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Comment by plehoux | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't Starlink by Space X solve this? Authoritarian govs. would make it illegal to subscribe... but like VPNs it would be very hard to police, even harder.

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I know the fan community likes to make this argument, but SpaceX will most likely cooperate with major governments.

Fighting oppressive regimes is not something I remember Must doing, yet. And he has no problem setting up shop e.g. in China.

He hasn't really had reason to, none of his businesses thus far have involved media, telecom or social media. Not saying it's particularly likely that he would go against the grain, but its a bit unfair to say he hasn't when he hasn't had occasion to yet.

You need to have the ground receiver and those seem relatively easy to restrict.

This.

People talk about Starlink like they never heard of RF engineering or something? I mean really, what does Starlink change when the entity doing the blocking is a state level actor?

Hackable SDRs and small planar antennae are very cheap.

"Must be willing to own a device that can get you disappeared" is not a realistic solution to state-level censorship, despite cypherpunk dreams to the contrary.

For bidirectional communications you need to transmit, and this means you send out a signal that can be easily triangulated.

No, ground based lasers can deactivate. Nation states have these.

The only thing we can do is strengthen non-authoritarian governments. Unfortunately, western business leaders made the mistake of strengthening authoritarian countries for a profit. We have a dark two to three hundred years ahead of us.

The only way is mesh. It’s the only way to permanently stop it.

Sneakernet mesh. RF can be triangulated and blocked.

Voice Over Vocal Chords as a new NFC RFC.

But seriously, your comment makes me want to find an article on how the Chinese have been thwarting bluetooth mesh chat in HK protests.

Sneakernet is the most future-proof solution. It's impossible to stop by design. It can be discouraged with arrest, but not stopped completely.

Not completely non-workable either. A lot of store-and-forward text messages would fit on a 256GB USB.

Something like an isolated wifi "dead drop", and a gossip protocol would be all you need, like ssb.

We don't need Starlink or SpaceX or VPNs.

Radio is difficult if not impossible to block with clever operators. The system is known.

Satellite will always be subject to whoever is in power at the time and it won't work within a building.

If you want to get information in and out the best option is—and possible always will be–a network of skilled radio operators.

An unfortunate side effect of the way HAM licenses are handled worldwide is that each government has a handy list of almost every citizen with enough knowledge and experience to build, service and use radio stations - complete with addresses and a partial inventory of equipment in circulation. It makes confiscating radio equipment and detaining operators much, much easier.

If by saying "each government" you mean globally, that's just wrong. It's certainly not the case in many developing countries (e.g., Indonesia).

I mean locally, each government keeping track of its own citizens with HAM licenses.

Don’t need to be licensed. That’s optional.

The knowledge is free and available to all and not that difficult. Amateur, citizens, and even AM/FM are cheap and easy to operate.

We are talking about how people get a message out in a martial law / wartime scenario. Radio is your best bet because no one can really stop you the way they can block and DNS server or just outright tell the ISP to shutdown.

Starlink is more vulnerable to governments than VPNs and is going to be much much more expensive.

Big social media companies could offer an API that offers a list of IPs that serve the app and any data it needs from an unblocked source. Then if you're under oppression by a malevolent leadership that blocks a social media, it could be so that you only need to hook your Twitter or Facebook app to internet via Starlink for the millisecond it takes to fetch the unblocked IPs, and the app would be configured to automatically use those in blocked countries. Those new IPs got blocked? Just hit the API again with Starlink and get back to using normal internet. It could be default behavior for the apps in countries where they are blocked to do that if a Starlink connection is up.

If a couple of bytes of information every now and then is too expensive to fetch with Starlink in poorer countries, it is too expensive to use for normal internet use for normal people anywhere on the planet.

Since you are using normal internet except for fetching the IPs, you are not subject to government snooping or sabotage any more than you would be normally. It also would require normal people at maximum the same level of tech-savvyness as a VPN to just connect to Starlink for a second.

Another key difference would be that a VPN requires you to reach the VPN server somehow, and the country can arbitrarily block cable traffic if they have the resources and will. Whether it's technically feasible for most VPNs is another question. But anyway, for Starlink... You would really need to wreck their satellite off the orbit or mess with their radiosignals to block it.

Not that social media companies would do anything to piss off authoritarian leaders / oppressing governments. But they could if they thought it's right

Censorship resistant DNS over Starlink could be pretty useful and cost effective.

“Hey, Turkish ISPs? This is the government. We’re gonna need you to black hole some BGP routes or else. Thanks.”

I’m sure this would be happening in any country. Even USA. I’m not defending Turkey here though.

I just meant that unless customers were talking to satellites directly, presumably there would still be a Turkish ISP in the middle that would be able to route Facebook et al into the æther. But maybe I’m misunderstanding how Starlink works.

I think the current plan is for them to talk to the satellites directly? One of the reasons they're trying to get the costs of the antennas down to ~$300.

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