Comment by bawolff
19 hours ago
The article seems quite speculative.
I'm sure the Iranian regime would live to jam starlink, but i don't think we have any ability to know what is actually happening here.
The article claims 80% packetloss. That's still 1 in 5 packets getting through. That is annoying but not going to stop information getting out.
I also wonder, if all other coms are cut off, is it possible star link in the country is just overloaded?
In my experience 80% packet loss makes most common protocols basically unusable. Yes you can still get data out...but many apps will just fail due to timeouts and other things.
I imagine the people with illegal starlink terminals are fairly tech savy and can use custom protocols. Living in Iran they probably already have a lot of experience with vpns and lower level protocols to evade censorship.
Illegal just means there’s a black market. You pay some guy in cash and he gives you a smuggled Starlink terminal. Neither buyer or seller is likely to be anymore sophisticated here than someone trading in any other smuggled goods (cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, etc).
I'm a programmer and even i wouldn't know where to start implementing a custom network wire protocol.
I wouldn’t imagine that no. It’s “illegal” but not hard to obtain
Matrix published a proof of concept a few years ago of an alternative transport layer designed to work over connections with a few hundred bits per second, and massive packet loss, while still providing E2EE:
https://matrix.org/blog/2019/03/12/breaking-the-100bps-barri...
Without knowing that much about this area, i think https://mosh.org/ is a traditional choice if you need encrypted communication in a high packet loss environment.
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