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Comment by berserk1010 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this service will facilitate collapse of censorship in dictatorship countries like China and Russia. Especially if those countries are currently suffering from economic depression like China and Russia, and its citizens are waking up to its harsh realities and are keen to get unfiltered information

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It will not.

Don't know about China, but Russian citizens already have almost unfiltered access to information. The only major western media outlet currently blocked in Russia is BBC. Anyone can read pretty much anything else - Reuters, Newsweek, CNN, whatever - right from their phones.

Access to information is not the problem (at least for now). It is trivial to get access to uncensored news for anyone with a modicum of desire to do so.

Linguistic and cultural barriers are far stronger than informational barriers. Which may be an upside considering how other potentially self-destructive fads and attitudes spread so rapidly with the internet. We've seen the beginnings of that with the Arab Spring, and various culture wars across English-speaking western countries. If the world were even more homogenous the whiplash from such polarizing movements would be even more severe.

Also I think the only reason why the BBC was banned in the first place is their BBC in Russian service. See https://www.bbc.com/russian

Interestingly, most (all?) UK providers block RT, so it's pretty symmetrical.

Just on DNS level, or?

I feel like the whole dream of "free internet will bring freedom and democracy to the whole world" died a decade ago if not earlier. All of those states had completely free and unrestricted access to the internet not that far back and it didn't really lead to anything groundbreaking - introducing satellite telephony to the common market is not going to do it. And you can bet that if the service is offered in China/Russia it will be forced to go through local servers to operate legally.

Language really matters, it's a great homogenizing force. Unfortunately, the Chinese and Russians mostly don't speak English and thus can't/don't interact with pro-democracy people.

As if you would know what the percentage of English-language proficiency is . Ever had friends in RU and CN?

Btw, not everyone on Earth seems Western faux democracy as a suitable / wanted direction to move to.

I have indeed made online acquaintance with people from China and Russia. They are a pretty small percentage of the population. 1% and 10% respectively IIRC.

> it will be forced to go through local servers to operate legally.

Not having to operate legally is the whole point here. The hope is that Russia / China will have no way of preventing Starling from existing (maybe except shooting down satellites and causing a major international diplomatic incident).

There's still the question of how to make this profitable, if Starling is illegal in Russia / China, it will be difficult for them to interface with their financial infrastructure to receive payments. This could be solved either with cryptocurrencies or support from other governments and human rights organizations. It's also possible that Starlink will allow certain activity free of charge, particularly during protests and internet blackouts.

This moves the global nature of the internet one step further. Until now, it was generally possible for law enforcement to force ISPs to censor content and give up activity logs, something that made catching criminals a lot easier. Satellite networks make that much harder, especially if your government isn't very friendly with the jurisdiction the ISP is incorporated in. It's not unimaginable to me that, in ten years, most black hat US hackers will use a Russian satellite network as an additional layer of protection. Even if all else fails, all their devices get compromised and their IP address leaks, the Russians won't give up the customer info for that address anyway.

But with tight controls of the financial system, none of that matters. Revolutions in the past were possible because government lacked the power/abilities to enforce the laws and nip dissent in the bud. Once a country goes fully cashless, you won't even be able to feed yourself if those in power decide not to allow it. And it's not even strictly more authoritarian countries that will exercise this power. It happened in Canada, a progressive western democracy, by a liberal government during the trucker protests. Now add it the ability to fully track/monitor all citizens in real time with cameras and AI/ML, and the power differential is orders of magnitude more between a person and their government than it ever has been previously.

So as much as it hurts me to say it, I don't think this or anything else will make a difference. Once freedom is lost somewhere, it may not even be possible to get it back.

> The hope is that Russia / China will have no way of preventing Starling from existing (maybe except shooting down satellites and causing a major international diplomatic incident).

They've got a much easier way of preventing it from operating: Ban sales of Teslas until Musk relents.

Nice factory producing 250k cars per year for the Chinese market you've got there. It'd be a real shame if some sort of party of workers were to seize the means of production.

The authorities in those countries already ban importation of unlicensed communication devices and severely punish anyone caught in possession. A few will be smuggled in but not enough to effect any real change.

