My thoughts to the Iranian people, may they get what they need and deserve at a cost that is not too high.
As in all conflicts, there's always a "fog of blame" where there isn't absolute certainty about who is right and who is to blame. Though it's not that hard. Because their survival depends on it, dictators are very good at blaming others--anybody, really--for their own shortcomings, and they usually wield the kind of hard power that makes them extremely costly to topple in terms of suffering and human lives.
Life is too short to have to deal with despots. We need a better, perhaps less-crowded or less xenophobic world where every person can protect their right to exist by simply packing and leaving as a last resort.
Agreed, but right now, I'm getting Bay of Pigs vibes from the whole affair. Trump baits the protestors into action -- don't worry, we've got your backs! -- and then hangs them out to dry.
The hubris of US idealists. There's no packing up and leaving. If you leave your tribe you are dead. This was true 10k years ago and it is true again. If you weren't born under the US security umbrella you are nothing but an ant avoiding the boots of those above you. And the whole world is returning to mean once more. There's no packing bags, there's fighting for YOUR freedom or being a slave. Those above will always seek to oppress those below.
There are a lot of people not particularly under the US umbrella who are doing ok. India for example. It's debatable how under the umbrella Europe is these days with the current president.
Seems like a big flaw that low-orbit constellations have a dependency on GPS, which are high-altitude satellites. They're 40x further away and so have 1,600x greater path loss. Why can't they use their own satellites for this?
> "But Starlink receivers use GPS to locate and connect to satellites. “Since its 12-day war with Israel last June," The Times says, “Iran has been disrupting GPS signals.”"
This isn’t even true; Starlink can use the local starlink constellation for positioning and the option is available in the customer facing configuration specifically for GPS denied areas (since about two years ago), where it’s been used for ages.
Something else is going on here - perhaps there’s an edge case where Starlink can be made to perform poorly without falling back away from GPS, but I wouldn’t expect this since it’s been “tested” in the most GPS hostile places for quite some time now.
It sounds like Starlink uses GPS to localize the receiver, rather than for any active step in the communication link. Since most receivers are static, I wonder if an effective workaround to this is for the receiver to just remember its last GPS fix for longer, or worst-case allow a manual location specification in lieu of a GPS fix.
A user provided location cannot be trusted for geofencing purposes. A GNSS (GPS or other) is needed sooner or later. This is a legal requirement for sanction and regulation enforcement (US, if not others).
Gps is free to use. Running your own gnss service requires an atomic clock and possibly separate transmission hardware, which is possible, but adds cost, volume, and weight.
According to [1], “[o]ne of the current generation of GPS satellites (Block III) weighs over 2,200 kg (4,850 lb), the weight of an average pickup truck. The body of these satellites are 1.8 m x 2.5 m x 3.4 m (5.9’ x 8.2’ x 11.2’) in size”. In comparison, “the current V2 Starlink satellite version weighs approximately 1,760 lbs (800 kilograms) at launch, almost three times heavier than the older generation satellites (weighing in at 573 lbs or 260 kg)” [2]
> Gps is free to use. Running your own gnss service requires an atomic clock and possibly separate transmission hardware, which is possible, but adds cost, volume, and weight.
Thanks you provide some great insights on why starlink didnt use gps but still if starlink wants to focus itself as the uncensorable internet in places like protests etc. I feel like they can probably do this after this recent incident
I just can't feel but sad right now because starlink was still providing activists ways to report outside and that helped protestors a lot and information. Now even starlink got removed because starlink tried to save money and I think might not have thought about what if gps itself gets blocked.
This is giving very bad signals for Iran. Is there any way now that Protestors are able to communicate to the outside world/ activists be able to report data outside?
In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[19][20] SpaceX executives repeatedly stated that Starlink needed to remain a civilian network;[21][22][12] in late 2022, as Starlink was being used as a tool in combat in Ukraine, SpaceX announced Starshield, a Starlink-like program designed for government customers.[23][21] Musk is reported to have said that Ukraine was "going too far" in threatening to inflict a “strategic defeat” on the Kremlin.[24]
Musk, like Trump, has an interesting relationship with Russia. The investigations into that have been quashed, so we don’t get to find out about the rumoured Kremlin calls he was making.
Because Musk is a fickle, unethical individual with poor impulse control and too much money who only talks about high minded concepts like “free speech” and “battling censorship” when it serves his interests at that moment.
Yes, ask their Mossad direct and local handlers (as per Mike Pompeo [1]) about how things are going, I’m sure that this being Mossad they have a ground-based way to get the information out.
Mike Pompeo is a private citizen; is there some reason to believe that he has direct knowledge of foreign involvement in these protests? It seems unlikely, and doubly so that he’d actually disclose it if he did.
