Elon is probably proud of it.
It is almost like Elon is a really bad person.
It’s one thing to be a capitalistic shitbag, it’s another to be a traitor. Governments like capitalistic shitbags
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.
People keep making the mistake of thinking the super rich have loyalty to a country.
Most people don’t feel loyalty to the country they betray. It isn’t a requirement to be a traitor.
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 🍿
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.
This article was amended on 14 September 2023 to add an update to the subheading. As the Guardian reported on 12 September 2023, following the publication of this article, Walter Isaacson retracted the claim in his biography of Elon Musk that the SpaceX CEO had secretly told engineers to switch off Starlink coverage of the Crimean coast.
IIRC Musk didn’t switch it off, it wasn’t turned on in the first place and Musk refused to turn it on when the Ukrainian military reqeusted it.
Musk is a shithead but not for this reason.
With my extensive knowledge about starlink satellites I uh… Ooh look at the pretty bird! 😍
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, 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.
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.
Are you saying that geolocation of a starlink unit is difficult from the starlink satellite network?
In 99% of cases? No. In the case of a state actor intentionally wanting to obsfucate the location? Absolutely.
Do you see a moral dimension to this?
You’re either missing the point or ignoring it. If you bothered to read around that sentence, you’d realize that in context it has nothing to do with morals, and everything to do with other companies with a financial incentive failing to do it. If a company loses out on 75+% of their profit when I pay for YouTube out of India, and fail to stop me despite active efforts, how do you expect a company to manage it against a state actor.
Yputube ignore it because it is cheaper to ignore than to pay people to fight against it. If enough people do it don’t worry they will fund and find methods to block user using VPN to pay abonnement
They do fight it. They cracked down on it a couple months back. Didn’t stop all users, and it wouldn’t stop just asking a friend in the respective country to buy it for you and pay them on the side.
Which is my point. You’re coming at this like it’s Joe Everybody is being discussed, when we are talking about an entire country which is actively succeeding at influencing other countries.
