Comment on Russia is using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite devices in Ukraine, sources say
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago… meaning that one of their many worldwide operatives could just get a credit card. Like, say, in Ukraine.
You’re focused way too hard on “following the law and doing things by the book” without realizing Russia is more of a “do what it takes.”
rdri@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Yeah okay. Let’s say we covered the billing. What about devices id, their origin and location? Those are not purchased through Ukraine and Starlink is ought to know that.
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Who says they weren’t purchased in Ukraine?
rdri@lemmy.world 7 months ago
They can’t be. Ukraine must have them under full control because they rely on them too much.
Also it’s much easier to assume that these modules, like any other modern tech these days are bought by Russia through other countries who it still does business with like China, Turkey etc.
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
You’re essentially saying “Tesla has to know, because it’s easier to believe that they do.”
fatalError@lemmy.sdf.org 7 months ago
Since when can you not spoof any of that? Grab a used android phone from local used market. Put any rooted rom on it. Spoof the gps… Device id is irrelevant at that point. As for origin, not sure what you mean by that, you can just order the starlink equipment to a random address in a different country, it will look legit. As others said, it’s trivial to bypass/spoof all that metadata.
Once you got the connection up and running you just use a vpn to hide everyrhing.
The only thing they could do is block starlink for a whole region, that would affect everyone in there. But you still couldn’t distinguish who is using the service.
cole@lemdro.id 7 months ago
you don’t even need to root to spoof gps, you can just do that on android
rdri@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Starlink modules are not Android devices.
Device ids should be required for pairing with the satellite from my understanding. Same with IMEI on smartphones - except it should be useless to try to fake it as the number of devices is magnitudes lower than smartphones and it should be possible to pin-point any misbehaving device.
Spoofing GPS is not exactly useful. Starlink satellites are very low-orbit so again misbehavior should be detectable. I mean you can connect to some satellite but if you report location that should be served by a different satellite then you got yourself caught.
Starlink is shipping devices to Ukraine directly for the military it seems. It should know the difference between these and others that are shipped all over the world by anyone.
VPN is out of scope for this I think. It’s about locating the device physically by the provider, not about specific sites trying to watch actual internet activity.
They are already doing this but not the whole region. Occupied territories of Ukraine are selectively blocked according to their own availability map.