so in the best probable condiditions there is an ability to shut down network services in real time.
I think you’re right about this. Shutting down in real time if they think the dish is compromised should be possible, but whitelisting them requires more overhead to verify authenticity, especially for civilians.
If I hadn’t seen one of the news articles a week or two ago where one of the Ukrainian military higher ups were talking about it, I wouldn’t have either. I had always wondered why they hadn’t just done it as well.
Whitelist every official Ukrainian station for use in the region, deny everyone else.
That is what they are doing now, but simply whitelisting every terminal in Ukraine isn’t a simple task. There are military purchased ones, then there are civilian purchased ones, then there are donated ones, and even ones purchased by soldiers for their own use that the military isn’t aware of.
The Ukrainian soldiers when pressed from above, didn’t want to register their unofficial dishes for fear of losing them for other military purposes, so between that, and all the other potential problems, the military decided not to do it. It would also need to be country wide including civilians, so you’d need some country wide process that every new dish needs to go through, and every dish is kept tabs on should it be captured.
This late January though, they caught Russia putting the dishes on drones, and these long range drones were able to be remotely operated, and were resistant to jamming making them very hard to intercept, and they were being used to hit civilian targets (they hit a train and something else I think) so it really came down to okay we can’t ignore this anymore.
Ukraine asked SpaceX to do something, and within a few days (maybe less) SpaceX had put a blanket speed limit on ALL dishes in Ukraine. This stopped Ukraine from using drones as well. The follow up was a whitelist which were now seeing the results of.
The reason this wasn’t done before is because Ukraine didn’t want to do it. The reason it’s happening now is Ukraine said shit, we have to do it.
Edit: And while overall this is good and required and should have been done ages ago, it’s also not without consequences. Not all Ukrainian positions were able to activate their dishes in time and were also cut off, but Russia is impacted more.
I bet. Making it life or death would only make it worse as well.
The people who knew they were going on that flight.
But with the epidemic of people falling out of windows that’s an easy problem to solve.
Higher ups in the Urkainian military said that there was a lot of soldier bought, and donated starlink dishes, and trying to do a country wide whitelist was complicated, and soldiers said they didn’t want to report their dishes because they were worried they’d be confiscated for other uses. I’m sure civilians were worried about it as well.
Push came to shove though and they need to do it now.
edit: Like imagine being in some hell hole trench with a starlink you bought/donated and it’s your only lifeline outside, and you’re worried the higher ups are going to say, we need that dish for a seababy.
It would have been even better if a Oreshnik missile was in the hanger. Who needs anti-air when you can just take it out on the ground!
I wonder how many civilian plane crashes it’ll take to help wake up the Russian population.
The author has retracted that statement. It was always off, Musk simply didn’t turn it on.
He was talking to me that night as it was happening. He said ‘We’re not enabling it on the Crimean coast.’ I thought ‘Okay that means he shut it off that night.’ He later said to me, and I’m sure he’s right, that it had been a policy already in place, that he had already decided not to allow — to geofence, it’s called — the Crimean coast. And that night, all he did was reaffirm the policy.
Starlink is not a military weapon, it is a consumer / business tool. By using Starlink as a weapon it puts Starlink/SpaceX under different regulations which they can’t be under. Crimea was technically Russian controlled as well, and they weren’t allowed to offer service in Russian occupied areas.
SpaceX wanted the government to be handling all of this so it would be fine and dandy, but the government wasn’t. AFTER this happened, it helped give a shove to the government / military to step in and take control of Starlink in Ukraine. Now the US government/military is the one who dictates what should be happening in Ukraine with Starlink, as it should be.
They could have done a whitelist from day 1, but Ukraine didn’t want to do a whitelist initially. It means having to register every single terminal including non-military in the country.
There was an article as well when this drone / dish thing came up that one official said there are a lot of non-military dishes being used by military personnel who either purchased their own, or had it donated, and they are afraid that by registering it, the military would take it from them for other purposes, but they have to do it now as there’s no other practical solution and the Starlink controlled drones needed to be stopped as they were too hard to intercept/jam.
In terms of stopping the drone usage with a speed limit, that also stopped Ukraine from using drones. It wasn’t a Russia only fix it was a emergency region wide fix to stop all drones over a certain speed. Only with the whitelist can Ukraine continue to use them at high speeds.
It’s not a simple as you seem to want it to be.
Russia has been using Starlink yes, but recently not Starlink attached to drones that are being remote controlled and are harder to intercept / jam with electronic warfare. This is a very new development, and Ukraine alerted SpaceX and SpaceX started addressing it within days.
The only real solution to this is a whitelist, and whitelisting every dish in Ukraine wasn’t seen as a good option earlier, but now it’s not a matter of a good option, it’s what they have to do, or Ukraine won’t be able to use starlink on their drones either.
More than that, it’s a recent development, and as soon as Ukraine raised the issue and asked for help they responded with an emergency fix in a few days.
Article discusses how it’s really hard to build a white-list of Ukrainian military starlink inventory because many of them have been purchased by soldiers or donated by volunteers and they’re worried about their superiors confiscating / redeploying them elsewhere.
I’d always wondered about making white-lists but hadn’t considered this problem before
Dang, had been hoping Russia didn’t know where those were.
So, I realize it must be hard to tell what signal is what on the ground and if its Ukrainians in Russia or Russia using it in Ukraine.
Shouldn’t it be easy for drones though? It should know the starting origin, see that its headed deep into Ukraine and offer enough time to do something about it?
Maybe not front line stuff as maybe a Ukranian drone is just flying home after a mission, but from inside Russia controlled area deep into Ukraine seems like a wholly different matter.
It’s very possible these could do that already with little to no effort, but taking that step is pretty big.
Keeping a human in the loop has benefits.
You’ve never been looking for an answer to something and it’s on an old reddit post?
How to beat a boss in a game?
Ways to do some sort of home improvement?
Discussion on a product you’re considering that isn’t brand new?
Did… did he just declare the USA Annexed Venezuela?
I wish we could hear the gunshots. That ain’t an easy task and I’m so curious how many shots it took.