“Former” is operative. I don’t see any reason to believe that Pompeo has special insider knowledge here, and sharing it makes zero sense even if he did. The more parsimonious explanation is that he’s a sidelined grifter whose only way to stay relevant is to speculate on social media.
GPS comparison is moot in this case, as there's no need for Starlink constellations to provide full GNSS capability, just locating the satellites precisely enough to facilitate beamforming.
GPS signals are extremely weak, and they're necessarily received from omnidirectional antennas that can't provide much antenna gain. In some sense it's a miracle of signal processing that GPS can ever be received.
There have been developments in receiving antennas that are harder to jam.
Most jamming is horizontal and limited to a few bands. So by having a directional antenna and listening to all services for now it seems to work. But this is a cat and mouse game.
For legal reasons I base this off of nothing but just turn your jammer to the sky. Could get fancy and point out directly at the satellites since my understanding is it's pretty easy to know where they are.
Edit to add: I do not mean the GPS satellites or the starlink ground terminals. That was not the question so that is not my answer. I mean the starlink satellites
That doesn't work. GPS is broadcast, not bidirectional communication, so preventing the satellites from seeing the GPS receiver does nothing: they're not looking to begin with.
What are you talking about? The jammers are on the ground. Just like receivers on the ground can be jammed with bad RF nearby, so can receivers in space. You just point the bad RF towards the receiver
The GPS satellites aren't receiving anything. The GPS satellites transmit signals, and the starlink terminals (and other users of GPS) receive those signals.
More to the point, to do that to this number of satellites on this big an area you'd need nuclear power plant levels of power, and it would only degrade GPS a bit (their clocks slowly desync when uplink is blocked)
Ok they said the GPS of the starlink satellites is being jammed, and the question was how. The comment I was replying to did not say the terminal, it said the satellite. Maybe that's the confusion
This whole stalink for military use (Starshield) was a scam Elon sold the military from the beginning. Just like his dumb ass tunnels and his self driving cars. He is putting the military at risk.
Why are none of the people I saw posting non-stop about Palestine saying anything about Iranian freedom? Would honestly love to hear a genuine response from anyone who is against the movement in Iran. Or even conflicted about it.
There are a lot of signs that the leader being suggested would be a king, which is not something most citizens in democratic nations would feel natural fighting for.
I’m not against the movement, but the last time Iran had protests this bad was in 1979. It didn’t get better afterwards. It’s a huge mess and I hope they figure something out to fix it, but I’m just pessimistic.
1. Iran has frequent large protests that consistently get crushed. So while I assume the vast majority of Americans oppose the Iranian government, it’s hard to get worked up for the 5th, 6th time.
2. The US doesn’t support the Iranian government. We already sanction them. What additional support can US citizens lobby for? In the case of Israel, decreased US support would have a tangible effect. Unclear how increased US support for Iranian protestors would matter.
I've been curious myself about why the activist class seems weirdly quiet on this issue.
On a quick scan of media feeds I've seen a couple of things that stand out (I do not confirm or deny how true these claims are)
1) Current Iran is a enemy of the USA and thus activists can't support the destruction of the current regime. Iran is able to create nukes so can put pressure on the USA in Middle East Politics (esp. Palestine and Israel)
2) The uprising and the Shah are CIA/Western Backed and thus supporting the protestors is de-facto colonialism/imperialism.
3) Contrary to popular belief Iran is not actually a Muslim nation, only the leadership is. The population is significantly more varied and people do not want to be seen supporting the firebombing of Mosques because Islamphobia.
I don't know how widespread these opinions are, but it IS very strange how I don't see more outrage.
I think the left-leaning activist people in the Americas are so against any position that could align with a Trump position, that they can’t think beyond those lines. If Trump supports the revolution it must be bad.
I have a less charitable and more direct answer. Right now there is a notion in Left that Israeli are the oppressor. In Iran large majority of population is Persian but MINO (Muslim in name only due to dictatorship). They are struggling to get freedom from the Islamic regime and getting some help from Israel. This flips the narrative in Left's mind (if they accept it) that Muslims can be oppressors too and that is untenable for them. especially because Left in Western nations has basically aligned themselves with muslims so its easier for them to just ignore it.
BTW its not just left here, I originally hail from India and you can feel the pin-drop silence from left on Iran there too. They just hope the rebellion gets crushed by regime like other ones and they'll pretend status quo.
My TLDR takeaway: Muslims only care about when they are oppressed & Left is completely aligned with them right now.
