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No, because most of that fiasco was just garbage journalism. SpaceX has had a publicly stated policy of not allowing use of Starlink in that manner and the US g

No, because most of that fiasco was just garbage journalism. SpaceX has had a publicly stated policy of not allowing use of Starlink in that manner and the US government has not opposed that stance (hell, it's likely because of technology export regulations that the use of Starlink to directly control drones is not allowed). The initial story claiming shutdowns was actually just about terminals that the UK was paying for being deactivated with full knowledge of Ukraine because there were far more terminals available being directly supported by SpaceX. Ukraine had rotated out the terminals appropriately. The other intermittent outages were just general system instability as many early users around the world also experienced. The more recent story was retracted because it turned out to be completely false. SpaceX hadn't turned off the cells over Crimea as an act of sabotage, they had always been off (to prevent Russia from using captured terminals) and they had just refused to turn them on hours before a drone attack. IIRC since then the cells have been turned on after having more time to discuss with relevant authorities.

philwelch 3y ago
I’ve always found the outrage on HN over this somewhat inconsistent. Lots and lots of people here are critical of the arms industry and were largely supportive of Google employees pressuring the company into dropping US defense contracts, but when it’s Elon who doesn’t want his satellite internet service to be weaponized he’s suddenly the bad guy? Personally I think Elon (and the general HN consensus against the defense industry) is naively pacifistic, but the double standard is noteworthy. For what it’s worth, SpaceX is also launching a completely separate Starlink constellation, known as Starshield, for the US Space Force. So if the government wants to allow our allies to use a weaponized Starlink, they can share their own.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  I'd agree, but on the other hand, it isn't entirely HN users' fault that scummy journalists intentionally misreport and/or don't circulate their corrections as loudly as their initial accusations. Plus, I doubt those critical of the arms industry would be complaining about Google offering to take on defense contracts specifically intended to help Ukraine. If anything, they'd be complaining about Google not just paying for it out of pocket, as they did when SpaceX said that providing Starlink for free for an indefinite period of time would be financially unrealistic for them. My understanding is that Starshield isn't an entirely separate constellation, it's a special mode of existing Starlink for which the DoD controls cell activations, probably has priority usage of some portion of bandwidth, plus custom terminals and the ability to have Starlink satellites with hosted payloads (which, by nature of being Starlink satellites, would be able to take advantage of the rest of the network for their own communications, enabling things like extremely hard to detect point-to-point beamed communications anywhere in the world).
  - philwelch 3y ago
    > Plus, I doubt those critical of the arms industry would be complaining about Google offering to take on defense contracts specifically intended to help Ukraine. The letter from the Google employees about Project Maven began, “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war”. If that’s what they meant, if those are the principles they were operating from, that would obviously apply even to the war in Ukraine. Obviously what’s happened is that the war in Ukraine has taken on a particular partisan coding in the broader culture war. I’m not surprised to see the inconsistency here but it is worth calling out.
baybal2 3y ago
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philwelch 3y ago

I’ve always found the outrage on HN over this somewhat inconsistent. Lots and lots of people here are critical of the arms industry and were largely supportive of Google employees pressuring the company into dropping US defense contracts, but when it’s Elon who doesn’t want his satellite internet service to be weaponized he’s suddenly the bad guy? Personally I think Elon (and the general HN consensus against the defense industry) is naively pacifistic, but the double standard is noteworthy. For what it’s worth, SpaceX is also launching a completely separate Starlink constellation, known as Starshield, for the US Space Force. So if the government wants to allow our allies to use a weaponized Starlink, they can share their own.

dotnet00 3y ago
I'd agree, but on the other hand, it isn't entirely HN users' fault that scummy journalists intentionally misreport and/or don't circulate their corrections as loudly as their initial accusations. Plus, I doubt those critical of the arms industry would be complaining about Google offering to take on defense contracts specifically intended to help Ukraine. If anything, they'd be complaining about Google not just paying for it out of pocket, as they did when SpaceX said that providing Starlink for free for an indefinite period of time would be financially unrealistic for them. My understanding is that Starshield isn't an entirely separate constellation, it's a special mode of existing Starlink for which the DoD controls cell activations, probably has priority usage of some portion of bandwidth, plus custom terminals and the ability to have Starlink satellites with hosted payloads (which, by nature of being Starlink satellites, would be able to take advantage of the rest of the network for their own communications, enabling things like extremely hard to detect point-to-point beamed communications anywhere in the world).
- philwelch 3y ago
  > Plus, I doubt those critical of the arms industry would be complaining about Google offering to take on defense contracts specifically intended to help Ukraine. The letter from the Google employees about Project Maven began, “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war”. If that’s what they meant, if those are the principles they were operating from, that would obviously apply even to the war in Ukraine. Obviously what’s happened is that the war in Ukraine has taken on a particular partisan coding in the broader culture war. I’m not surprised to see the inconsistency here but it is worth calling out.

baybal2 3y ago

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