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Comment by XorNot

18 hours ago

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.

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...