Does anyone know how Iranians are _actually_ communicating right now? I remember seeing here on HN (admittedly a long time ago) some Bluetooth-mesh technologies that promised decentralized solutions to these very type of problems
So like they are very heavily DPI censored though and maybe govts able to spy on any messages you send right now but I feel like there is a still possibility that for the average communication, they might still exist but although heavily heavily censored/bad and I feel like protestors might not be able to communicate (which I feel like is the question you meant to be asking)
So TLDR: protestors must have a hard time sadly and they may be using bluetooth mesh or other tech, only they can tell after we figure things out but also lets say some major services websites might still exist after all if they bypass the dpi censorship for IPv4 services.
In my opinion, I feel like Protestors must be using mesh based technologies as you mention. We'll see what really ends up happening after we get some reports from Iran.
It is said they pulled the plug for all peering on Thursday, although I would assume some kind of government-run ISP may be operational still (I haven't checked Cloudlfare radar)
Pardon me but can you please provide me more context regarding it. I am genuinely confused about the ground state of reality in Iran right now regarding Internet access at all
can you please take a look at cloudflare radar and see what the current ipv4 connectivity means? Even Ipv4 was blocked for sometime but then it got back to normal in the graph shown in cloudflare radar
Can you please tell me what you mean by plug for all peering? Like complete internet blackout?
Remember when the Russians / Trump PACs smeared spammy crap all over social media to run this bitch agenda?
Then, PAC and foreign interference in US elections cost those firms a lot of money; they were asked to become a better censorship apparatus; to fight spam for billions of dollars, Eric
Satellite signals are just weak RF signals and can be disrupted easily. There is nothing 'hardened' about them. It's funny that people think Starlink or any of its many incipient competitors are any different.
Starlink uses beamforming with directional antenna arrays, so it should be rather difficult to jam compared to omnidirectional antennas. It's basically a dish pointed at the satellite, so the jammer should be in between to work.
Antenna arrays aren't perfect so it still picks up some energy omnidirectionally, but it should be possible to shield it with some metal plates in a way that only sky is visible.
> basically a dish pointed at the satellite, so the jammer should be in between to work.
Which isn't hard to do if you have the budget of a government. Directional antennae, GPS and a helicopter/Cessna flying patterns over a metro. Beams from the terminal are constantly scanning the sky chasing the constellations.
A higher hit rate option would be a fleet of low altitude drones taking high-res pictures of the ground, and running a fine-tuned classifier to identify Starlink Dishies which require a clear line of sight to the sky.
People who think Starlink is unblockable, or somehow anonymous IRL are unimaginative. Iran is well-versed enough with electronic warfare that it tricked a RQ-170 Sentinel land on it's territory - how hardened are Starlink terminals against responding to a spoofed signal and exposing their locations?
I think, to beamform in the right direction you have to be able to locate yourself precisely, have an up-to-date almanach of the satellites, and a precise enough datation source. Jamming GNSS is a source of problems for 2 of those issues.
Also, the antennas on starlink dishes are still pretty small, likely to pick up some hard-to-remove sidelobes and the tech to cancel them properly might be export-controlled. You still need to be within electromagnetic visibility to jam them, though.
To add to my point, with multiple antennas it's also possible to spatially separate signals. Not sure if Starlink is doing that, but I think it should be possible to escape GPS jammers by using two antennas with some distance between them. Two antennas can pick up the direction of the signals and with some math they can be separated, at least in theory.
But it's in extremely difficult to disrupt the signals across the whole country? I person go go out with a battery and setup a starlink terminal in the middle of nowhere in 2 minutes (exactly how I'm writing this post right now from Boliva)
If your objective is to stop or at least slow coordination of protests and flow of information about things the regime is doing in the major cities of Tehran and Mashhad, you're a lot less worried that plenty of rural villages get completely unhindered signals, if anyone in them happens to have a Starlink terminal.
Agreed, the only way to get starlink terminal is via smuggling it into the country and it costs 1000's of $ or 500$ or more which is more than many months of average iranian income let alone rural villages
I hope though that perhaps rural villages can shelter activists but who knows what happens in the ground level, perhaps news development from tehran doesn't reach the villages in the first case, maybe they block anyone entering and leaving the city I am not sure
This seems to be a really bad development for protestors. There were reports that some protestors were killed by the govt and now I am genuinely worried about them even more. This tyranny needs to be stopped.
I am wondering if Starlink users can't compensate for it themselves by transmitting a GPS signal using some SDR device locally, just putting in correct coordinates from Google Maps into it? GPS signals are at 1.5GHz which is easily accessible for cheap SDRs.
But really, why doesn't Starlink device allow to simply enter coordinates manually? After all, if someone enters wrong coordinates (say to enable operation in a place where Starlink has no service), it won't work because it won't find satellites where it expects them to be.
I don't own a starlink dish, but I assume one can log in and configure some things. It would be a nobrainer to have a way to enter coordinates and system time. Also the manual could have sane advice like recommendation to use "peace time" to establish the locations GPS coordinates and write them down on some sticker or so.
