Price is a factor for how accessible the hack is. If it requires an expensive FGPA or a lot of AWS time to crack then that makes it less appealing.

Exactly. For me it's about the replicability of the attack. Is it restricted to government-sized organizations? Or can anybody with the skills do it?

Interestingly, either H/N changed the submission title, or the article itself changed their title to reflect the content of the article better. Is there a way I can check which happened in the last few hours?

I think the point is that anyone with $25 can hack Starlink once the script or instructions are published online. Information costs almost nothing to publish/ share so it's the cost of the hardware that matters.

"You wouldn't download a satellite uplink would you?"

Uh, yep thats exactly what I want to do :-)

"Twitter hack compromising 5.4 million accounts accomplished using $12 keyboard"

Gods that one had no self respect! You cannot properly hack on any keyboard that isn't mechanical and worth at least $200!

It’s just low grade journalism trying to inflate the impact of the bug.

Conspicuously missing is the cost of the equipment in the lab where he developed the first prototype.

I think it's useful to differentiate between attacks anyone can do with common hardware and things like smartcard attacks that you can only do with access to an electron microscope.

Yes and no. Is the $25 increasingly irrelevant. Sure. Is it clickbait-y, yes. Does it matter because it might make it more widespread, it probably still does.

Absolutely. This modchip is just a raspberry pi plus a couple parts. You'd have to try hard to get it to be expensive. The BOM for most embedded systems is going to be cheap unless you need some exotic hardware. It really does seem to ignore the amount of time this guy spent to get to figure out what parts he needed and where to solder them. If it was developed by a company instead of an individual, you can bet it wouldn't have cost "only $25 to develop".

Edit: fixed for clarity of thought