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Comment by josefresco

1 day ago

Starlink can be jammed.

Jamming can be defeated quite funnily, by digging a pit and putting the antenna at the bottom of it.

  • Why do you think China is putting lots of satellites into space.... All those tons into orbit isn't for the lolz.

  • That stops working when the jamming is coming from a hostile satellite that's also in the sky.

  • Or fly a plane or drone overhead and see [0] where the terminals are. After a few fines most people would decide it’s not worth the risk.

    I remember how the Uber rollout worked in Berlin. Uber said they don’t need to comply with anything the city asked for and enjoyed their position in the safety of an ocean away so the local authorities instituted eye watering fines for drivers caught providing Uber rides. Uber decided to comply.

    [0] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/quadrf-can-spot-drone...

    • Depends on how many terminals there are and whether or not the neighborhoods they are in are sympathetic to the operators. It’s very easy to move them.

      Resistance against totalitarianism is a duty.

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    • I can see how that worked in Berlin. In USA or someplace with a healthier culture of resistance that would fail laughably. Americans will drive with no license, registration, in cars they've stolen back from the repo man because they refuse to pay anything to anyone. When my car was totalled by an illegal alien, the police didn't even show up, wisely because they were surely driving without license, identity documents, insurance, registration, or any sort of recoverable assets or any way to punish them but to throw them in an overflowing jail. You could try fining them but it would be like trying to draw blood from a stone. I suppose could try to jail them, but you'd find our jails are already full, and we already let violent criminals out on bail.

      In much of the world including USA poor people will slang crack for $5 under threat of life in jail and fines higher than they could ever hope to pay. Suffice to say there's an endless line of people willing to uber for roughly crack slinging wages without the risk of life imprisonment even if the fines are as bad -- because their alternatives are worse.

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It would be easier to shoot it out of the sky than try and jam a whole country from starlink

  • Might be easier to jam the uplink. Just modify some starlink units to transmit nonsense and place them around the country.

  • Putting aside the geopolitics of satellite destruction, we're likely moving to the realm of microwave based disablement instead of kinetic. It's the thing that can scale and provide some plausible deniability while the numbers are low.