9 ms·
Starlink can’t come soon enough. Imagine internet beyond the grasp of control freak governments
by georgeburdell 7y ago
Starlink can’t come soon enough. Imagine internet beyond the grasp of control freak governments
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> Imagine internet beyond the grasp of control freak governments Radio jammers. There are very few technological solutions to political problems.
- _bxg1 7y agoAren't some of them planning to use lasers? They'd have a hard time blocking that.
- aaomidi 7y agowat how are lasers working in this scenario
- icebraining 7y agoEach end (satellite and ground station) point a laser at each other, which they modulate according to the data they wish to send. The other end has a sensor (much like in a camera) that captures the light, and processes it to recover the data (demodulate). It's much like fiber optics, except over air instead of a cable.
- abhishekjha 7y agoHow much power would such a laser emitter require? That is a huge distance to cover. Wouldn't it get attenuated over the distance?
- Rebelgecko 7y agoLasers are subject to the same inverse squared law as regular radio waves. However with lasers you're starting with a smaller beam so the attentuation is actually less
- jagger27 7y agoLasers between them in orbit is what I've heard, nothing about ground stations, AFAIK.
- _bxg1 7y agoI could've sworn somebody was planning to use lasers to communicate from the satellite to a ground station, claiming it would improve latency. Maybe I misread.
- jsjohnst 7y agoLasers alone won’t improve latency, but they would certainly impact reliability. Radio waves already travel at essentially the speed of light.
- Rebelgecko 7y agoIt's been done in the past. I think the main benefits are preserving EM spectrum and some theoretical improvement in bits per watt
- m12k 7y agoYeah, probably not much point in making an internet connection that only works without cloud cover.
- yellowapple 7y agoI'd imagine a laser at typical radio wavelengths would be just as susceptible to cloud-cover-induced interference as a non-laser at typical radio wavelengths, no? Not that even lasers would be necessary to mitigate jamming; ordinary beam-forming / directional antennas should be enough (barring some really sophisticated jamming technology of which I'm not aware, or the Iraqi government putting up and maintaining permanent chaff clouds or something similarly outlandish). Jammers (to my knowledge) operate by actively producing an inverted copy of the signals it actually sees. That is: it'd be reliant on non-directional signals. Any directionality / beam-forming would make jamming a lot harder, since it makes it a lot harder for the jammers to actually see the signal in the first place (let alone produce an inverted-waveform copy of it). Jamming also tends to get in the way of other radio communications, so even if it was actually effective against satellite communications, it'd be a last resort and would likely cause all sorts of other issues.
- ceejayoz 7y agoThe lasers are for inter-satellite comms, where there’s no atmosphere to interfere.
- baybal2 7y agoDo you realise that most of satellite jamming is done on uplink, not downlink? This is how Cubans jammed US milcom and few civilian satellites since nineties
- LifeLiverTransp 7y agoYou can make a habbit-routed physical mesh-net, where people smuggle huge encrypted packages from the few "entry points" to the recivers on there phones. That way the urge for total surveilance (everyone has his/her phone on all the time) contradicts the "block all phones all the time". Its also very unrealistic to demand constant phone searchability for the government- and if the app is virus based, gives the users even plausible deniability. Imagine your daily habbits, as a sort of plankton zoo constitued by constellations of cellphones. Shape is specified by agreement on habbit and predictability. The bus driver always knows that the group will behave, shape and dissolve in a predictable fashion. He will be able to predict fixed on-route contacts (home-routers / other entitys). Thus one cellphone with the mesh-net routing virus, can predict and promise a best effort delivery of a package of data to other habbit plankton on route. You could smuggle a whole youtube video in one go out of country, simply by having it passed to other civilian phones, until it reaches a phone on the way to the airport. After its on the web, with some proof, it could decrypt its inner layers and travel by conventional means to the actual adress.
- markovbot 7y agoDeploying and maintaining radio jamming devices is _way_ more difficult and expensive than telling an ISP to shut down service.
- trust07007707 7y agoWay more difficult maybe than running a bash script but in real terms it's very doable.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoDepends on the frequencies and types of antennas used. Doesn't take much to disrupt a radio-based service (people do this by accident, that's why RF regulations exist everywhere). It's not that much of an expense for a government to set up a few antennas and make them put out half a megawatt of noise each.
