Russian troops use Starlink licensed and imported from Dubai

I assume a working gps is necessary for good signal since orientatiin matters in starlink.

Spoofing is possible, and Russia is known to use it. But it's unlikely they'd use it here. Spoofing is pretty indiscriminate, so nearby devices would also be affected, and as another commenter pointed out the device knowing it's location is important for it to connect to the network.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/vladimir-putin/russia-spoofing-...

Spoofing a Starlink receiver's GPS is not going to be very helpful with phase-shifted array antennas. Both the satellite and the terminal need to know each other's position.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array

Starlink satellites are in a very, very low orbit - which means they "see" a fairly small patch of land. So if you're in eastern Ukraine, currently satellites #32581 and #44197 are above you, with #17994 coming soon over the horizon (numbers invented).

Additionally, they have phased antenna arrays able to narrow-beam your data pretty much to you (this is very useful as you can, among other things, recycle the exact same frequency for another user a short distance away).

Spoof GPS all you want, but Starlink knows you're not actually somewhere else, simply because of which satellites are able to talk to you right now.

Spoofing is a big topic in the GNSS world (which is the broader set of satellite constellations like GPS). There's a lot of stuff happening to prevent spoofing. One of those things is using digital signatures that you can use to authenticate the signal. Another thing is using signals from multiple satellite constellations and correlating those. And of course the way these things work you need to talk 3-5 satellites from each network at least to be able to reliably interpolate the position. Even older networks, like GPS, change over time as satellites get replaced and software is updated.

The advantage Starlink has is that there are a lot more satellites that are also in a much lower orbit. There has been some talk about using their satellites for positioning. I think they look at that as a bit of a low value market so far.

I guess Starlink receive the encrypted GPS signal, and send the encryption back. If they can’t decode it they can probably block the receiver.

The public normally use the unencrypted one with lower accuracy. Can fake GPS, but I don’t think it would last for long.

Can't they look up the subscriber information? Presumably the Ukrainian ones would be registered to the Ukrainian government, but the Russian ones would be registered to some random UAE company.

Ass beat? More like outlasted. The Taliban went to Pakistan for 20 years until the US left.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Enduring_Freedom

The US lost 2,380 and the coalition killed 72,000+.

Finding them is actually likely much less of a problem than listening in, though providing the Ukrainians with additional ways of finding and tracking their enemy without us directly providing intel does offer the US plausible deniability.

Guerilla tactics just raise the cost of steamrolling an opponent to an unpalatable level, hiding among civilians, civilian infrastructure, etc. American loses these matchups not because they can't blockade a country, raze their farmlands and wait a few seasons while they all starve, but because fully eliminating and "winning" would be the worst possible choice.

I think it'd be more accurate to say the US consistently signs itself up for wars based on political or economic motivations with little intention of doing what would be needed to actually "win" the war.

Specifically, we either don't define metrics for success or we define completely unrealistic metrics. Worse, we go to war with no intention of destroying an enemy that has left us with no alternative other than to risk many, many human lives to stop them. We go for political wins at home, to claim ground in a geopolitical power struggle, or for natural resources.

I presume Musk necessarily has a clearance already and keeps many things secret on pain of imprisonment.

Did you forget SpaceX does NRO launches all of the time?

Furthermore, you aren’t allowed to have access to orbit from the USA without playing by the MIC/IC’s rules, clearance or no clearance.

They're emitters though. I assume the US and Ukraine are already able to locate every emitter within minutes of them powering up.

Is it fair to assume Musk and any state actors he could be working with don't have any way to decrypt Russian encryption techniques?

My only point is they its interesting how quick many are to jump on this a narrative that Elon is evil, he works for or with the Russians, etc when there is actually a scenario that fits in which he is closer to playing a role akin to Allan Turing during WWII.

Plus, that would give the ability to degrade communications whenever it's tactically useful.

Flight MH17 investigations revealed Russian military has a habit of switching to cellphones when their normal communications don't work, and those calls tend to be plain audio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17

I never know where the line is for assumptions on encryption and espionage. The Germans thought Enigma was unbreakable, you really just never know if you encryption was compromised unless the ones who cracked it tip their cards.

The point is that he's done this before in order to disadvantage Ukraine.

He is quite clearly on the side of russia.

An Operation Mincemeat of our time.

> would be nice to explore the topic more than “Musk is bad”

Isaacson’s Starlink claims are muddied.

But Musk has tweeted Kremlin propaganda points, e.g. on its proximate nuclear red lines (which, for the record, we’ve since passed). I blame David Sacks for giving him bad advice. But whatever the reason, it’s fair to question whether this was intentional at some level.

> I don’t know what the right answer here is but it would be nice to explore the topic more than “Musk is bad”.

I mean, Musk has been on the vanguard of the "Ukraine's resistance is futile" push. You can call speculation on this line specious, unthinking "Musk is bad" rhetoric, but at some point negative criticism of a person is relevant.

It takes zero imagination to conceive of Musk turning a blind eye to Russia's use of Starlink, it would be consistent with the way he speaks on X/Twitter.

It may seem like bashing, but honestly it's easy to run out of good things to say about some people.

