this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
820 points (98.7% liked)
Technology
58531 readers
4982 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Shouldn't they be capable of detecting where the connection is going and disconnect/block it for specific regions or something? I have no clue how any of that stuff works but this one thing feels like it should be the case.
They do, but Ukraine uses Starlink, so they can't really disable usage entirely in the contested areas. They could disable the individual terminals, but that would require knowing which ones the Russians were using in the first place.
Well, given that they have access to Internet via starlink, all they would have to do is set up a website and list the IDs, then block everything that's not there.
They got me shipment? Add them to the list? No longer own the device? Remove it.
The problem is that not all of those terminals are being purchased by Ukraine, or supplied through official channels. There are tons of equipment being donated from third parties not directly affiliated, including Starlink terminals.
That's great if the Ukraine military were the only users in the region, but they aren't. Regular Starlink service is available in the country, outside military use. Even though the Ukraine military is using it, Starlink is not designed to be a military network. It is a civilian network that just happens to be available and extremely useful in this case, even with the Russian attempts to interfere with signals in the region.
So they would have to have a white-list for Ukraine and a process for getting on the white-list. That doesn't seem that complicated. Somewhat intensive, sure, but a very simple solution. And I would think militarily advantageous equipment would be more controlled in a war zone than normal.
The Starlink probably only works once the drone enters Ukraine. Disabling Starlink in that area would cut off the Ukrainian military too. The internet traffic could easily be routed through a VPN in another country, so blocking Russian IP addresses on Starlink wouldn't work either.
If Starlink is the internet provider, aren't they providing the IP address? If they are how would a VPN trick Starlink since the equipment has to connect to Starlink first?
Whitelist/allowlist for this region comes to my mind. But probably some other specific problems would arise from this too. Hmm...