This "simple administrative mistake" could easily lead to the next SolarWind-style breach in a different setting. A nonchalant attitude towards site reliability engineering is exactly what is not needed.
The way iOS and Fuchsia are dealing with the problem is to completely lockdown the operating system with a tight permissions system. An app can be compromised but the damage is limited. Perhaps it is time for servers to move to a similar model.
If you are the author (and every other contributor signed relevant CLAs) then you can distribute the code however you want. You do not have to include game assets in the code distribution.
If a third party can break into the satellite and communications firmware of two different spacefaring nations (you have to hijack an orbiter too) then there are bigger problems to worry about. The number of countries (counting the ESA as one big country) with objects in orbit around Mars can be counted on one hand.
It is like open source debate. Contributing back could either mean hiring/giving massive sponsorships to the core contributors, or it could mean giving out scraps. A couple meaningless lines of code here and there and the corporate sponsor gets to pretend they have fulfilled their social responsibility. The bulk of the labour is still born by those who toiled for years without material reward.
This is not too dangerous as long as the phase transition is not instantaneous. A one year weakening period is more than enough for man made intervention. We have ways of making an artificial magnetosphere (see literature by NASA's James Green). Models have been calculated for Mars. It is not cheap but doable. A nuclear reactor+superconductor satellite in orbit. Borderline exotic by commercial standards but relatively normal for military proposes.
A more worrying threat is supernovae. Those can't be easily shielded against with current technology.
Depending on the geography and building design, you can carry light to the plants via optic fiber. They act as a light pipe/optical waveguide. No need for any photovoltaic solar panels. However this design necessitates a skyscraper in the middle of the desert with nothing else blocking line of sight. Great if you are in the Middle East. Not so great for New York or Seattle. For the latter cities, a permanent barge on the Hudson/Puget with a fiber optic connection could be a solution (the losses would be great and it may not be much cheaper than using electricity, geography and land costs will have to be carefully accounted for).
The technology is very cut and dry. If you are a well funded startup, it may be more economical to acquire an optic fiber skylight manufacturer instead of ordering OEM.
Probably the usual aerospace stack: C/C++ and Ada doing the heavy lifting. Since memory is no longer a (significant) space constraint in 2021, I suspect other high level languages are also used for the non-critical parts of the system.
This would just permanently entrench existing wealth structures. Gated communities will be celebrating at what you suggested. It would be the end of economic mobility. Great for the long tail, not so great for those left of the power law.
We could easily have done that research in the 20 years after the cold war. These are not research that requires state of the art technology (except for radiation shielding which requires good materials science). But we didn't, because there was no immediate demand.
Running on a shoestring budget is not very interesting. What would be interesting is running a well funded production level data center in a completely hostile political environment with every other commercial entity trying to refuse business with you.
The issue is that there are too many barriers to commercialisation and the current stakeholders have too much power. The profitable fields like medicine strictly limit the number of people accepted (the official explanation is that there aren't enough residencies, the unspoken reason is that the American Medical Association wants to keep salaries up) and FDA drug approval laws err on the side of caution; better to have 10 people die due to disease and lack of access to treatments than to have one person die due to a faulty drug that the FDA let through. This attitude and approach means that the time to market is huge and highly resource intensive. The COVID vaccines were designed in less than a day. It took a year to reach market even under the ridiculously accelerated approval pace.
The Signal app, to the best of my understanding, does have a built in dead man's switch in the form of the PIN system. You can apparently set the time range in the settings.
You cannot divorce Syria's situation from regional geopolitics. Simplifying it to not bribing Assad enough is a complete fantasy. Ultimately most of the problems stem from the hard realpolitik fact that the Syrian state have little military power to wield against significant adversaries. Their newfound alliance with Russia may be useful against rebels and terrorists and negating the meddling of the French and US, but it gets problematic when it comes to defending against Russian interests like Turkey and Israel. Syria is being carved up right now and no amount of bribing would help. Take a look at Kashmir if you want a better example of how to properly put down a protest.
The gold standard for dynamic interpreted language package management is Yarn, and to a lesser extent npm. They are both cross platform, allows for easy publishing and building of native code dependencies, and support each package having its own conflicting dependencies, which means you don't have to do SAT solving. Furthermore, the metadata is held outside of the package, so package selection is much quicker than Python which requires downloading the entire library first and parsing the requirements.
But browsers are by nature an engineering project several level divorced from hardware. There is no natural law demanding that they have to be democratic. Ultimately somebody has to foot the bill for their development time. C++ developers are not exactly a scarce commodity yet you don't see any major governments willing to fund browser development despite it being a critical piece of infrastructure. "Professional services" companies like IBM, Deloitte, Oracle, Accenture, get paid hundreds of millions to billions a year to build CRUD software for the public sector. Maybe it is time to redirect some of those funding to more useful purposes.
Because complying with GMP is tedious and expensive. One mistake and you could end up with blood poisoning or a brain-eating microbe. Lab grade material is not the same as pharmaceutical grade material. You can get a lot of expensive anti-cancer drugs too at bulk prices from lab suppliers. That does not mean they are rated for human consumption. What's good for the lab rat is not necessarily good for the homo sapien.