Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Iran is likely jamming Starlink

timesofisrael.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 306 posts

Re: Iran is likely jamming Starlink

#201

Post by queenkjuul »

bawolff wrote: post #22
XorNot wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I'm a programmer and even i wouldn't know where to start implementing a custom network wire protocol.

Re: Iran is likely jamming Starlink

#202

Post by [deleted] »

lostlogin wrote: post #189
Forgeties79 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Musk is a fickle, unethical individual with poor impulse control and too much money who only talks about high minded concepts like “free speech” and “battling censorship” when it serves his interests at that moment.

You are correct. It’s interesting to watch how ‘free speech’ works on Twitter.

[deleted]

Re: Iran is likely jamming Starlink

#203

Post by paganel »

Rover222 wrote: post #160
paganel wrote: post #100

Good for them, as they’re under external attack. For example a US ghoul like Mike Pompeo had this to say recently [1]: > Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them so under those circumstances anything goes to defeat the likes of Mossad and associated foreign entities doing their thing on Iranian soil. [1] https://xcancel.com/mikepompeo/status/2007180411638620659

Iranians are living under Islamic colonial dictatorship. Blaming this unrest on Israeli and US influence is absurd. And only exposes you as a sympathizer to the oppressive regime.

You're saying that the Brits should throw their colonizer and Christian king out of the island and return to their old Celtic traditions and deities, no? Or what exactly? Because the timeframes are very comparable, Saint Colombanus died in the early 600s, while the Arabs got all the way to Merv by the 670s-680s.

Re: Iran is likely jamming Starlink

#205

Post by stevenwoo »

tim333 wrote: post #152
malchow wrote: post #73

Satellite signals are just weak RF signals and can be disrupted easily. There is nothing 'hardened' about them. It's funny that people think Starlink or any of its many incipient competitors are any different.

Russia seems to have been ineffective at stopping the Ukranians using it.

There are multiple photos of Russian drones using Starlink terminals, so they would be blocking their own use of it.

Re: Iran is likely jamming Starlink

#206

Post by feb012025 »

Rover222 wrote: post #161

Why are none of the people I saw posting non-stop about Palestine saying anything about Iranian freedom? Would honestly love to hear a genuine response from anyone who is against the movement in Iran. Or even conflicted about it.

I would say it's really about opposition to death and suffering.

The activists want the excessive death and suffering to end in Palestine, and they want to avoid death and suffering in Iran.

Many politicians want to use the protests as a pretext for military intervention in Iran, and my blunt opinion is that they don't actually have the interests of Iranians in mind. There are many reasons to believe it will end up worse for both America and the Iranians than our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A valid response would be to say that you think abuses in Iran are bad enough that a military intervention is justified and that it will lead to a better outcome for Iranians. My intuition would be to disagree with that, based on the results of past interventions, etc...

Re: Iran is likely jamming Starlink

#207

Post by olao99 »

Hypothecally speaking. If I were to live in an authoritarian country that would shut off all means of communication like that. What off grid technology would be viable?

Lora? Shortwave radio? Or nothing at all?

Re: Iran is likely jamming Starlink

#209

Post by serf »

olao99 wrote: post #207

Hypothecally speaking. If I were to live in an authoritarian country that would shut off all means of communication like that. What off grid technology would be viable? Lora? Shortwave radio? Or nothing at all?

in a country that hostile to you I would be worried about radiating any kind of EM, honestly. It's too easy to track and could cause undue targetting & victimization.

my real answer : I think at that point in time effort is best spent trying to arrange escape.

my technical answer : depends on the scene. directed optical/laser or microwave is very hard to track if that can facilitate the links you need -- but realistically most war-time off-grid comms historically has been established via runners, dropboxes, or community radio systems ; all options with very real inherent risks.

Re: Iran is likely jamming Starlink

#210

Post by overfeed »

ece wrote: post #200
overfeed wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> basically a dish pointed at the satellite, so the jammer should be in between to work. Which isn't hard to do if you have the budget of a government. Directional antennae, GPS and a helicopter/Cessna flying patterns over a metro. Beams from the terminal are constantly scanning the sky chasing the constellations. A higher hit rate option would be a fleet of low altitude drones taking high-res pictures of the ground,…

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.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van

Post reply on HN