I do think though that the CIA should at least take advantage of this new technology to undermine hostile foreign governments. Mass produce a few million cheap satellite phones and use balloons to scatter them all over China, North Korea, etc. Even if it doesn't have much practical effect, the overt disrespect will help to undermine our adversaries and force them to expend more resources on tightening internal security controls.

Of course it will not. Kim, Xi, Vladimir P. and Alexandr (to use some random names) are not going to be bothered by citizens communicating freely unless it leads to near instantaneous mass revolt in which the army, the police and the security forces all move over to the other side. Otherwise they'll just kill a few hundred, thousand, ten-thousand or hundred thousand of their citizens (which they can afford to lose) to bring the rest back in line.

It would take far more than a bunch of cell phones to bring this about.

> Especially if those countries are currently suffering from economic depression like China

You seem to ask a question to push a narrative rather than by curiosity

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/imf-upgrades-chinas-2023...

~5% growth when the west is contracting, specially Germany and the US is quite the feat, what's happening in the Red Sea didn't even hurt that forecast

Have you seen the forecast for most EU countries? it's quite dark in comparison

And have you read about EU farmers protesting? Dictators must be wearing blue, and censorship may rule, perhaps not just red ;)

In the meantime:

https://consumer.huawei.com/za/community/details/Huawei-Mate...

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/China-s-own-GPS-Bei...

Economic depression? has any of the European countries attempted this?

that 5% growth is just a fantasy number made up by the Chinese government, and parroted by other institutions like world trade bank. No way the 5% growth is real when FDI has fallen all the way from 344B in 2021 to 15B!! in 2023. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-chinese-fdi-inflows.... Global investors like Blackrock and Vanguard obviously know the real financial truths. When Chinese youth suffers from 46.5% unofficial unemployment rate https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-real-youth-unemploymen.... When a large shadow bank with $65B in debt just declared bankruptcy https://fortune.com/asia/2024/01/08/zhongzhi-china-shadow-ba....

Uncensored Starlink won't be turned on in China because that would upset the government and then the government would retaliate against Tesla.

Musk being reliant on his business in China is one thing, but I also think that the US government may not want to upset China by having an American company serving people in China without approval of the Chinese government? Starlink works (or worked?) in Iran, but International Telecommunication Union ordered Starlink to stop it[0]. I'm not sure if it changed anything because US government doesn't mind it.

[0] https://amwaj.media/media-monitor/will-starlink-comply-with-...

This assumes those citizens have an avenue to signing up and paying for Starlink's mobile offering, and whether Elon will cooperate with requests from those nations. I can't imagine he'd put his ability to sell his cars at risk.

The problem isn't the lack of access, the problem is China and Russia are doing an awesome job of using Western infrastructure against us and their own people even when using products like Facebook and YouTube.

When people do end up on these platforms, they see a bunch of pro Russia and China stuff anyway.

Do you log into Facebook and feel the freedom right away?

Probably not, given that operating satellite communication services targeting a given country requires approval of the respective government.

And even ignoring that: I doubt that Elon has any appetite for his satellites being targeted by nation states that have publicly demonstrated [1] [2] their capability of taking them out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...

[2] https://www.spacecom.mil/Newsroom/News/Article-Display/Artic...

Taking out the number of sats that Starlink fields is hard, keep in mind that it will take an order of magnitude more launches to kill them off than it takes SpaceX to launch them in the first place. If you wanted to play that game long enough you'd be bankrupt, besides I'm fairly sure that other entities besides Starlink/SpaceX might have an opinion (or two) about doing that.

If you are a country like China that wants to prevent this from being possible how would they go about it? Can these satellites provide communication between phones without a terrestrial cell network sitting in the middle?

Unless Elon offers it for free, they'd start at the bank level, blocking payments. Then they would put pressure on Elon, putting Tesla's ability to sell there at risk. That's before they do anything from a technology standpoint.