- markovbot 7y agosure, but they have to have the hardware for that ready to go, and they have to get people deploy each site and prevent it from being vandalized or disabled
- viraptor 7y agoWideband noise generators are cheap and trivial to make. Giving them more power is a bit more tricky. If satellite internet becomes a norm, I'd be surprised if most armies didn't end up with one of them.
- JohnFen 7y ago> Doesn't take much to disrupt a radio-based service Particularly satellite signals, because they're very weak to begin with.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoIndeed. High-gain antennas and some math trickery can compensate a bit (see e.g. GPS and its below thermal noise floor signals), but I don't think a commercial transceiver could in any way win with a 50kW signal on a broadcast antenna turned jammer on a nearby hilltop.
- baybal2 7y agoLEO Ka band jamming is very hard https://www.mitre.org/sites/default/files/pdf/10_2505.pdf https://www.mitre.org/sites/default/files/pdf/10_2505.pdf
- Thlom 7y agoIsn't starlink and most other LEO constellations ku, though?
- baybal2 7y agoYes, C and Ku are dominant now, but not on LEO. LEO is dominated by 400-500Mhz for milcom, L and C. Resurgence of Ku in LEO is mostly due to regulatory regime already being cleared for satellite internet due to previous entrants, and cheaper hardware for consumer market.
- viraptor 7y agoI realised there's more to this article, but with notes like this: "Note this strategy assumes that the link from the ground to the UAV is somehow protected from an electronic attack by the jammer either through waveform design or by narrow beam antennas." you know they're not focusing on consumer level hardware.
- ISL 7y agoAnd prosecuting people with the relevant transceivers.
- lacker 7y agoThen Iraq would have to make it illegal to own this sort of internet connection. A country like North Korea could do that, but not a country like Iraq or Cameroon that has some degree of normal freedom but intermittently shuts off the internet.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoA country willing and easily able to shut down the Internet is also perfectly able to temporarily limit or ban civilian use of a frequency range.
- hanniabu 7y agoYeah, but what about the radio jammer jammers?
- ineedasername 7y agoThere are ways of dealing with jamming [0] though I doubt they are in most (or any) easy consumer available units. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_counter-countermeasure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_counter-countermeas...
- kungito 7y agoAn interesting social effect could be that currently by default there is no internet. Then you get a device that provides internet and the government takes it a way. If there was starlink lets say there is internet by default. Then the goverment gets a device to jam that internet and the protestors can take it away. It kind of switches the local on ground dynamic I would say and makes it way more interesting for the protestors. They can occupy jammers like they do airports and get internet back
- gouggoug 7y agoIt will still be owned by a private company you have no control over, which isn't necessarily better
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoEspecially since Iraq is leaning on private companies (ISPs) to get them to shut down the internet. The one advantage that Starlink might have is, it might be a company beyond the reach of the Iraqi government, and therefore less likely to give in to their pressure to close off access. But what we really need is several such companies, not just one.
- caleb-allen 7y agoAren't there multiple Starlink competitors in development now?
- hawaiianbrah 7y agoYes, they’re just the furthest along and perhaps most likely to succeed since they own the launching mechanism the others would likely use.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoGiven how satellites don't respect national borders by default, I wonder whether there will be - or maybe already are - international agreements that would make it easier for a nation's government to coerce a foreign operator to deny service over that nation.
- kingo55 7y agoAt least it's a another competing choice.
- DINKDINK 7y ago>It will still be owned by a private company you have no control over I don't have any ethical justification to enslave or coerce or control a person. Why should I have any ethical justification to enslave or coerce or control, if a group of people get together (a company) to do something?
- xeromal 7y agoThe freedom to access information is one of the greatest and most sacred gifts the internet gave us. The longer we can protect that, the further the human race will progress. Bring on starlink!
- JohnFen 7y agoThings like Starlink won't remove a government's ability to cut off internet access. The radio signals aren't hard to jam.
- beamatronic 7y agoWe need one that uses lasers
- joombaga 7y agoWhy? Are lasers hard to "jam" (I'm using quotes because it seems weird to use "jam" with optical media, but maybe that's just me)?
- tonyarkles 7y agoNot to be too cynical, but it’d be pretty straightforward to at least tell where the ground-based terminals are if they’re shooting lasers into the sky. Not sure if laser-based systems use IR or UV or what (presumably whatever has the least amount of atmospheric attenuation), but airborne cameras could likely pick it up pretty quick. And for the most brutal dictators: laser-guided bombs are already a thing...
