As much as I hate Elon for all the shit he says and does, but it also shows the sanctioning for stuff like this is not waterproof. These units can be bought by company X in country X and sells it to company Y in country Y who is friendly with Russia. Also depending where they get launched from (for example from occupied Ukraine) it makes it also difficult to tell “friend” from “foe”. Can that be prevented ? Probably, but it’s not as straightforward as armchair generals may make it sound.
Now, could spaceX do something more about this ? Most likely. But that is resources you need to put on this, which is not profitable. So long story short. It’s more than Elon bad here.
Look at this article from March 2024: https://robertgarcia.house.gov/media/in-the-news/cnbc-house-democrats-probe-spacex-over-alleged-illegal-export-and-use-starlink
In a statement on Thursday, the congressmen wrote, “Russia’s use of Starlink satellite terminals would be in contravention of U.S. export controls that prohibit Russia from acquiring and utilizing U.S.-produced technology.”
So the equipment has to fall into the wrong hands, through a somehow compromised supply chain. Maybe that could happen without starlink knowing, but they really should have figured that out in march. They should have very easily identified the units that were potentially compromised by auditing shipping logs.
Not only did the supply chain have to be compromised, but also the subscription and payments system… How did they not catch it on the subscription payment side? Now in addition to a compromised supply chain, a financial institution was compromised? At the least, they didn’t do their due dilligance in customer verification.
How could russia have set up the equipment without some level of development and testing? Geolocation should have given that development away.
Now, could spaceX do something more about this ? Most likely. But that is resources you need to put on this, which is not profitable.
Yeah good point, that’s called “negligence”. Not doing due dilligance or taking the necessary steps to avoid breaking the law, because it isn’t profitable, isn’t a valid legal defense.
It really would have been as simple as geofencing against devices that weren’t preauthorized or whitelisted.
I’m curious on how you envision they identify these units? If they don’t activate until they are near the Ukrainian border, how do they know what is Russian controlled vs Ukrainian controlled?
As for the payment side, YouTube can’t even get a proper handle on users getting region pricing at a fraction of the cost, by simply using a VPN, and they have skin in the game for preventing cross region abuse. Starlink has no reason outside sanctions to give a fuck where their payments are coming from, and you’re talking about state actors that can literally provide a real bank and address owned by a shell individual that passes any check you can think of beyond highly invasive levels no one would accept.
Geolocation is extremely unreliable. Let’s look at one aspect, GPS: In North America you don’t normally deal with it beyond being in between buildings or under a tunnel, but the moment you’re flying in airspace near Russia, GPS can and has literally shown the location being thousands of miles away.
I get the musk hate, but you’re acting like a grandma down the road is illegally using it, and ignoring the fact that it’s a country known to have operatives worldwide, multiple hacking groups, and resources you likely can’t even imagine.
Are you saying that geolocation of a starlink unit is difficult from the starlink satellite network? That seems unlikely to me.
Starlink has no reason outside sanctions to give a fuck where their payments are coming from
Do you see a moral dimension to this? Keeping technology out of the hands of an aggressor state is an excellent reason. I think that many people feel that because corporate entities behave like criminal organizations (indifferent to anything other than maximizing their own profits) that this is somehow OK. It isn’t, and normalizing isn’t acceptable either.
Its quite simple really: if you want profits then you should get it honestly. Otherwise you don’t deserve the profits.
This explains nothing. Russia infiltrates governments and your answer is “yeah, well starlink should just be honest.”
Geolocation is very different when you use an omnidirectional antenna passively listening to multiple signals rather than a directional antenna connecting to a satellite for a bidirectional communication session. And all of this ignores the simple fact there are sanctions against some countries and a war going on in another. They are the seller of their antennas and could easily limit who is allowed to change the region of their antenna to work in the white-list zone. Starlink knows the exact equipment I bought from them, and they will know if I move it, and if I change ownership to another person (who actually uses it). Yes, none of this can happen without some administrative or programming work, but that’s the case for many companies if they don’t want to break the law.
They could probably prevent 99.999% of this with a list of starlink devices in ukraine, a list devices geolocated to the vicinity, and a single part time employee.
Sure, but then he wouldn’t have an excuse to hide behind while supporting Russia.
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But Moscow has ways of avoiding bans – as does Iran – and could have found a way to build Starlink-equipped kit that only becomes active once it crosses the border into Ukraine where SpaceX’s service is allowed.
They could have, but that doesn’t mean that Starlink couldn’t do a lot more to catch them at it. You’re making excuses for a fascist.
Didnt we already know that elon opened starlink to the russians? I thought he announced after that call with putin?
It is almost like Elon is a really bad person.
It’s almost like the Oligarchs of the world are all on the same team.
They’re clearly not all on the same team. Some are decent human beings that choose to use their money for the betterment of humankind.
It’s just that a couple, e.g. Musk, Thiel, David Sachs and others, decided to be huge assholes. They would end democracy any day to become richer and more powerful.
I legitimately don’t know any of those good hearted oligarchs, who would you say they are ?
Carnegie chose to do good things with his money, as did Gates and Boros. Now, it’s easy to criticize all three of them for an arbitrary number of bad things they are responsible for. Which is entirely beside the point:
There is obviously a scale of good and bad things oligarchs decide to do with their money. Musk, Thiel, Sachs and the likes are on the “huge asshole” end of that scale. And other oligarchs are not. Assuming Gates was as bad as Musk because somereason fails to see this and ultimately leads to letting the true assholes off the hook.
Gates was (and arguably still is) an enormous asshole and has only recently started spending money on “charity” and PR to improve his public image (similar to Carnegie). That you’re willing to let him off the hook for all of his past evils only shows that spending a tiny fraction of their ill-earned gains on PR will wipe their slate clean and people like you will let them off the hook.