Yep, and that's only step 1 on a 100 step ladder. With monitoring tech that they probably already have in place, unless there's a widespread coordinated effort to obscure it (which itself would be extremely difficult), it wouldn't be hard to find the people accessing Starlink and punish them. There are a dozen different angles the government can take to make this impossible without great personal to the participants. I doubt it ever gets that far as the financial restrictions alone will be sufficient

"Especially if those countries are currently suffering from economic depression like China and Russia"

Dude, I don't know. "Despite the challenges posed by external pressure and earlier negative forecasts, Russia's GDP growth in 2023 is expected to be 3.5%,"

Most EU countries would be happy about such a growth. Russia has 100 times less debt than the US and an unemployment rate about 2.5% if I remember correctly.

I give you two more links, one by a US nobel Prize winner, another by a French guy who predicted the collapse of the UdSSR when he was a PhD student:

https://www.gulf-insider.com/robert-shiller-warns-of-catacly...

https://unherd.com/thepost/emmanuel-todd-world-war-iii-has-a...

I am not a Putin puppet. This guy may be a dog, but he has the luck of the devil. Russia may rise out of this mess as a power to be reckoned with.

As a person who expected a 30-50% decline in Russian GDP when the sanctions were first announced, I’ve been very surprised at how resilient the Russian economy has been.

I’d love to read an analysis about why sanctions were so effective at harming the economies of countries like Venezuela & North Korea but so much weaker against Russia.

Here's a very good in depth article https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/91235.

"They essentially put the Russian economy into an artificial coma by raising the key rate to 20 percent. Additionally, they imposed temporary capital controls, compelled exporters to sell export revenues, and prohibited non-residents from leaving Russian markets....This combination of factors allowed the Russian economy to sustain itself in 2023 and gave time to Putin, the government, and Russian businesses to adjust their strategies, turning to new markets, mostly China and India."

However, it does look like Russia's strategy of supporting economy on strong oil sales will falter in 2024 and 2025.

"Indian purchases of Russian crude have fallen to an 11-month low as the price tag on the discounted oil rises...Sources at the Indian refineries told Reuters that the country is looking to Saudi oil partly because of problems with payments for Russian light sweet crude Sokol." https://www.newsweek.com/russia-oil-india-war-saudi-1860480

> why sanctions were so effective at harming the economies of countries like Venezuela & North Korea but so much weaker against Russia.

Not any in depth analysis, but I'm guessing:

1. Size of the economy (Russian economy is 3x Venezuela)

2. Diversity of the economy (Venezuela is primarily oil, Russia has a diverse industrial base, defence, agriculture etc)

3. Ties and trade with countries not participating in the sanctions (Russia trades with China, India and ME countries).

Not if Musk has anything to say about it.

Starlink works in Iran and is crucial to the Ukrainian army, but as other commenter pointed out, Musk has business in China, so China would be off the table.

I will say, if there's one person that might give China the bird and do it anyway despite a heavy economic penalty, it's Elon. His reactions against companies like Disney have been shocking and remarkably principled.

That said, I agree it's pretty unlikely. No individual person has enough resources to win a fight againt a world-power nation state like China, even if they wanted to badly enough to risk it all.

China is as free as the US. You can leave the country and emigrate to the US, and that's why there are so many Chinese everywhere. No, it's not Orwellian any more and people do not carry a "little red book" with them. Chinese people can choose their jobs, start a company, pursue hobbies like rock climbing and guitar and gardening and live basically like most westerners.

No one in China is allowed to criticize their leader lol

Except you can't have certain political opinions without going to jail, that's a pretty big difference.

I feel like - and I don’t mean to do the whataboutism thing, but… - that rings a lot less true to me after BLM and the border patrol tear gassing grandmas. Arguably it’s better here, but like, I feel like the boot comes down more or less the same.

It's absolutely whataboutism. Just because bad stuff happens in doesn't mean America is authoritarian. It has many many flaws but it's one of the few places where checks and balances still work, for now.

Do they though? Like, basically the Supreme Court is legislating morality now…

I’m not saying China is “better.” But, like shit is pretty bad here in a lot of ways. I think it’s folly to look at them with much of a sense of superiority.

Now, Russia? Russia is real messed up… but that wasn’t the topic of conversation here. I don’t see much practical difference between BORTAC tear gassing grandmas and Hong Kong protesters getting tear gassed.

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