3 ms·

The article seems quite speculative. I'm sure the Iranian regime would live to jam starlink, but i don't think we have any ability to know what is actually hap

by bawolff 10mo ago

The article seems quite speculative. I'm sure the Iranian regime would live to jam starlink, but i don't think we have any ability to know what is actually happening here. The article claims 80% packetloss. That's still 1 in 5 packets getting through. That is annoying but not going to stop information getting out. I also wonder, if all other coms are cut off, is it possible star link in the country is just overloaded?

XorNot 10mo ago
In my experience 80% packet loss makes most common protocols basically unusable. Yes you can still get data out...but many apps will just fail due to timeouts and other things.
- bawolff 10mo ago
  I imagine the people with illegal starlink terminals are fairly tech savy and can use custom protocols. Living in Iran they probably already have a lot of experience with vpns and lower level protocols to evade censorship.
  - aaomidi 10mo ago
    I wouldn’t imagine that no. It’s “illegal” but not hard to obtain
  - onesociety2022 10mo ago
    Illegal just means there’s a black market. You pay some guy in cash and he gives you a smuggled Starlink terminal. Neither buyer or seller is likely to be anymore sophisticated here than someone trading in any other smuggled goods (cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, etc).
  - queenkjuul 10mo ago
    I'm a programmer and even i wouldn't know where to start implementing a custom network wire protocol.
- p-e-w 10mo ago
  Matrix published a proof of concept a few years ago of an alternative transport layer designed to work over connections with a few hundred bits per second, and massive packet loss, while still providing E2EE: https://matrix.org/blog/2019/03/12/breaking-the-100bps-barrier-with-matrix-meshsim-coap-proxy/ https://matrix.org/blog/2019/03/12/breaking-the-100bps-barri...
  - bawolff 10mo ago
    Without knowing that much about this area, i think https://mosh.org/ https://mosh.org/ is a traditional choice if you need encrypted communication in a high packet loss environment.
    - rurban 10mo ago
      UDP is certainly not known to improve traffic reliability in those environments. TCP is
      - bawolff 10mo ago
        UDP is build your own reliability layer, so its going to depend on how you use it. [Of course you could say the same thing about TCP i suppose depending on which congestion control algorithm is in use]

by bawolff 10mo ago

XorNot 10mo ago

In my experience 80% packet loss makes most common protocols basically unusable. Yes you can still get data out...but many apps will just fail due to timeouts and other things.

bawolff 10mo ago
I imagine the people with illegal starlink terminals are fairly tech savy and can use custom protocols. Living in Iran they probably already have a lot of experience with vpns and lower level protocols to evade censorship.
- aaomidi 10mo ago
  I wouldn’t imagine that no. It’s “illegal” but not hard to obtain
- onesociety2022 10mo ago
  Illegal just means there’s a black market. You pay some guy in cash and he gives you a smuggled Starlink terminal. Neither buyer or seller is likely to be anymore sophisticated here than someone trading in any other smuggled goods (cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, etc).
- queenkjuul 10mo ago
  I'm a programmer and even i wouldn't know where to start implementing a custom network wire protocol.
p-e-w 10mo ago
Matrix published a proof of concept a few years ago of an alternative transport layer designed to work over connections with a few hundred bits per second, and massive packet loss, while still providing E2EE: https://matrix.org/blog/2019/03/12/breaking-the-100bps-barrier-with-matrix-meshsim-coap-proxy/ https://matrix.org/blog/2019/03/12/breaking-the-100bps-barri...
- bawolff 10mo ago
  Without knowing that much about this area, i think https://mosh.org/ https://mosh.org/ is a traditional choice if you need encrypted communication in a high packet loss environment.
  - rurban 10mo ago
    UDP is certainly not known to improve traffic reliability in those environments. TCP is
    - bawolff 10mo ago
      UDP is build your own reliability layer, so its going to depend on how you use it. [Of course you could say the same thing about TCP i suppose depending on which congestion control algorithm is in use]