Iran shuts down the internet amid protests, Starlink also affected

techradar.com

10 points·underdeserver··4 comments

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46542683

That old maxim - the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it - no longer true unfortunately.

Larger and larger swathes of the world population are coming under the purview of governments and corporations that are technologically strangling the free flow of information over the intertubes. China, Russia, India, Iran, UK, US (corporations a.t.m.) are the prominent examples.

Just having a resilient software stack is no longer sufficient. An open source hardware stack AND infrastructure is critical.

Eventually there will be need for an open source manufacturing base as well. Even if it is only at the level of 1980s computing, that is better than nothing.

The world needs some big thinkers to start working on this yesterday. A civ resilient project to avoid the dystopian futures or something like the dark ages coming back.

"By jamming GPS and satellite signals, authorities have reportedly degraded Starlink performance, with data suggesting packet loss has reached 30%."

That's a lot of loss. Curious if their existing forward error correction could be updated to use a larger window even if that means reducing potential speed in circumstances like this. I am also curious if any of the Starlink engineers are on HN. Reason I ask is their first customer was supposed to be the US Army. They would want reliability over speed during such attacks.

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