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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Obscufating the location of the starlink unit isn’t possible. It inherently requires positioning to function at all.

    Starlink uses phased array antennas for beamforming, both on the earth base station and on the satelite station. That means the antenna is very directional by using some complex math and multiple tranceivers feeding an antenna array.

    That means the satelite must know where you are within like 10s of km. Otherwise it can’t tell where to beam your data.

    It’s kinda exactly why cell towers can locate you. And why you can’t avoid that.



  • 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.