difference between Propulsion section and Payload section.

This is a drag, but it's always a drag when these fail because it still means failure is possible, even SOYUZ.