If you provision a range of IP addresses to use specifically for the Ukrainian government, you can just cut access to all of them at once. Claiming an “outage” of 15-30 minutes would be pretty easy to do.
I have no doubt that starlink can geolocate a client device by triangulation or trilateration.
The article states they essentially geo-fenced the area. So when client devices entered that area, their traffic was dropped.
It’s more complex than that, especially when all you’re looking for is denial of service. As an example: I don’t have to decrypt anything if I can use traffic analysis to determine which packets are sent to or coming from a drone and just drop them. Standard Internet security, TLS, encrypts the content of a packet but not the source or the destination. You could use a VPN wrapper but then it’s as simple as dropping traffic to and from the VPN.
Not really. You just have to know that the comms are going to or coming from a drone, which should be easy enough given that the AP needs to know how to route the comms so that information must be visible to it (and it can therefore decide to drop comms at that step in transport). Even with the content, origination and destination being perfectly secret you can do this like track which APs a given client connects to over a certain amount of time and infer airspeed and rough direction. Something flying at $droneTopSpeed +/- 10%, headed roughly toward some juicy target? Drop comms.
Remember that starlink is already in their communication chain and start thinking in terms of what you’d do if you wanted to intercept letters between two people and you’re already the mailman for one of them.
Did you read the article? It wasn’t about the traffic being encrypted. It’s about starlink turning off service in a certain area so the drones didn’t have Internet access to communicate:
Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the eccentric billionaire titled “Elon Musk.”
As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes.
Hopefully some skepticism can finally be focused on the concept of giving a single billionaire unfettered control over who is allowed to access the internet, and what they are allowed to do with it.
The whole endeavor to “arm” Ukraine with Starlink has always been a shameless attempt to dodge any future criticism of the company, by claiming to be a “military asset”
ETA: he said he did it to avoid a nuclear attack. Everybody with two brain cells to rub together knows this is an empty threat from Putin, so either Elon is an idiot or he’s lying.
Glad a billionaire gets to dictate US foreign policy on his whim. How is this not treason? How is he not being dragged in front of Congress as we speak?
Yeah I never heard about it. I heard about him wanting to up the price for Ukraine using Starlink around that time (which was controversial enough) but shutting down drones, that’s a whole other level.
There was already a lot of talk about the military no longer using SpaceX in the future just because of the price hike thing. But sabotaging an ally’s military hardware? Holy shit. At the very least Elon Musk cost SpaceX many billions of dollars in revenue in the future because of this.
He was born in South Africa, but he holds citizenship in the US & Canada as well. He went to Canada because he couldn’t get access to the US, but his mother was a Canadian national so he was able to convince her to get them Canadian passports to attend school in Canada and then transfer to the US. So after a couple years at Queens Uni he transferred to Upenn. Then after completing his Bachelors, in order to stay in the US he pretended he was going to get his PhD, but then started a company sort of like online yellow pages called Zip2. His investors realized that as a student couldn’t work, they needed to get him a green card. So they got him a an “investor green card” (Eb-5) and 5 years later he became a naturalized US citizen.
Musk was reportedly motivated to foil the attack out of concern that a strike on Crimea would constitute a “mini-Pearl Harbor” and lead to Russia retaliating with nuclear weapons
So glad the blue-checks get to dictate our foreign policy now.
What was all that DoD money for? A suggestion box?
If you own a new Tesla purchased since he took over Twitter, I suspect you may start having some increased tire and paint bills. I could see it becoming a trend; feels like the kind of thing kids could get into.
Fuck that. We don’t need some Tesla version of that Kia challenge shit. I happen to drive a Tesla that I bought when Elon was still cool. I would never buy another thing from him (for a variety of reasons, many of them related to the car), but I’m still stuck with what I have because it’s a bad financial decision for me to change the car now. He already has my money and it pisses me off every day. The last thing I need is some anarchist, vigilante twat slashing my tires to “teach me a lesson”. Go fuck up Elon’s shit instead of taking it out on people who just might feel the same way about him as you do.
In this case then, that makes sense. I was just wondering if you had something against the site generally. Is it trash generally? Not defending it, just curious.
It’s not even the source in this case, the story originates from CNN and they even have a link to it! The daily beast is an absolutely needless layer here.
And the author from the article at CNN quotes the book is from the CEO whos the author…
Musk isn’t the one who pulled the plug on this. The lawyers did because they have to follow international law…
I thought you Lemmy users were smarter than the reddit idiots, but I guess I was wrong…stupid fucks here asking to nationalize starlink and calling musk a traitor lol
Musk is shit and so is russia but acting like this is anything else than international law being followed is stupid. This article is just rage bait and shilling the CEO of CNNs book.
It’s funny that you’re saying this, because I thought that all arrogant and aggressive people, who can’t communicate with others, stayed on reddit. Yet here you are!
Yes because ignorance is an excuse for being kind. You and the rest blindly hate without giving a fuck and hate anyone who cares about the truth. So I callem’ like I see em’.
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