Didn't he already taken that side?

Musk has already taken that side, on numerous occasions if memory serves well.

> don't have the ability to geoblock

I don’t think anything is stopping them from triangulating if they wanted to, right?

Many satcom operators geoblock their terminals in regions where they do not have license to transmit. This is trivial as both modem and hub/nms/noc will have the gps data from the equipment.

Most governments don't care enough to do anything about illegal transmitting, but some, like the Indian coast guard, has been known to board ships and write out fines and cause a ton of paper work for ships sailing with transmitting satcom equipment. And often they don't know how to determine if the equipment is transmitting or not, so it's safest for the crew to just turn it off when within Indian territorial waters even if the satcom provider automatically mutes equipment.

Only to the extent it's okay to send any equipment at all

The US itself doesn't even allow ukraine to use their weapons for deep strikes.

The US intentionally did not deliver the long range version of ATACAMS.

I also think its questionable that a business person can influence a war. But you know, it was actually in favor of ukraine.

Look its all well and good to bring up the objective and obvious fact that Russia isn't a threat to the United States, but have you considered the impact on the families of defence contractors?

Haliburton's share price is correlated with the amount of global conflict, but did you know that same share price determines executive compensation? Do you know how much it costs the producers of child killing weapons to hire a twenty something to cheat on their wives with? A lot, therefore we need to keep the stock high and people very afraid otherwise how will the child murdering members of the professional managerial class be rewarded?

Imagine this.

SpaceX solves this by terminating every dish bought outside of Ukraine due to antagonist comments

I have never seen Russian being describe as the ultimate boogeyman while in America but I am also realistic. Russia is after all a mob run state and makes no qualms with public assassinations. There are fairly well documented instances of their operations. I am not scared of them, look at the massive failure their military is but I also am aware that they are an outlier to world stability.

Brave of you to assume I'm American. Spoilers: I'm not. And on that note, I know a thing or two.

>I mean, where does this mentality come from? It's insane.

From people who studied some history, unlike you.

Some of this maybe:

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

See the "see also" section.

Why doesn't Musk's Company just turn off the Starlink panels , you know operating in Russia, just like he did over Crimea?

> can predict which terminals sold in other countries will be "illegally" moved to Russia

That's not how starlink works. At all.

but he can remotely turn them off and has done so in the past..... so...

This is not a truck.

If your truck would have an extension cord going back to your factory so it can run and running the truck would be sanctioned, you could be blamed if you don't cut the cord.

it's not that simple

export and re-export laws, especially from the US, are extremely complicated

Here we are talking about regulations even if we agree or not. Answering your question: if your truck is specially considered under those regulations the answer is yes.

For example, we had a customer from Malaysia who was in jail in US because he sold normal hardware devices bought in USA to Iran and that is banned.

Analogies are not arguments.

the truck company can't suddenly decide to stop providing the truck.

that's one of the primary reasons a service isn't necessarily a good.

This really brought me back to those 90s era anti-piracy ads.

> “There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol,” Musk wrote on X, the platform previously known as Twitter.

> “The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor. If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation,” Musk wrote.

Musk himself has used the ostensible fear of becoming complicit as a justification to disable Starlink access for the Ukrainian military.

So yes, he's already taken the position that he would be to blame. You can't then turn it around and say he wouldn't be to blame for russian military success through the use of the same technology.

Yeah, you very well might be.

If your truck gets traced back to you, expect a government audit. If you sold it to a denied party due to lack of due diligence, you will be held liable.

(A truck is probably an extreme example. I'm not sure we're spending time tracing vehicles, but you better believe we are for our state-of-the-art radio tech.)

Source: I with export controls for the semiconductor industry.

I doubt iPhones are very common among russian soldiers. And Androids are probably mostly of Chinese origin (with Chinese custom OS).

I don't know, tbh. One obvious advantage to me would be traffic analysis from each node. They own the internet; they own the traffic. :)

The SpaceX cells are small enough. All they need is a whitelist of nearly 100k devices.

They'd rather antagonize the cheapest satcom supplier

If for example you live in a country that doesn't register sim cards with authenticated information (e.g Ukraine) anyone can use the service.

That's why Russian soldiers are using Ukrainian network sims in Ukraine.

The same is true of starlink. The equipment (analogue of sim and phone together) is easily acquired. There's no whitelist . And service is available to anyone that can get a valid payment card. So just like the mobile network, Russians can use it.

SpaceX used to mitigate this by limiting areas service is available. But that helps with places 20+km from the frontline. Not somewhere opposing soldiers can see each other. And Ukrainians complained about this. They had partisans and SOF they wanted to communicate with. Now it's done and we have a new narrative l

You won't see Reddit level comments for such mobile networks.

We know the reason for the difference in sentiment. The solution is device whitelisting at the frontline and beyond visual range. Maybe for some people limiting movement might be enough.

But our anti work crowd will rather blame the supplier

Well hey, if you sell stuff that gets used in a war you're gonna have one both sides pissed at you. Only way to avoid would be to geofence the entire region and nope out on the whole thing.

Like a two-year war?