Comment on Russia is using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite devices in Ukraine, sources say

• KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Who says they weren’t purchased in Ukraine?

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  • rdri@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨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.

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    • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You’re essentially saying “Tesla has to know, because it’s easier to believe that they do.”

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      • rdri@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Welp, Musk clearly isn’t even interested in exploring the possibility and just calls it fake news. I guess you won the argument by essentially saying “Nobody knows and no one needs to try”.

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• fatalError@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨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.

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  • cole@lemdro.id ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    you don’t even need to root to spoof gps, you can just do that on android

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  • rdri@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨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.

    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.

    you can just order the starlink equipment to a random address in a different country

    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.

    Once you got the connection up and running you just use a vpn to hide everyrhing.

    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 could do is block starlink for a whole region

    They are already doing this but not the whole region. Occupied territories of Ukraine are selectively blocked according to their own availability map.

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