- DuskStar 7y agoWhy would an airborne camera be able to pick ground-based lasers up easily? Wouldn't you need to fly directly between the satellite and the ground terminal? Same goes for laser-guided bombs - those home in on where the laser pointer is pointing, not the pointer itself.
- sandov 7y agoAlso, imagine it being much harder to verify that your systems are air-gapped.
- vkou 7y agoImagine how difficult it must be to drive through a neighborhood, and mark off anyone with a satellite dish on their roof as a political criminal. Hint: Not very. Also, how exactly do you plan to pay your bills to your ISP, when their service is illegal in your country?
- owl57 7y agoI bet half of houses in my neighborhood has a TV dish. If it will be possible to make Starlink dishes visually indistinguishable from those, the police will have a slightly harder time. Slightly, because detecting radio transmission doesn't seem hard either.
- yellowapple 7y agoTransmissions from ground to orbit tend to be highly directional (it's why satellite TV/internet typically uses dishes instead of ordinary antennae). Detection from the ground would be pretty difficult, given that most (ideally all, but there's probably at least some leakage) of the signal will never reach anything else on the ground (for the same reason you typically can't see the beam of light from a flashlight or laser pointer unless it reflects off dust or fog or some other particulate in the air). The most reliable way to detect ground-to-space transmitters would be with aircraft, since those will have a much easier time crossing paths with the signal (and thus actually being able to see it).
- devmunchies 7y agothe internet, with most content and platforms by freak capitalists
- heavyset_go 7y agoYou'd think a headline like the one we're posting under would stop techno-optimism dead in its tracks.
- journalctl 7y agoWhen all you have is a startup, everything begins to look like a nail.
- seph-reed 7y agoWe got the news within 12 hours. Right now massive amounts of data is being collected, and eventually it will get out. This seems like it'd all be a lot easier to control without technology.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- alistproducer2 7y agoNot to be too cute but by relying on corporations you're trading one dictatorship for another. Im not saying an oppressive government is the same as Comcast. Im just making the point that neither entity is accountabile to the people they 'serve.'
- kevas 7y agoOthers have stated their objections to your comment, but... my belief is that once StarLink becomes operational, the American Gov. will have oversight & control of it, just like our current ISPs.
- JohnFen 7y agoI believe that the only way the US could legally do that is by exerting control over up/downlink stations that are in US jurisdiction. I'm assuming that things like Starlink will have up and downlink stations in places outside of the US as well as inside. Extralegally, though? All bets are off.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoSpaceX is a US corporation, therefore US jurisdiction.
- input_sh 7y agoYou're making an assumption that Starlink will fight a nudge by the US government instead of quietly complying.
- JohnFen 7y agoI'm not, really. That's why I added my "all bets are off" comment.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoI can't see every other nation being too happy about US-controlled global Internet service. They will demand some degree of control over their territories. I can see the space law getting some updates sometime soon.
- buboard 7y agosatellite internet already exists
- journalctl 7y agoAnd instead controlled by one corporation headquartered in a nation that also partially controls Iraq.
- eyegor 7y agoTo anyone else interested, here's a link to a draft paper about starlink: https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkJHandley/status/1044621609120747520 https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkJHandley/status/1044621609120.... Apologies for not posting the direct link, for some reason my copy url gets hijacked on twitter mobile.
- l1n 7y agoFTFY: http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/starlink-draft.pdf http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/starlink-draft.pdf
- Romanulus 7y agoYet people pine for Net Neutrality.
- api 7y agoA Starlink dish is a transmitter, which is a beacon that says "come arrest me!" or "drop bomb here." Seriously though: as bad as Trump is, I still think Bush II was by far the worst president of the past 100 years. Trump would have to do something much worse than he's already done to match Bush's accomplishments.
- jacobush 7y agoIraq, Syria, yes. Agreed. Though it feels like Trump is one false move from something just as bad or worse.
- 4gotunameagain 7y agoSuggesting that revolted populace protesting about basic life amenities will have the ability to purchase and operate a starlink antenna is uneducated at best
- tomcooks 7y agoYou're forgetting that governments, especially of the control freak type, tend to be the only entities that are entitled to the use of violence and coercion. Good luck using Starlink or any other forbidden technology when your skull is being pushed to the ground by their boot