> Engineers design pickle forks to last the lifetime of the plane, more than 90,000 landings and takeoffs, a term known as "flight cycles" in the aviation industry, without developing cracks.
That number made me do a double take.
Seems planes never stay on the ground for very long.
I know in addition to salary there are other "hidden" costs like health care etc, but even taking that into account their employees must be taking home a pretty significant wage.
While not quite to the same level of obfuscation, your suggestion reminded me of this project:
http://www.cipherdyne.org/fwknop/
Its essentially port knocking with a single encrypted packet.
Haven't tried it (yet) myself but sounds interesting.
I realised I was more than happy to pay WhatsApp's yearly charge back in the pre-Facebook days (think it was 70p or so?).
Figured I could give Signal a few quid every now and then, maybe keep a server up for a few seconds :)
Donation link should anyone be interested: https://signal.org/donate/