Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

Maybe before your 玻璃心 breaks you should learn a little bit about your own country’s history before you go around tossing insults.

As for use of national security as an excuse, I’ve been protesting the NSA for 3 decades. I released one of the first anonymizing web proxies and designed anonymous mailers to fight FBI carnivore and NIST Clipper/Skipjack. I spoke out against the Patriot Act in 2001 when the US government used the 9/11 attacks to impose it. I spoke out against the Communications Decent Act when it was proposed and released software to combat it.

And that’s the difference. When my government uses “national security” as an excuse to crack down on freedoms or minorities, I speak out against it.

When you government uses terrorist attacks or crime to shutdown newspapers or jail Uighurs, you support it.

And that’s why it’s fascism because if you buy into the fear over some insignificant terrorist attacks which are not an existential threat to China in order to justify a total surveillance state and an authoritarian President for life who won’t even take turns and relinquish power to other Standing Committee members, then you’re defending an authoritarian dictatorship and fascist.

The governments of the world love using either terrorism, external threats, crime, or protection of children from sex as blanket justification for every encroachment of freedom.

The vast majority of it is crap. Always was. There's also a ton of things you'll like, but finding the things that you like but not popular with everybody else is a matter of sifting through (a) the things that everybody likes and (b) the things some people like but not you. Those two things make up 99.999% of the world.

1. Can you get wi-fi reception on the ground from a balloon? How big a transmitter, how big a power source, how long can you keep it going for, and how much weight do you need to spend on batteries for this?

2. Will your wi-fi reception cut out if a tall building happens to pass between you and the balloon? How do you mitigate this? Do you need duplicate coverage from multiple balloons? (Starlink is dealing with this now.)

3. How do you keep the balloons in one place, or at least control where they go? If one goes out of range, how do you make sure there's another covering all its receivers?

4. How much propellant/battery can you carry on the balloon for course adjustments? How long can it stay aloft before this is exhausted?

5. Where do the winds go in the stratosphere? If the balloons are not propelled, where will they end up? Can you use altitude changes to get into different jet-streams and reduce propellant use?

6. How do you respect country's airspace? How do you avoid causing international incidents? If a balloon does come down, how do you ensure it doesn't harm anyone and can be retrieved? Early in the project, Loon had an ops team of former navy SEALs whose job was to retrieve any crashed balloons without starting any wars.

And I wasn't even on the team - this is just what I got from a few lunchtime conversations. They had to invent new algorithms, first to model the wind systems in the stratosphere and then to optimize balloon placement given that wind. I know their CTO - he's got a Ph.D in stochastic optimal control (pretty appropriate for this problem). The math behind control theory, once you get past simple PID controllers, is hard.