If it can serve a basic web page with a world map, it may be justifiable to include it for the price of the dish (yes will require some flash storage).
The title is wrong, as usual. This is a re-hash of earlier reports. Starlink is getting 30-80% packet loss, depending on where they're using it. Likely local jammers. But it still gets through.
Any satellite signal is going to be relatively weak compared to what you can produce on the ground. Inverse square law, and power limitations of a mobile transmitter.
It's fairly trivial to set up a transmitter that saturates a slice of spectrum at an amount of power that is ridiculous compared to a satellite signal. There are still AM radio stations operating that go as high as 50kW. The satellite transmitters aren't going to exceed maybe a hundred Watts, at a great distance, and that falls off at 1/(distance)^2.
The Russians have developed rather efficient GPS jamming equip., as we know, Iranian Gov't is partners with Russians, providing drone technology, so no great mystery where likely the jammers originated from.
There's a difference between possible and plausible. In the most absurd case, it was always a given that a sufficiently large faraday cage or a literal iron dome would block starlink from reaching anybody in iran therefore it was never thought to be impossible to block starlink. At best it's implausible but that would refer specifically to the construction of the giant faraday cage and the literal iron dome, not the concept of blocking starlink.
> Fortunately, the government cannot enforce complete blackout because thousands of startlink terminals are active inside the country. They have been complaining about it to no avail.
Seems they finally figured out a way. Seems like yet again, you shouldn't shout hello until you've crossed the stream.
I wouldn't consider it funny though when you realize the gravitas of the situation though but yea.
I just wanted to point out that it felt rude to call it funny but I understand what you mean and what intention but please be more sincere about such issues.
> Seems they finally figured out a way. Seems like yet again, you shouldn't shout hello until you've crossed the stream.
Someone mentions that there is a huge packet loss but its still possible. Other mentions that its possible to do this in rural villages and there are many nuances. I genuinely dont know the technological reasons or know how of what it is or what the ground state of reality is and what's actually happening but I hope that starlink still works or can have a work-around for the activists. We will see in sometime what really happens in the ground state as I must admit I still don't know if its 100% censored or what the reality is.
The situation as a whole is in no way funny, sorry I gave you that impression. What is funny to me, is a confidently incorrect comment from a related story just two days ago that also ended up the highest upvoted one, which quickly seemed to have been proven wrong. This is still funny to me, yet the situation itself remains helplessly depressing.
What do you mean, Russia has been doing the same thing for most of the war? The success relies on you controlling the territory, or at least territory close enough, so the results vary.
In a war zone any large high power jammer will be like supernova in the darkness visible for detectors from tens of kilometers away. So its gonna be immediately destroyed.
Iran protesters cant find or destroy jammers though.
Isn't Iran doing this from the air? That would be far more effective. In a contested space with AA everywhere that wouldn't be feasible (i.e. large parts of Ukraine)
I don't think it will have much implication. Jamming is a two way street. You can erase some spectrums, but you are also creating massive electromagnetic beacon for home-on-jam ammunition.
However if you are a protester without any advanced weapons, then you can't do anything against that.
Link budget cuts both ways. If your user terminal sucks, you can compensate somewhat - by building a larger, beefier satellite that has better antenna directionality and pumps out more transmission juice, and throwing the data rate under the bus. This is how it's done now.
Having a terminal that doesn't suck puts less strain on the satellite side and, thus, scales better. But for emergencies and serving middle of nowhere, "direct to cell" makes sense.
Iranians are living under Islamic colonial dictatorship. Blaming this unrest on Israeli and US influence is absurd. And only exposes you as a sympathizer to the oppressive regime.
I think this is a major unforced error by the USG, of course we have seen plenty of those of late. There may be Israeli, American or other intelligence agencies present. But history has shown that spies can't just foment a revolution out of thin air. The Americans' first attempt at a coup in Chile, in 1970, failed. It was only after three years of US machinations and missteps by the Allende administration that Pinochet arose — Pinochet was given his fateful promotion by Allende himself! And that was in a "friendly" country where the US had many connections.
Iranians wouldn't be on the streets right now if the government had listened to its own water engineers over the years. But the new political culture in our government is more interested in braggadocio than achieving real change. I doubt that if the protesters succeed that Iran would become friendly to the West. At the same time there is probably a not too contrived worry among the Iranians that Netanyahu will seize the opportunity to attack if a political transition occurs. Bluster like this only hurts the cause.
I have to imagine the protests would stop immediately if Iran is attacked by Israel or the U.S. You can be angry at your government while not welcoming bombers.
Ordinarily I'd have faith the governments were smart enough to know better, but at this point I've lost hope.
Aside from your location, GPS also provides a very precise timestamp. Starlink terminals use that to compute where the satellite they're talking to is this nanosecond, and aim the antenna there.
