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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

Is there something wrong with buying services from SpaceX?

Especially when Apple was already buying satellite services for iPhones. This isn't some kind of fake deal to transfer money.

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Nothing, as long as you're fine funding the exploits of a ketamine fueled edgelord who is throwing his resources behind far-right parties in multiple countries.

They could just not buy those services. That is a completely viable way forward.

The partner is T-Mobile, not Apple or SpaceX.

Globalstar launches with SpaceX too

I‘m afraid this kind of far-left histrionics was rejected at the ballot box.

Let’s reject these comments here too.

Technically, the majority of Americans voted for something other than what we got.

This is incorrect. The vote was 49.8% for Trump vs 48.3% for Kamala.

https://www.cfr.org/article/2024-election-numbers

0.56% voted for Stein, 0.49% for RFK, 0.42% for Oliver, and 0.42% for other third party candidates, meaning 50.21% voted for not-Trump.

RFK is supposed to be in Trump's government, so...

It's shockingly common to have to explain to Americans like yourself, that a democratic world exists beyond your borders. We even have different democracies electing different leaders.

Crazy isn't it.

By a much smaller margin than Election Day conveyed. But the original comment didn’t relate to an election result. Why did you bring that up?

As long as they don't offer global service, fine. You voted for it.

Tech should be void of politics. Thats the real issue here.

> Tech should be void of politics. Thats the real issue here.

"Tech" doesn't exist in a void - "tech" exists because politics allow it.

>Is there something wrong with buying services from SpaceX?

For some, the two are from two very different and far away political spectrum. They dont want each other to touch or cross path.

Anything with Musk's name attached to it is also in danger of getting hit with bans and sanctions if Musk and the current US government keep operating as they've done since the inauguration, so I'd also see that as a risk with regard to availability of those services outside the US. Apple is pretty good at keeping their products out of political crossfire but Musk seems to pretty much be seeking trouble these days.

Pretty obviously.

Musk will absolutely have access to any data you send over his network. I would not trust Musk within a light year of my data.

This seems unlikely to me given Apple's branding around privacy. Do you suspect they're going to backdoor the iOS HTTPS implementation for Starlink?

Is there a way to prove your data is private? Or were just taking their word on it?

RCS is working on Android.

SpaceX will see exactly who you are talking to, and there's nothing Apple can do about that if they want SpaceX to route the traffic.

> SpaceX will see exactly who you are talking to

Is Starlink routing? I’d expect they’d see you’re talking to Apple, or at worst a CDN.

If you're accesing, say, an Iranian site, SpaceX will obviously see that and can record it. If you're doing a VoIP call or sending a text, I'm much less sure they'd see where it's going - but wouldn't think it's out of the question.

> If you're accesing, say, an Iranian site, SpaceX will obviously see that

Why? Your DNS requests should be encrypted.

First, that's rarely true, plenty of people use DNS, not DoH (and DoH just means Clodflare or whoever gets to know your traffic too). But even when they are, this is mostly irrelevant: your network provider knows which IPs you're talking to, otherwise they couldn't route your packets, obviously. It's generally quite trivial to do a reverse DNS search and figure out which hostname corresponds to the IP you're talking to.

These are regular unencrypted text messages

Apple controls the iPhones... they can e2e encrypt the data. This is not a real issue.

That's only if the other end is also Apple. Thankfully https is pretty ubiquitous.

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