I have no doubt if Ukraine was sufficiently aggrieved they would seek retribution directly against him.
He’s a fair enough target… nothing of value would be lost.
Mr. Free Speech wants to decide what we can and can’t use our ISP’s for eh?
God he is such a shitheel
The traffic going to and from these drones isn’t encrypted?
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.
Does he seem like someone who is concerned about your security?
You shouldn’t need to trust him to communicate securely using his equipment
Considering that he is using my money to do his chicanery, yes, I do.
I mean from a technical standpoint, not an ethical one
It is, but if you control the endpoints then there is no traffic to be had if you block it.
How did they know what device to block if they don’t know what’s being sent/recieved?
by looking where it is
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.I could believe that too
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.
But surely you’d then need to have prior knowledge of the intent of the endpoint
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.
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Took longer than I thought it would for Musk to do this. Been waiting for it since he threw his little fit about starlink in Ukraine was costing him money.
Then he said he’s talked to Putin directly.
Seriously someone reign this dude in, somehow, before he really fucks shit up.
So the article says this is from a year ago so I’m thinking this may have actually been from around that time and the complaints about money was a smoke screen to cover him being a little traitor and we just haven’t heard about it because this is coming from a book with someone once again waiting to blow the very important whistles until they can make money off of it.
Shit you’re probably right. Fuckin buncha gross, greedy, crybaby assholes the lot of em
Sure would be a shame if Starlink got nationalized.
Talk about fixing the rural internet problem. That would be amazing.
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Arrest when?
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who the fuck said anything about including scholars and intellectuals
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why? did it seem relevant somehow?
“If we include people you like then it’s bad. Is that what you want?”
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We can also include pretend-millionaires
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Man the old geezers really think they still have absolute control over everything and don’t realize the ultra wealthy they have enabled are getting and have been operating far beyond the control of the western governments.
God the fucking narcissism of those in charge to think that they still rule with perfect wisdom. I’m waiting for when these companies that the US built leave and take up residence with new hot authoritarian countries and leave misery poverty in their wake.
Singular rich people should not have this much say.
I’m waiting for when these companies that the US built leave and take up residence with new hot authoritarian countries
This is my first time seeing this theory. Kinda interesting take.
Why would the companies leave, rather than just expanding into those authoritarian countries? I guess… Why not both?
Alternatively, why not just turn the US into one of those authoritarian countries?
Cheap labor and less expectations, and with the jobs they are giving to remote workers they are giving them higher purchasing power. Eventually they will realize they can basically start over with a much more subservient audience.
Granted we can see that not all of them are super accepting and would rather their own internal companies become big but I can see the investors behind ours happily moving and pushing for partnerships or acquisitions when they decide they need the extra cash.
I’m guessing it will happen in some way with someone, at this rate, but keep in mind most tech company employees aren’t going to want to move to a banana republic.
That utter swine!
Defense production act takeover when?
As an oligarch, he stands with the other Russian oligarch who need and benefit from this war. If the rouble is at an historical low, the ones who have money in other currencies have an historical purchasing power in Russia…
Why does Musk know when Ukrainian military operations are taking place?
Elon owns the Network Operations Center for Starlink. I can only imagine the type of data/intelligence he has access to.
I would think that sensitive communications would be encrypted tho
Indeed, and then they decrypt it if you’re a Ukranian boat.
It’s not that easy as just checking a box that says “enable decryption”. Not saying they can’t decrypt traffic, but it’s not trivial if you don’t have the private keys.
You don’t need to know what the message is about when you know where it comes from and where it’s going. A lot of security breaches come from that king of knowledge.
Aka metadata.
Only metadata, but that is enough. Who sends how much data from where to where.
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They don’t provide the encryption though. Star-Link just provides an Ethernet cable, the same way your modem/router/whatever at home does.
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