Geolocation and Starlink
potaroo.net
potaroo.net
It's still baffling to me how Starlink is getting away with this.
It makes some sense for the old wide-beam geostationary services, like Inmarsat's legacy services, which are intrinsically hard to geolocate (the satellite beams for tehse cover huge areas and the operator has no technical reason to know where the client is located).
But for Starlink, which has a mandatory GPS receiver in every terminal and which uses spot beams smaller than some rural 5G cells?
Great for people in countries with authoritarian governments limiting their access to information, of course, but somehow I don't feel great about the broader implications on the credibility of international law.
It was illegal, but for the most part tolerated. Yes, it was just one-way geostationary communication rather than internet access, but it wasn't like people were doing anything special to hide the dishes on their roofs.
I think most authoritarian regimes tend to tolerate some low level violations of these kinds (VPNs were also illegal yet openly sold) in exchange for the public allowing them to stay in power.
With Starlink it probably helps that even the previous administration, despite their conflicts with Musk, turned a blind eye to Starlink being supplied to Iranians even given the Iranian government's protests (IIRC).
It's also the case that if nearly everyone is breaking some minor law then nearly everyone is vulnerable, which could also be a more comfortable place for such a regime. Even if this is not the intent behind the current permissiveness, this fact might help keep it in place all the same.
It gives people false confidence of "well sure it's horrible on paper but nobody goes to jail for that"
It releases some of the pressure from such oppressive regimes
If you ever want to crack down on it, your supporters can lean on the "but but but it's always been the law" apologetics (see illegally deporting people suspected of being illegal aliens)
And the best reason of all, if everyone is violating a law, you have carte blanche to attack anyone you want with the full force of the law. You aren't arresting that annoying Journalist or Politician for their speech or views, you are putting a criminal in jail!
That's not an example of something that "most [...] citizens are in violation" of. In fact, 0% of US citizens are in violation of that.
The whole idea of "a country owns its radio waves" hasn't held in practice for, basically, the entire history of radio waves.
And I don't think the tech companies are very trustworthy - but I'd trust many of them with power before I would trust a lot of the governments. Google is quite open about being evil now, but I'd still trust Google before I trust the governments of Saudi Arabia or Sudan.
So in practice the agreements we make essentially cover making reasonable concessions so no one feels the need to start bombing things.
Or a covert act of war disguised as local domestic terrorism.
For example, how I'd have expected this to play out in an age that feels more and more a thing of the past:
- Country A's ingenious startup offers global satellite service, bypassing country B's telecom monopoly, without even fully registering it. (They employ more engineers than lawyers.)
- Country B complains to country A's government.
- Government A respects B's sovereignty, even though A is much larger and more powerful than B, and wants to reassure the world that the same rules apply to everybody. It slaps the startup on its wrist, under the (very implicit, never even hinted at) threat of further regulatory or legal action. (The startup pays taxes in A, and its executives live and can be arrested there.)
- The startup stops providing service on B's territory.
- The governments of A and B sit down together and negotiate, behind closed doors and without making it a big display of power, a deal that works for both of them, e.g. granting the startup access to the market of B, in exchange for complying with local regulations.
Obviously it has never worked like that between all countries and in all cases, but I'm just saying, this used to be seen as a desirable model by many.
Sure, it currently seems to lead to good outcomes in my eyes (democracy and access to information > most alternatives), but what if it one day does not? Trust in laws and international agreements is, like all trust, gained in drops and lost in buckets.
In practice, laws are only as effective as a government's willingness to use its monopoly on violence to enforce them.
They don't care because their employees are never going to fly to those [whatever series of expletives] countries, and that's not um ... not nice.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/10/21/1062001/spacex-s...
Roaming (commonly) keeps the person in the original state, regardless where they are. I can travel through out Europe, or Thailand, or the Canary Islands. I will still proudly reside in the capital where I don't live anyways.
So just forget IP and geolocation.
IP location can work at the postal code level, if the ISP's assignment scheme is granular enough and they are either publishing a corresponding geofeed or somebody is just reverse engineering one based on data collection.
The latter works very similarly to Wi-Fi geo positioning: Devices that have a GPS position source report the observed location of a given IP address; devices without one make use of it.
> So just forget IP and geolocation.
