231–240 of 295 posts
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The question isn't whether or not there are laws against it, it's how you enforce the laws. For example, the USSR had to jam radio stations to stop external content getting into it's borders. Would a country like Belarus try to do the same type of thing when it comes to satellite internet?
I donct know if they jammed anything, they built radios and TV sets with Eastern band. But that was easily circumvented.
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FYI - we have been able to get regular SMS and voice calls through (using Google Fi as our carrier). It was great to go from "absolute zero communication" to "we know you're currently OK"
Folks I've been in contact with cannot be reached by WhatsApp and email, but SMS seems to work. "We go from home to work and then straight home. Afraid to go out after dark so as not to get picked up by accident. Otherwise, everything is OK." is the message I got.
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Article 18.1 or the ITU Radio Regulations (a binding treaty) states that > No transmitting station may be established or operated by a private person or by any enterprise without a licence issued in an appropriate form and in conformity with the provisions of these Regulations by or on behalf of the government of the country to which the station in question is subject (however, see Nos. 18.2, 18.8 and 18.11). SpaceX…
While the first iteration of Starlink requires a ground station somewhat close (hundreds of kilometers) to the user, once they deploy intersatellite links, the only ground station required will be close to the destination IP, far away from the censoring country. While radio licenses will probably prevent them from operating in geographically large countries like Russia, information can seep in through regions several…
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I always thought the Pentagon has had a robust global satellite communications network for decades already. (I don't know whether it is Internet-protocol based. My guess is yes.)
Just look what happened when Iridium failed and became propped up by government users who wanted its capabilities.
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I don't see Starlink shutting down subscribers if the Belarussian government asks them to, at least not very quickly. If the terminals are available, this is going to make all of the national internet projects (Russia, China, Iran) much more difficult to pull off.
Starlink requires a proprietary receiver, right? I suspect these authoritarian regimes won't be allowing starlink installations on the ground unless they get to have a kill switch.
Can these internet shutoff valves intercept dialup? Could be useful for at least text based communication.
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If this becomes a thing, they will put a laser on a satellite and call it a day. All of the big 3 (military, not economically, you know who I am talking about) can do this easily. edit: In response to below - they are putting SHORAD lasers on Strykers soon. Things have become a lot more compact.
High powered lasers on an aircraft carrier work because it has a nuclear power plant onboard. How will you launch a nuclear power plant into space? Note that the response to star wars contributed to the Soviet Union's bankruptcy :).
But the whole point of a laser is that you don't need to put it in space, it could be a large facility on the ground.
Main considerations are political impact, not technical feasability.
As for Soviet bancrupcy, impact of Chernobyl was definately much larger than space program shenanigans.
I have some close acquaintances in BY, so this has been hard. We saw that (at least as of 8 PM UTC) outbound connections to HTTP servers wasn't really a problem. A fresh ec2 box with a basic web server wasn't effected. So, early yesterday I set up an OpenVPN server on ec2 (eu-west-1) to try to get some slow but functional internet access. What we saw was that about 15-30 seconds after the TLS handshake the connection…
If udp connections are working, it may be feasible to proxy something over that.
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An ISP must be registered with the government and must follow laws in place for filtering content and working with the government. Whether the ISP is using any local infrastructure or "going to space" doesn't matter.
> An ISP must be registered with the government and must follow laws in place for filtering content and working with the government. Whether the ISP is using any local infrastructure or "going to space" doesn't matter. An ISP should not be registering with the government, and it must follow any laws. Oppose censorship. Anonymous, censorship free communications is a lethal threat to rogue regimes. It allows opposition…
Saudi arabia is still a dictatorship, despite being our 'allies' and having internet. They even dismember dissidents from time to time.