101–110 of 122 posts
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I didn't know about Starshield. I thought Starlink was supposed to be neutral.
Starshield is like a private totally separate Starlink for the US government (and controlled/operated by the US government). I am not sure what sort of neutrality you were expecting as US government is SpaceX's biggest customer and is obviously a critical infra company.
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Starshield is like a private totally separate Starlink for the US government (and controlled/operated by the US government). I am not sure what sort of neutrality you were expecting as US government is SpaceX's biggest customer and is obviously a critical infra company.
I expect it not to be involved with the military, which was something they stated
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Starshield is like a private totally separate Starlink for the US government (and controlled/operated by the US government). I am not sure what sort of neutrality you were expecting as US government is SpaceX's biggest customer and is obviously a critical infra company.
I expect it not to be involved with the military, which was something they stated
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I am entirely convinced that absent LEO comsat constellations, people who espouse this sentiment would likely be whining about "useless astronomy taking money away from helping poor people". If you genuinely care about the field of astronomy, rest assured that the same falling launch costs that have enabled LEO comsat constellations, will enable the launch of fleets of space-based telescopes.
> fleets of space-based telescopes. Isn't one of the nice aspects of astronomy is that you can do quite a bit as an amateur with some decent equipment and a nice vantage point? What value does this fleet have to these people? > people who espouse this sentiment would likely be whining about "useless astronomy taking money away from helping poor people". You've constructed a strawman for the purposes of gatekeeping; m…
> Say a couple perpetually quarrels about who's going to do the dishes. To prevent further squabbles they decide to split the chores on weekly, alternating basis. > > Everything works well, until one of the spouses falls ill. The dishes pile up in the kitchen sink, but the other spouse does not feel responsible for the mess. It’s not their turn. And yes, there's nobody to blame. And this is where accountability sinks…
You are in the wrong comment section, but thanks for the thoughtful comment!
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> easily tappable I suppose in any realistic scenario we should assume that the enemy may be listening to all our communication at all times. This is the assumption behind such daily things as WPA3, SSH, TLS. Jamming is a much more serious concern.
Yes, so all in all for satellite vs. fiber in backbone applications, I'd say that it's a wash (or slight win for fiber) when it comes to security, and a definitive win for fiber when it comes to jamming resistance. In the field it's a completely different story, of course – you can't always pull fiber (although it does appear in unexpected scenarios, such as fiber-operated UAVs or torpedoes).
However, it's very easy to cut a fiber in a way that is hard to repair. Fishing trawlers do this all the time. In that sense, fiber can be "jammed" (sabotaged) much more easily than radio/satellite.
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> This enables secure private communication outside of the internet across data centers How so? I'd imagine the datacenter terminal side downlink to be much more easily tappable than fiberoptics. There are advantages in latency and potentially availability, but even there I would imagine fiber to win in an adversarial active jamming scenario.
FHSS[1] has made jamming difficult in US military communications for decades. It doesn’t make it impossible but jamming the entire spectrum is nearly impossible at scale for almost everyone. At best it would affect small areas until the US sent rf seeking missiles (HARM are designed for this) at the jammer source. Also note that modern satcom like Starlink uses AESA digital phased array antennas much like a F35’s rad…
Signal strength (satellites are power constrained) and distances involved are tough.
GPS uses frequency spreading too, and locally jamming that (even the military version with a secret/unpredictable spreading code) is trivial, for example.
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> Isn't one of the nice aspects of astronomy is that you can do quite a bit as an amateur with some decent equipment and a nice vantage point? What value does this fleet have to these people? It doesn't, and admittedly I don't really care that much. I care far far more that remote communities can now have meaningful access to the internet, one of the most transformative and enabling technologies in existence, than ni…
> I care far far more that remote communities can now have meaningful access to the internet Then can you tell me how many remote communities were not being served before that are now suddenly capable of accessing the internet now that these particular constellations exist? I mean just looking at Starlink's current availability map shows how little you might actually care about this particular outcome. Even so was th…
???
Almost all of the Americas, including the deepest Brazilian jungle.
Indonesia, Australia, Mongolia.
Decent chunks of subsahara Africa.
Ships far away on the ocean, transcontinental airplanes … how is this all not amazing?
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It's comments like these that sadden me. It's this mindset that make me pessimistic about the long-term viability of humanity as I think it is shared among many people. When we (individuals/groups/society) don't plan far ahead (even for the loosest sense/meaning of the word "plan"), that will tend to lead to short-term benefits with long-term detriments. That even applies even for things that can occur past our lifes…
There's no incentive to do this, it's politically untenable to plan that far ahead. The beauty of humanity is we're always changing and evolving because we only do things within the scope of our lifetime. The curse of humanity is having a brain that lets us think too hard about what we want to be rather than acknowledging what we are which is a bunch of mortal animals with finite time spans that like to fuck, make ba…
In parallel but as a separate point, fewer people will be willing to use products or services provided by organizations that they believe are doing wrong or harm by contributing to such problems, thus making it less profitable within capitalism. We already see this to some degree today (Harry Potter comes to mind). Even if the reduction in customers and profit is small, it would decrease compounding and ever so slightly disincentivize the company from making such a pursuit.
It's impressive how adaptive humans are, I must admit. We are quite good at tackling problems we see right in front of us if we set our minds to it. But that doesn't mean we should dismiss problems that are not causing an issue right here and now. We shouldn't wait until it becomes an actual problem because there could be irreversible consequences (or rather, we cannot reverse on reasonable timescale).
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FHSS[1] has made jamming difficult in US military communications for decades. It doesn’t make it impossible but jamming the entire spectrum is nearly impossible at scale for almost everyone. At best it would affect small areas until the US sent rf seeking missiles (HARM are designed for this) at the jammer source. Also note that modern satcom like Starlink uses AESA digital phased array antennas much like a F35’s rad…
It’s easily possible to jam a frequency spread signal from a satellite, assuming you can get the directionality right (i.e. you need to be in the beam of whoever you’re trying to jam, or you’ll need even more power to overcome their receive directionality, which is never perfect). Signal strength (satellites are power constrained) and distances involved are tough. GPS uses frequency spreading too, and locally jamming…
Russia has some of the best EW chops in the world (after the NSA perhaps), and they struggled to successfully jam Starlink after some defensive work was carried out by SpaceX. They use Starlink in the “sea baby” USVs that attacked Crimea just last night.
https://tech.yahoo.com/general/articles/spacex-spends-signif...