It also means that insurance rates for SpaceX launches just went up. Making really cheap rockets won't save any money if they're not reliable.

One billion files?! That's why adults use statistics. Relatively small random sample would have given the same result.

The only rational explanation: Elon burned a lot of karma with that SolarCity merger.
Now he's having tough times: both (Tesla and SC) companies are in cash crunch, plus this...

They're not contacting us. The signal was sent to their colonization fleet on route to earth.

Yes, the common root of these failures is the same - it is mechanical stress.

Although Nvidia's (customers) problem was somewhat different - NV decided to save few pennies on BGAs by telling their foundry not to bother putting stress relieving layers on their wafers. Great writeup is here

BGAs in general are fine. Overtime, mechanical stress will kill anything not properly designed for it.

Ok, abcnews does have it on front page, CNN, wsj, nytimes do not.

Go scan their front pages. Then return to me.

I'm still waiting for major US news outlets to cover the story. Are they being censored? The story has major political implications, e.g. often proposed mandate to allow government to access encrypted private communications, etc. BBC seems have no problem reporting on this.

It was 3 years ago. Importance of this detail is this: in pre-Snowden era NSA did not have access logs or other internal audit tools. Those were considered risk to security of operations.
My speculation is that this is why the data dump is so old - to maximally complicate forensic team's job.

Interesting note: There are no frontpage articles about NSA hack among major American news outlets. It is/was on BBC, Guardian, etc. But not on CNN, WSJ, NYtimes...

Hmmm....

That timing of deployment of logging tools might explain why files are 3 year old. Newer files are dangerous because they will expose the mole or access method used.

Does anybody know what's going on with that auction? Because it seems now that those crazy hackers do have some serious goods on them...

NSA _and_ Russians had access to to all thus firewalled networks for 3 years... Should Cisco and it's customers start lawyering up?

An important thing to note about NSA operations - they intentionally do not keep access logs. They do not allow for auditing tools or any other such nonsense. Claiming that such infrastructure will endanger security of operations. Now, they will try to figure out what/who/where. Good thing they know when: 3 years ago.

Slashdot is getting ADD.

Go, read entire series of Snowden's twits on the subject. The whole point is: this disclosure is a warning shot. Imagine if the rest of the files will reveal targets, personally identifiable info on perpetrators, provable attribution etc. God forbid malware targets are in NATO countries or some such. This thing might explode into a serious international scandal.

Russians are mentioned simply because they might have better motives for pulling this off (with some tit-for-tat hacking going on right now). But that's beside the point.