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Comment by starmanaj | Hacker News Reader

The (state-owned) main contractor for the Chinese space program, CASC, launched the first satellite of its planned +300-satellite 'Hongyan' broadband communications constellation late last year. The aim? Providing global internet access. How far it goes is hard to say, but none of the western/other broadband satellites would be able to provide services to China, so there's that market at least.

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> How far it goes is hard to say, but none of the western/other broadband satellites would be able to provide services to China, so there's that market at least.

How would the Chinese government block someone from pointing a satellite dish at the sky?

One method is that your neighbors may report you. In China, part of the social credit system is that your neighbors will report you for doing anything against the law or the rules. So they may not 'block' you from putting it up and getting internet through it, but try going to work the next day you may be blocked from getting on the train.

Edit: Everything I said here was strictly factual. I'm not sure why it's so quickly downvoted so here is a source to back it up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkw15LkZ_Kw. And one more, regarding the trains in particular: http://fortune.com/2019/02/22/china-social-credit-travel-ban...

Basically any attempt to make statements about "the" social credit system in China is going to be at least slightly wrong, since there is no single system. There are several pilots of different possible implementations, but no complete system yet (both of your sources actually mention this). Some are run by private financial companies to determine eligibility for their loans, some are run by city governments to provide credit rating for companies (e.g. https://wzcredit.gov.cn/ ) and apparently some rely on neighbors reporting each other. (This is the first time I heard about that one, though.)

The blacklist that prevents people from buying high-speed train tickets is http://zxgk.court.gov.cn/shixin/ and it usually works as a court-ordered punishment between fines and a prison sentence. The intention seems to be to target people who owe money and falsely claim not to have it by preventing their ability to spend it on "luxury." I.e. if you have the money to take a faster train, they'd prefer it if you used that to pay your debts.

Yikes, how horrifying

Presumably all the services will need dedicated slices of spectrum -- they're all licensing bands from the FCC in the US for that purpose, for example. So: nothing, I don't think, but they might not work if in China they're unlicensed and those chunks of spectrum are also used for TV or whatever.

Plus if they operate the service in China, the companies could be fined, or the users of the satellite dish could be fined/imprisoned, etc., etc.

The parent mentions this is going to be provided by a Chinese company - while they can't control your satellite on the ground, they can control theirs in orbit.

The US has been geolocating dishes [1] in order to see what they are pointing at, even in residential areas. You have to imagine, if deemed worthy, positioning a just-in-time line-of-sight intercept with a SIGINT satellite is passing in view is very easy to do. Pre-computing these targets is a well solved problem at this point, even down to moon bounce and esoteric methods from the 60s-70s.

[1]: https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-hunt-for-ghosthu...

> How would the Chinese government block someone from pointing a satellite dish at the sky?

Literally, men with guns show up and take the thing off your roof. It can be done at a very low tech and brute force local policing level. As an example: Occasionally the Iranian government goes on a program of confiscating Ku/Ka band Rx only (TVRO) satellit dishes off peoples' roofs.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/iran-destroys-100000-...

google "iran satellite dish police" for further examples.

Also, it only takes about one hour to train an unskilled person in how to use a portable spectrum analyzer and dipole/yagi antenna to locate the source of a transmission. Two way satellite things on roofs need to transmit back.

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