This is the main way GPS jamming breaks Starlink.
The terminals also use it to know their own location. Maybe it can ignore "movements" when jammed, IDK.
The receiver does have a fallback mode when jammed. It blindly searches the sky for any satellite to talk to. Once found, it's can limp along at much lower bandwidth.
My thoughts to the Iranian people, may they get what they need and deserve at a cost that is not too high.
As in all conflicts, there's always a "fog of blame" where there isn't absolute certainty about who is right and who is to blame. Though it's not that hard. Because their survival depends on it, dictators are very good at blaming others--anybody, really--for their own shortcomings, and they usually wield the kind of hard power that makes them extremely costly to topple in terms of suffering and human lives.
Life is too short to have to deal with despots. We need a better, perhaps less-crowded or less xenophobic world where every person can protect their right to exist by simply packing and leaving as a last resort.
A politicide is occuring right now in Iran.
Agreed, but right now, I'm getting Bay of Pigs vibes from the whole affair. Trump baits the protestors into action -- don't worry, we've got your backs! -- and then hangs them out to dry.
The hubris of US idealists. There's no packing up and leaving. If you leave your tribe you are dead. This was true 10k years ago and it is true again. If you weren't born under the US security umbrella you are nothing but an ant avoiding the boots of those above you. And the whole world is returning to mean once more. There's no packing bags, there's fighting for YOUR freedom or being a slave. Those above will always seek to oppress those below.
There are a lot of people not particularly under the US umbrella who are doing ok. India for example. It's debatable how under the umbrella Europe is these days with the current president.
Seems like a big flaw that low-orbit constellations have a dependency on GPS, which are high-altitude satellites. They're 40x further away and so have 1,600x greater path loss. Why can't they use their own satellites for this?
> "But Starlink receivers use GPS to locate and connect to satellites. “Since its 12-day war with Israel last June," The Times says, “Iran has been disrupting GPS signals.”"
This isn’t even true; Starlink can use the local starlink constellation for positioning and the option is available in the customer facing configuration specifically for GPS denied areas (since about two years ago), where it’s been used for ages.
Something else is going on here - perhaps there’s an edge case where Starlink can be made to perform poorly without falling back away from GPS, but I wouldn’t expect this since it’s been “tested” in the most GPS hostile places for quite some time now.
It sounds like Starlink uses GPS to localize the receiver, rather than for any active step in the communication link. Since most receivers are static, I wonder if an effective workaround to this is for the receiver to just remember its last GPS fix for longer, or worst-case allow a manual location specification in lieu of a GPS fix.
A user provided location cannot be trusted for geofencing purposes. A GNSS (GPS or other) is needed sooner or later. This is a legal requirement for sanction and regulation enforcement (US, if not others).
Starlink system inevitably knows the terminal location down to a service cell, which is what, a 20km grain? Good enough for "regulation enforcement".
The satellites know where they are TX beamforming to a fine-enough degree of specificity for geofencing.
Gps is free to use. Running your own gnss service requires an atomic clock and possibly separate transmission hardware, which is possible, but adds cost, volume, and weight.
According to [1], “[o]ne of the current generation of GPS satellites (Block III) weighs over 2,200 kg (4,850 lb), the weight of an average pickup truck. The body of these satellites are 1.8 m x 2.5 m x 3.4 m (5.9’ x 8.2’ x 11.2’) in size”. In comparison, “the current V2 Starlink satellite version weighs approximately 1,760 lbs (800 kilograms) at launch, almost three times heavier than the older generation satellites (weighing in at 573 lbs or 260 kg)” [2]
[1] https://novatel.com/an-introduction-to-gnss/basic-concepts/s... [2] https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html
> Gps is free to use. Running your own gnss service requires an atomic clock and possibly separate transmission hardware, which is possible, but adds cost, volume, and weight.
Thanks you provide some great insights on why starlink didnt use gps but still if starlink wants to focus itself as the uncensorable internet in places like protests etc. I feel like they can probably do this after this recent incident
I just can't feel but sad right now because starlink was still providing activists ways to report outside and that helped protestors a lot and information. Now even starlink got removed because starlink tried to save money and I think might not have thought about what if gps itself gets blocked.
This is giving very bad signals for Iran. Is there any way now that Protestors are able to communicate to the outside world/ activists be able to report data outside?
> if starlink wants to focus itself as the uncensorable internet in places like protests etc
I’m not sure Musk would actually want that though, especially these days.
Why not? Has Musk shut off Starlink? The reporting out of Ukraine was almost entirely wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain...