If you let Gates, Carnegie, etc off the hook for their rotten past, expect future generations to let Musk et al. off the hook once they buy back their reputation when they get old.
Top ten Gates “evils”? Just curious 🍿
I’m not going to give you a list, because I have other things to do, but you can read for yourself under Controversies here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates.
I was mostly thinking of the decades of anti-trust and “embrace, extend, extinguish”, as well as his sexual harassment of his employees. But I had forgotten that he was besties with Epstein and his wife divorced him after the extent of his endeavors there came out. So I guess child-raping may be on his list too.
Pretty swell guy.
It’s one thing to be a capitalistic shitbag, it’s another to be a traitor. Governments like capitalistic shitbags
Some, like Donny, are both. Or the right wing AfD cunts in Germany. Or any other country
Seem like governments also love traitors, look at amount of deals and collaborations between starlink and the US government
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_applications
Is it possible to be a traitor when you’re a capitalist shitbag?
They only have loyalty to themselves and their bank account. Quite literally the world could burn (due to their business) for all they care.
Most people don’t feel loyalty to the country they betray. It isn’t a requirement to be a traitor.
People keep making the mistake of thinking the super rich have loyalty to a country.
Corrupt governments like capitalistic shitbags.
they could also have stolen it though. gotta wait what an investigation of the serial numbers finds
They are most likely stolen or imported through a third party.
Shouldn’t they be capable of detecting where the connection is going and disconnect/block it for specific regions or something? I have no clue how any of that stuff works but this one thing feels like it should be the case.
They do, but Ukraine uses Starlink, so they can’t really disable usage entirely in the contested areas. They could disable the individual terminals, but that would require knowing which ones the Russians were using in the first place.
Well, given that they have access to Internet via starlink, all they would have to do is set up a website and list the IDs, then block everything that’s not there.
They got me shipment? Add them to the list? No longer own the device? Remove it.
The problem is that not all of those terminals are being purchased by Ukraine, or supplied through official channels. There are tons of equipment being donated from third parties not directly affiliated, including Starlink terminals.
That’s great if the Ukraine military were the only users in the region, but they aren’t. Regular Starlink service is available in the country, outside military use. Even though the Ukraine military is using it, Starlink is not designed to be a military network. It is a civilian network that just happens to be available and extremely useful in this case, even with the Russian attempts to interfere with signals in the region.
So they would have to have a white-list for Ukraine and a process for getting on the white-list. That doesn’t seem that complicated. Somewhat intensive, sure, but a very simple solution. And I would think militarily advantageous equipment would be more controlled in a war zone than normal.
The Starlink probably only works once the drone enters Ukraine. Disabling Starlink in that area would cut off the Ukrainian military too. The internet traffic could easily be routed through a VPN in another country, so blocking Russian IP addresses on Starlink wouldn’t work either.
If Starlink is the internet provider, aren’t they providing the IP address? If they are how would a VPN trick Starlink since the equipment has to connect to Starlink first?
Whitelist/allowlist for this region comes to my mind. But probably some other specific problems would arise from this too. Hmm…
DOJ and Pentagon are you listening?
Isn’t that a massive security risk?
Like, what if the U.S was using Roscosmos satellite links in drones? I’d certainly be raising an eyebrow.
Yeah, sure, if it was an adversary like the U.S. government and not a Russian ally like Elon Musk…
Yeah, but it’s not a government satellite system, it’s an independent Internet provider. It is always possible that the US government/military has access on the back end, but that’s not guaranteed. And since Ukraine is using Starlink, they can’t exactly just disable all access in the region.
Kind of makes sense for Russia to try and use Starlink at least a bit to test the waters and see what sort of Intel the US has access to directly through it.
It is guaranteed, actually. US law imposes requirements on telecoms providers to support wire taps
A wiretap is different than having something like backdoor access at will for military use.
Don me a tinfoil hat, but I think it is absolutely within the realm of possible that half my networked electronics has a backdoor to one or another governmentsl agency. Or that my ”encrypted” WhatsApp conversations are available to US officials if need be.
Luckily I am as interesting as a slice of bread gone stale
Oh I’m sure that’s the case for nearly all large social media and network systems based on the US. I’m also willing to bet that for some of these companies, almost no one even knows it’s there, either because a 3 letter agency put it there themselves without being noticed, or an employee implemented it for them without corporate approval.
The US is worried about other countries doing this because we 100% are doing it ourselves. From a national security perspective, it’s basically common sense. Ensure you have access to everything, even if you don’t use it now, you might in the future and it will save time.
If the item is indeed Starlink hardware, it should be possible to prove its origins – perhaps even where it was bought, and by whom.
sheeeeeeeeeeeit. Starlink isn’t going to say shit, maybe someone else controls the database of serial numbers?
Has Tesla even identified that TX CyberFuck that killed it’s unidentified (?) driver in early August? I can’t find any followup on that, except that the wreck was going to be auctioned at the end of August. It’s the one truck that has gone dark in all of TX that month… easy to figure it out on Tesla’s end.
Remember they fired their corporate communications and even municipalities mid-project can’t get anyone on the phone. It’s burning down.
That said, I would not be shocked at all to find Elmo with his fascist oligarch mitts on this. That fucker needs a serious regulatory beatdown. (Not an actual, like, punching him in the head beatdown.)
so they are basically saying “nanana, I can’t here you! you can’t oblige me to do anything!”, and getting away with it?
Yes
(Not an actual, like, punching him in the head beatdown.)
Look, let’s not be picky here
