Elon Musk's Starlink internet service installed in White House | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk's Starlink internet service installed in White House

theguardian.com

22 pointsabeppu20 comments

I'm sure that there was an extensive, open, and fair contracting process that led to this service being installed, and that the American taxpayer is getting the best bang-for-their-buck with regards to this urgently-needed upgrade to the White House telecoms systems.

Considering it was provided for free, yes, probably the best bang-for-their-buck.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. What's the angle?

Yup. Privatizing both the state and the government. This data connection is worth billions. Just see all the coin scams from the White House and market manipulation. Crime in plain sight.

On a general note, it is quite dangerous that people still are completely blinded by years of "us-vs-them" and all kinds of binary belief traps. There is thundering amount of signals that the things which are happening are not quite normal.

And yet.. This should put to rest any notion that you can drown the public in lies and vitriol as part of "free speech". It kills people's ability to perceive reality and renders them unable to judge things on scales of civility, lawfulness, constructive behavior, ethics etc.

Instead, you get them to excuse all kinds of crimes against law and humanity, as long as they think they smell the musk of "their own pack", which has been defined as "owning the libs, hate towards transgenders/lgbt/foreigners" and other kinds of cultist/tribal feelings.

Not addressed in the article is why a satellite-based internet service makes sense for a building in a city that presumably has ready access to more conventional high-speed internet services.

Marketing and product placement. If you weren’t entertained by the Tesla sales event, you have another opportunity.

Considering the impact all of this advertising has had on Tesla sales and stock, I'd be very worried if I worked for SpaceX right now.

SpaceX isn't a public company, and they get most of their money from government contracts so I think they will do quite well.

"Only apps that meet GSA’s security and privacy standards are allowed."

Given that they're firing all the people who actually know what that means, that's not real reassuring.

Won't be any backdoor access to the White House communications opened up here.

Given the amount of corruption currently happening I don't think a technical solution is required.

Seeing how we’re only a few months in, I think you’re wrong.

I can see their desire to circumvent the firewalls and monitoring infrastructure because it’s too complicated and/or they don’t know who they can trust yet.

But on a purely technical level, doesn't TLS make all these concerns obsolete anyway?

It doesn’t.

Many governments block TLS connections directly between a client and an external website. Instead, they’ll install a custom root certificate and all connections and intercept traffic, using the government root certificate for each TLS connection instead of the external website’s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_packet_inspection

It still means that only whoever has the private key corresponding to that certificate can intercept and decrypt the traffic, so a third-party like Starlink should not be able to.

Preventing third parties from intercepting encrypted traffic isn’t the point of deep packet inspection (DPI).

Organizations implement DPI to PREVENT outbound encrypted connections to unknown external servers to keep internal data LEAVING the organization.

In other words, the point of DPI is to prevent unauthorized encrypted connections to unknown servers.

See:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43396281

Small discussion (20 points, 15 hours ago, 12 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43395411

Related White House to overhaul $42.5B internet plan – likely to Elon Musk's advantage (27 points, 13 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43268228

> Trump administration officials claimed that “some areas of the property could not get cell service,” according to the Times, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt describing the Starlink project as intended “to improve Wi-Fi connectivity on the complex.”

Being overly generous they are probably planning in anticipation of the global internet and power being nullified after some wartime escalation. They also issued satellite phones to key members of congress and staff a little while back. If by some bizarre chance I am right what VLF/HF frequencies and modulation do we all want to meet on? Chess over morse code or would Battleship© be more apropos?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com