Comment on U.S. intelligence officials determined the Chinese spy balloon used a U.S. internet provider to communicate

paultimate14@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• Linkerbaan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Don’t think they were colluding with the provider. They probably just put a burner sim card into a 4g module and sent data over a VPN to China whenever it had signal.

  source

  • paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    It could have even been one of those multi SIM router things that has network redundancy.

    source
  • postmateDumbass@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The blurb says primarily for navigation.

    So it was using the starlink signals like gps signal and therefore they needed to correlate with the carrier to get a rough time sync.

    I wonder what timing data is freely available on the starlink acquisition signal.

    source

    • Linkerbaan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Why would they need data then? For GPS you can get a 1metre accurate chip for like 20 bucks and it’s way smaller.

      source

      • postmateDumbass@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Mapping out network topology? Who knows.

        Whatever the collected data was, it could have been sent to their satellites for long haul back home.

        source
• Joker@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It’s a satellite provider. Cell networks don’t work at that altitude. Starlink was my first guess too but, after some more thought, it could be Hughesnet. They probably have wider coverage.

  source

  • Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yeah, their coverage is hugh

    source

    • snausagesinablanket@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Y U G E N E T

      source
    • crsu@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      So are their pings

      source
    • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Hugh Mungous

      source
  • Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Probably Hughesnet or Viasat.

    source