Doesn't Starlink use some sort wideband signal which is hard to jam? Combined with some sort of frequency hopping and a moving constellation should mean blocking a user or satellite signal should be pretty hard, like many times the cost of building and servicing a user terminal for use against protesters.
> Doesn't Starlink use some sort wideband signal which is hard to jam?
It probably is hard to jam, but you don't need to jam it if you can pinpoint terminal locations and send in on-the-ground enforcers to confiscate the equipment and make arrests. TV detector vans were introduced in 1952[1], the principles for finding sources of RF emissions isn't cutting edge technology.
You realize Iran is pretty big with lots of people and Iran can't run around with detector van across all those regions and people. Specially when they potentially lose control over certain areas. And those vans can be disabled pretty easily as well, specially in a proto-war zone.
That said, this would only be true if there were enough people with terminals.
TV emissions don't use beam forming. This is all a cat and mouse game, but Starlink being a distributed system should mean it is harder to completely block use of.
See my other comment upthread on how beamforming doesn't make terminals/emissions invisible, just harder to acquire, but well within reach of a determined adversary. Newer Starlink terminals have a 1.5° beam, and older ones are
3.4° wide . At 10,000 feet altitude, the tighter beam is 245 feet across. Starlink satellite orbits are public and predictable, and Iran has drones to spare.
This is just 1 passive RF-based approach, and there are others (e.g. drone-mounted FLIR surveys done at 3 am)
Like I said, this is a cat and mouse game, if you had terminals to spare or even just fake battery operated transmitting antennas, you could waste a lot of drone time. There are also masking techniques and it's not like the drones can't be tracked or misguided. It would take orders of magnitude more effort to stop Starlink than to keep using it minimally. Iran is a big country, it just depends on how determined and prepared the protestors are to evade censorship. Which by itself is hopefully just a start to other actions.
Looking forward to using Gentoo in WSL more easily. I currently use Ubuntu for some scripting but would switch as I also use Gentoo on the desktop. Also good to see the Rust toolchain and BLAS packaging improvements.
What has kept me on Gentoo since the first Opteron days (20+ years ago) is that once you do an install, you also learn in part how to fix the things you installed, which can be helpful later on. I also do world rebuilds often which I think is just the equivalent of testing an OS backup for a source based OS. :)
Starlink isn't perfect, but at least it doesn't go for "it's so not our problem, we'll just make sure that every single VPN exit point Iranians use is GeoIP'd as Iran in our systems" like Google tends to, or "let's lick every authoritarian boot, we control the app distribution and our users will suck it up" like Apple does.
Not even Starlink has the balls to oppose the likes of Russia and China directly - they aren't operating there without a permit, sadly. But at least they don't kneel before every two-bit dictatorship and cave to every single "we want you to do censorship on our behalf" demand. Way better than what most tech companies do now.
I'm unfortunately inclined to not look at their actions so favourably. They operate solely in jurisdictions where the US state supports open destabilization, and dont where the political ramifications would be too high for the US. Makes them little more than an extension of the US imperialist structure.
And this makes sense for an organization thats so highly reliant on federal support, vs Apple and Google who only have to just stay somewhat in the states good graces.
> They operate solely in jurisdictions where the US state supports open destabilization
Could you expand on that? Are you saying that the US state wants destabilization in every place that Starlink is accessible? Like the UK, Australia, and USA itself? Which group are you considering the "US state" for that?
I assumed the context of the conversation was given to be understood, my bad. In the context of Starlink operating in nations for the purpose of bypassing internet censorship, as is the context of the conversation, starlink only operates were the US sanctions it to (iran) to further its imperialist goals, and it does not operate where it would hurt the US politically (russia). So pretending that starlink is operating from some kind of moral high ground rather than just SpaceX and most of Musks companies are heavily reliant on federal support so are at their beck and call is weird idolising of a corporate entity.
As a private platform, SpaceX did try to draw a line with where their service could be used in Ukraine, but we're talking about Iranian protestors now, a different matter I think. If they were offering a firewall as a service, then what you're saying would be more true.
Apple and Google have done more than just stay in good graces of governments by getting rid of apps governments don't like, they haven't enforced their terms against X, and given tens of millions to Trump's ballroom.
I would like to see the ratio of toll prices to public transport available for each state properly normalized. Would be interesting to see a correlation.
reply