Nobody brought up Ukraine
From your link, with good sources:
In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[19][20] SpaceX executives repeatedly stated that Starlink needed to remain a civilian network;[21][22][12] in late 2022, as Starlink was being used as a tool in combat in Ukraine, SpaceX announced Starshield, a Starlink-like program designed for government customers.[23][21] Musk is reported to have said that Ukraine was "going too far" in threatening to inflict a “strategic defeat” on the Kremlin.[24]
Musk, like Trump, has an interesting relationship with Russia. The investigations into that have been quashed, so we don’t get to find out about the rumoured Kremlin calls he was making.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/business/dealbook/musk-pu...
> doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.
that made me laugh!
Why not?
Because his enthusiasm for free speech is variable depending on whether he likes the speech or not.
Because Musk is a fickle, unethical individual with poor impulse control and too much money who only talks about high minded concepts like “free speech” and “battling censorship” when it serves his interests at that moment.
Yes, ask their Mossad direct and local handlers (as per Mike Pompeo [1]) about how things are going, I’m sure that this being Mossad they have a ground-based way to get the information out.
[1] https://xcancel.com/mikepompeo/status/2007180411638620659
Mike Pompeo is a private citizen; is there some reason to believe that he has direct knowledge of foreign involvement in these protests? It seems unlikely, and doubly so that he’d actually disclose it if he did.
You and I are private citizens, he’s former US Secretary of State, let’s quit the charade.
“Former” is operative. I don’t see any reason to believe that Pompeo has special insider knowledge here, and sharing it makes zero sense even if he did. The more parsimonious explanation is that he’s a sidelined grifter whose only way to stay relevant is to speculate on social media.
GPS comparison is moot in this case, as there's no need for Starlink constellations to provide full GNSS capability, just locating the satellites precisely enough to facilitate beamforming.
Musk tweeted a while back that the constellation could be used as its own GPS service, but it wasn’t a priority right now. Maybe later.
If the GPS satellites are above the starlink ones how is Iran able to disrupt the GPS signals?
GPS signals are extremely weak, and they're necessarily received from omnidirectional antennas that can't provide much antenna gain. In some sense it's a miracle of signal processing that GPS can ever be received.
There have been developments in receiving antennas that are harder to jam.
Most jamming is horizontal and limited to a few bands. So by having a directional antenna and listening to all services for now it seems to work. But this is a cat and mouse game.
https://furuno.eu/gr-en/marine-solutions/gnss-positioning-ti...
By jamming the receivers on the ground
Ok that makes a lot of sense, thank you.
For legal reasons I base this off of nothing but just turn your jammer to the sky. Could get fancy and point out directly at the satellites since my understanding is it's pretty easy to know where they are.
Edit to add: I do not mean the GPS satellites or the starlink ground terminals. That was not the question so that is not my answer. I mean the starlink satellites
That doesn't work. GPS is broadcast, not bidirectional communication, so preventing the satellites from seeing the GPS receiver does nothing: they're not looking to begin with.
What are you talking about? The jammers are on the ground. Just like receivers on the ground can be jammed with bad RF nearby, so can receivers in space. You just point the bad RF towards the receiver
The GPS satellites aren't receiving anything. The GPS satellites transmit signals, and the starlink terminals (and other users of GPS) receive those signals.
Wellll you could technically jam their uplink channels, but doing so may get the US in your doorstep quite quickly
More to the point, to do that to this number of satellites on this big an area you'd need nuclear power plant levels of power, and it would only degrade GPS a bit (their clocks slowly desync when uplink is blocked)
Ok they said the GPS of the starlink satellites is being jammed, and the question was how. The comment I was replying to did not say the terminal, it said the satellite. Maybe that's the confusion
Maybe he's implying they're literally cancelling out the waves like ANC headphones but with emf and a large geographic area.
A CRPA should still work.
This whole stalink for military use (Starshield) was a scam Elon sold the military from the beginning. Just like his dumb ass tunnels and his self driving cars. He is putting the military at risk.
Is there any actual evidence that Starshield doesn't work substantially as promised?
I don't know. Has the military ever relied so heavily on a company who's CEO frequently uses ketamine?
Recent related discussions:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46573384 - Iranian regime tries to shut down Starlink (42 comments)
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46564552 - Iran’s internet shutdown is chillingly precise and may last some time (91 comments)
Or just pick any of the matches here.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Why are none of the people I saw posting non-stop about Palestine saying anything about Iranian freedom? Would honestly love to hear a genuine response from anyone who is against the movement in Iran. Or even conflicted about it.
Speaking from an American perspective, many left-leaning commentators I've seen are focused on the ICE situation in the states right now.
But that's the most optimistic take I can conjure.
There are a lot of signs that the leader being suggested would be a king, which is not something most citizens in democratic nations would feel natural fighting for.
I’m not against the movement, but the last time Iran had protests this bad was in 1979. It didn’t get better afterwards. It’s a huge mess and I hope they figure something out to fix it, but I’m just pessimistic.
