this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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I’m curious on how you envision they identify these units? If they don’t activate until they are near the Ukrainian border, how do they know what is Russian controlled vs Ukrainian controlled?
As for the payment side, YouTube can’t even get a proper handle on users getting region pricing at a fraction of the cost, by simply using a VPN, and they have skin in the game for preventing cross region abuse. Starlink has no reason outside sanctions to give a fuck where their payments are coming from, and you’re talking about state actors that can literally provide a real bank and address owned by a shell individual that passes any check you can think of beyond highly invasive levels no one would accept.
Geolocation is extremely unreliable. Let’s look at one aspect, GPS: In North America you don’t normally deal with it beyond being in between buildings or under a tunnel, but the moment you’re flying in airspace near Russia, GPS can and has literally shown the location being thousands of miles away.
I get the musk hate, but you’re acting like a grandma down the road is illegally using it, and ignoring the fact that it’s a country known to have operatives worldwide, multiple hacking groups, and resources you likely can’t even imagine.
Are you saying that geolocation of a starlink unit is difficult from the starlink satellite network? That seems unlikely to me.
Do you see a moral dimension to this? Keeping technology out of the hands of an aggressor state is an excellent reason. I think that many people feel that because corporate entities behave like criminal organizations (indifferent to anything other than maximizing their own profits) that this is somehow OK. It isn't, and normalizing isn't acceptable either.
In 99% of cases? No. In the case of a state actor intentionally wanting to obsfucate the location? Absolutely.
You’re either missing the point or ignoring it. If you bothered to read around that sentence, you’d realize that in context it has nothing to do with morals, and everything to do with other companies with a financial incentive failing to do it. If a company loses out on 75+% of their profit when I pay for YouTube out of India, and fail to stop me despite active efforts, how do you expect a company to manage it against a state actor.
Yputube ignore it because it is cheaper to ignore than to pay people to fight against it. If enough people do it don't worry they will fund and find methods to block user using VPN to pay abonnement
They do fight it. They cracked down on it a couple months back. Didn’t stop all users, and it wouldn’t stop just asking a friend in the respective country to buy it for you and pay them on the side.
Which is my point. You’re coming at this like it’s Joe Everybody is being discussed, when we are talking about an entire country which is actively succeeding at influencing other countries.
True enough. I wasn't precise enough if they really wanted to crack down on it and reduce it to nearly zero they would have way. But the cost excède the benefit. For starlink that the same. They surely can know where the data are sent and disable suspected starlink asking for them to contact call center for exemple. Which a drone can't do. This wouldn't be trivial or cheap but that doable. We built systems far more complex than that