SMS routing and billing systems did cost money.
Especially billing, as the standards had nothing for it, so it was done by 3rd party software for a very long time.
Interesting how the US goes absolutely ballistic about some random dude violating the "Computer Security Act" on a small scale, but didn't react at all to this massive, incredibly impactful, attack.
it didn't impact Americans. it impacted us Europeans but at the time this went down we were too dependent on Russia's cheap gas (and, frankly, lacked the military power) to raise the appropriate level of stink.
Hell we let Russia freely execute dissidents (Skripal or the Berlin Tiergarten murder come to my mind) and tolerated a land-grab war by little green men in 2014. Either of these actions would have warranted serious consequences, the Crimea/Donbas grab would be a casus belli if you ask me. But again, we were too busy sucking Putin off for cheap gas.
The US does not want to go to full scale, open war with Russia.
So the US will downplay or ignore some amount of aggression from Russia to do so.
If the US wanted to go to war with Russia, we would be playing up some rather minor thing, like sending a missile system into "Europe" or something.
When that Ukrainian SAM fell in Poland and killed a farmer, there was a late night emergency meeting between a lot of very important people from NATO countries to decide WTF to do. If the west wanted to fight Russia, that meeting would have resulted in an Article 5 declaration of some sort.
Russia is behind the sabotage/blowing up of a Czech Republic arms depot. If the west wanted to go to war with Russia, that could have also been an instigating event.
Russia will continue to get passes for "minor" acts of war as long as the west does not agree with sending citizens to die in a war.
That we don't equip Ukraine with more than enough war material to do whatever they are capable of, however, is fucking stupid.
"Some" is an understatement lol. Here in Germany 3.800 (!) wind turbines lost remote control (and thus were forced offline) until the terminals could be changed because their command uplink was via Viasat.
I think that's probably true, but for learning stuff I think an oscilloscope is way better than a multi-meter and the cost is prohibitive so I love the flea scope to give to noobs.
I am also very much in the belief system that you should not buy an expensive tool before you are frustrated with a cheap one, most of the time people get into random hobbies and bow out six months later with way too much crap on their hands, and often time tools are more for show than for real world use.