Thanks for the reply. Makes sense.
I offer two possibilities:
1. Iran has frequent large protests that consistently get crushed. So while I assume the vast majority of Americans oppose the Iranian government, it’s hard to get worked up for the 5th, 6th time.
2. The US doesn’t support the Iranian government. We already sanction them. What additional support can US citizens lobby for? In the case of Israel, decreased US support would have a tangible effect. Unclear how increased US support for Iranian protestors would matter.
Makes sense!
Because the Iranian regime was the one pushing that pro Palestine narrative.
I hope the movement succeeds.
I've been curious myself about why the activist class seems weirdly quiet on this issue.
On a quick scan of media feeds I've seen a couple of things that stand out (I do not confirm or deny how true these claims are)
1) Current Iran is a enemy of the USA and thus activists can't support the destruction of the current regime. Iran is able to create nukes so can put pressure on the USA in Middle East Politics (esp. Palestine and Israel)
2) The uprising and the Shah are CIA/Western Backed and thus supporting the protestors is de-facto colonialism/imperialism.
3) Contrary to popular belief Iran is not actually a Muslim nation, only the leadership is. The population is significantly more varied and people do not want to be seen supporting the firebombing of Mosques because Islamphobia.
I don't know how widespread these opinions are, but it IS very strange how I don't see more outrage.
There's an alliance between the new left and islamism due to some ideological similarities.
Sure one side would march for pride and the other hangs gays on cranes.
However, in foreign policy both explain anything as some product of colonialism, a phenomena that essentially disappeared 60 years ago.
This is due to the effect Edward Said had on US humanities, which was in turn influenced by Muslim Brotherhood thought in his home country of Egypt
I think the left-leaning activist people in the Americas are so against any position that could align with a Trump position, that they can’t think beyond those lines. If Trump supports the revolution it must be bad.
Or because the Iranian Islamic regime supports Hamas? And they somehow align with that side. I don’t know.
The core of far left activism is being anti-Western. Therefore, they can't say anything bad about even the most despicable anti-Western governments.
That is what it seems like
I have a less charitable and more direct answer. Right now there is a notion in Left that Israeli are the oppressor. In Iran large majority of population is Persian but MINO (Muslim in name only due to dictatorship). They are struggling to get freedom from the Islamic regime and getting some help from Israel. This flips the narrative in Left's mind (if they accept it) that Muslims can be oppressors too and that is untenable for them. especially because Left in Western nations has basically aligned themselves with muslims so its easier for them to just ignore it.
BTW its not just left here, I originally hail from India and you can feel the pin-drop silence from left on Iran there too. They just hope the rebellion gets crushed by regime like other ones and they'll pretend status quo.
My TLDR takeaway: Muslims only care about when they are oppressed & Left is completely aligned with them right now.
I completely agree with you.
Does anyone know how Iranians are _actually_ communicating right now? I remember seeing here on HN (admittedly a long time ago) some Bluetooth-mesh technologies that promised decentralized solutions to these very type of problems
You might be referring to Bitchat.
The only working communication I see mentioned on X is Starlink.
I think IPv4 services are still present no?
So like they are very heavily DPI censored though and maybe govts able to spy on any messages you send right now but I feel like there is a still possibility that for the average communication, they might still exist but although heavily heavily censored/bad and I feel like protestors might not be able to communicate (which I feel like is the question you meant to be asking)
https://radar.cloudflare.com/routing/ir
So TLDR: protestors must have a hard time sadly and they may be using bluetooth mesh or other tech, only they can tell after we figure things out but also lets say some major services websites might still exist after all if they bypass the dpi censorship for IPv4 services.
In my opinion, I feel like Protestors must be using mesh based technologies as you mention. We'll see what really ends up happening after we get some reports from Iran.
It is said they pulled the plug for all peering on Thursday, although I would assume some kind of government-run ISP may be operational still (I haven't checked Cloudlfare radar)
Pardon me but can you please provide me more context regarding it. I am genuinely confused about the ground state of reality in Iran right now regarding Internet access at all
can you please take a look at cloudflare radar and see what the current ipv4 connectivity means? Even Ipv4 was blocked for sometime but then it got back to normal in the graph shown in cloudflare radar
Can you please tell me what you mean by plug for all peering? Like complete internet blackout?
Iranian address space is no longer in the public routing table.
I saw a comment yesterday from a user claiming to be in Iran. I think he said StarLink was usable. ( Maybe that’s changed, though. )
https://github.com/x011/smtp-tunnel-proxy :
> A high-speed covert tunnel that disguises TCP traffic as SMTP email communication to bypass Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) firewalls
It seems like these smuggle-disguise protocols are almost always trivially detectable.
Yes, but such tools aren't popular enough for the censor to specifically target.