Yes, for the <1% of people actively doing something against it (e.g. using VPNs), for some other edge cases, and importantly for mobile data roaming. Otherwise, it's surprisingly accurate these days.
so You want an mass privacy breach????? it literally all downside from customer perspective
And geolocation does work well enough for many purposes, for better or worse.
Regarding NAT, CG-NATs are usually still reasonably close to the first interconnection point to keep latency low. And as that stops being the case, IPv6 is getting more and more common in any case, precisely because CG-NAT doesn’t scale that well.
vs. modern reality
(And who hasn't experienced a Customer Support phone number that is answered in different parts of the world, based on the time of day?)
People don't usually think about it because intra-US latency is usually low enough to care (and lower than the latency to most outsourced call centers in any case), but during natural disasters such as Katrina, the ties between geography and network topology still make themselves known.
In Australia, mobile services are a separate area code-so a mobile number tells you that it is a mobile number, but nothing else-once upon a time, the first few digits told you the telco, but with number portability that is largely no longer true.
Unless it is the teachers at our kid’s school, who use Microsoft Teams to call parents on their mobile, so it looks like it is coming from a fixed line
This is the case in all NANP countries (i.e. also Canada and many Caribbean nations), and I believe only there.
Funnily enough, that area code became something of a status thing in an era when near-in suburbs got "kicked out" to a suburban area code when a lot of people were getting second phone lines for modems. There's a Seinfeld episode related from a different city.
As mentioned here Starlink could provide very precise location and limit access but as growing service it’s more valuable to break rules for wider adoption.
And who could punish Starlink? Only the US and they are interested to let this player getting big and regulate later.
Any country with anti satellite weapons where SpaceX is illegally broadcasting into the country... Shoot down a few satellites and the entire constellation will go down with them. SpaceX is playing with fire here...
1. That company provides satellite service for military units
2. That company's boss was recently a member of the US government, and is notably close friends with the US leadership
This will not go well. If a small dictatorial country does this, it would simply invite a rain of cruise missiles.
So I think SpaceX will likely continue as is.
Neither of those would be much of a deterrent to a country like China (though the loss of their own orbital assets in similar orbital shells might be a deterrent for them).
The idea that you can just trigger Kessler Syndrom is fantasy, that's not really how it works.
And of course that's before the idea that this would directly attack US military installations. Have you ever heard the US saying 'Don't touch our boats'?
Not sure any nation just basically starts a nuclear war to prevent people from accessing pornhub.
That said, if it makes you feel better, Palantir already likely has, or can infer/calculate, your geolocation in any case. So this isn’t necessarily giving anything new away. All it does is highlight the creeping trampling of our privacy rights.
Under such an excuse, any type of extreme measure is similarly allowed.
In fact, why not go full Suicide Squad and strap bomb/shock collars to every person on Earth?
He ran the whole thing from his home internet connection.
Then what? You're going to send seal team six to arrest him? 2 blocks might as well be 200 miles.
In this case I posted the info in our company slack, where everyone could see it. I did manage to stop the attack. As far as other action goes, that wasn't really my call, so i'm not sure if any further action was taken.
The Philippines is a notoriously corrupt country, so its likely that even if authorities there got involved, no real action would get taken, assuming those responsible for the attack had enough pesos to pay bribes.
That's why your ISP doesn't do statics for free anymore
Check the charts for price since 2020. It looks like IPv4-block prices almost tripled 2020-2021. Then seem to have been in gradual decline since then. I'm rather surprised.
Your ISP doesn't do statics, but not because of the cost.
Since then prices have come down. I can only speculate that high prices caused a bunch of organisations to decide to sell their unused IP blocks. I suppose the question is: Does the market now have enough spare capacity to see us through to IPv6-only adoption at reasonable IP costs, or will we be seeing high prices again in 5+ years?
As prices go up, previously impractical sources will satisfy demand just enough.
In other words, I think we’ll be stuck in IPv4 price limbo for a very long time.
It is core of problem with IPv6 adoption - from ISP perspective it do not solve any problem because they still needs solution for connecting to IPv4. Opposite way it works - if you have IPv4 there are bridges to IPv6.
There is no way to go from IPv4 to IPv6.
It's not great, but for 99% of consumers, they can't tell the difference. The ISP only needs a small 28 or 29 allocation, and with that they serve tens to hundreds of thousands of clients.
Of course prices have collapsed since then, and in real terms are back or below 2019 levels