Remember when the Russians / Trump PACs smeared spammy crap all over social media to run this bitch agenda?
Then, PAC and foreign interference in US elections cost those firms a lot of money; they were asked to become a better censorship apparatus; to fight spam for billions of dollars, Eric
(Edit: this is the tone of the communication; from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicinal_Fried_Chicken )
what does this have to do with smuggling tcp connections over email
No mention of any security review, or even testing. Reason enough to stay away from such tools.
Satellite signals are just weak RF signals and can be disrupted easily. There is nothing 'hardened' about them. It's funny that people think Starlink or any of its many incipient competitors are any different.
Starlink uses beamforming with directional antenna arrays, so it should be rather difficult to jam compared to omnidirectional antennas. It's basically a dish pointed at the satellite, so the jammer should be in between to work.
Antenna arrays aren't perfect so it still picks up some energy omnidirectionally, but it should be possible to shield it with some metal plates in a way that only sky is visible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array
> basically a dish pointed at the satellite, so the jammer should be in between to work.
Which isn't hard to do if you have the budget of a government. Directional antennae, GPS and a helicopter/Cessna flying patterns over a metro. Beams from the terminal are constantly scanning the sky chasing the constellations.
A higher hit rate option would be a fleet of low altitude drones taking high-res pictures of the ground, and running a fine-tuned classifier to identify Starlink Dishies which require a clear line of sight to the sky.
People who think Starlink is unblockable, or somehow anonymous IRL are unimaginative. Iran is well-versed enough with electronic warfare that it tricked a RQ-170 Sentinel land on it's territory - how hardened are Starlink terminals against responding to a spoofed signal and exposing their locations?
I think, to beamform in the right direction you have to be able to locate yourself precisely, have an up-to-date almanach of the satellites, and a precise enough datation source. Jamming GNSS is a source of problems for 2 of those issues.
Also, the antennas on starlink dishes are still pretty small, likely to pick up some hard-to-remove sidelobes and the tech to cancel them properly might be export-controlled. You still need to be within electromagnetic visibility to jam them, though.
Yes, afaik the source of issues is GPS jamming.
To add to my point, with multiple antennas it's also possible to spatially separate signals. Not sure if Starlink is doing that, but I think it should be possible to escape GPS jammers by using two antennas with some distance between them. Two antennas can pick up the direction of the signals and with some math they can be separated, at least in theory.
But it's in extremely difficult to disrupt the signals across the whole country? I person go go out with a battery and setup a starlink terminal in the middle of nowhere in 2 minutes (exactly how I'm writing this post right now from Boliva)
If your objective is to stop or at least slow coordination of protests and flow of information about things the regime is doing in the major cities of Tehran and Mashhad, you're a lot less worried that plenty of rural villages get completely unhindered signals, if anyone in them happens to have a Starlink terminal.
Agreed, the only way to get starlink terminal is via smuggling it into the country and it costs 1000's of $ or 500$ or more which is more than many months of average iranian income let alone rural villages
I hope though that perhaps rural villages can shelter activists but who knows what happens in the ground level, perhaps news development from tehran doesn't reach the villages in the first case, maybe they block anyone entering and leaving the city I am not sure
This seems to be a really bad development for protestors. There were reports that some protestors were killed by the govt and now I am genuinely worried about them even more. This tyranny needs to be stopped.
Some videos are still leaking out and it’s likely via starlink (from what I’ve read). Better than nothing.
10W is enough to block GPS signals in a 15-30km radius. The signals are below the noise floor and easy to disrupt.
Russia seems to have been ineffective at stopping the Ukranians using it.
I am wondering if Starlink users can't compensate for it themselves by transmitting a GPS signal using some SDR device locally, just putting in correct coordinates from Google Maps into it? GPS signals are at 1.5GHz which is easily accessible for cheap SDRs.
But really, why doesn't Starlink device allow to simply enter coordinates manually? After all, if someone enters wrong coordinates (say to enable operation in a place where Starlink has no service), it won't work because it won't find satellites where it expects them to be.
Or is there something here that i'm missing?
I don't own a starlink dish, but I assume one can log in and configure some things. It would be a nobrainer to have a way to enter coordinates and system time. Also the manual could have sane advice like recommendation to use "peace time" to establish the locations GPS coordinates and write them down on some sticker or so.
If it can serve a basic web page with a world map, it may be justifiable to include it for the price of the dish (yes will require some flash storage).
I candidly thought it wasn’t possible to block Starlink.
I guess with motivated actors anything is possible.
The title is wrong, as usual. This is a re-hash of earlier reports. Starlink is getting 30-80% packet loss, depending on where they're using it. Likely local jammers. But it still gets through.
Any satellite signal is going to be relatively weak compared to what you can produce on the ground. Inverse square law, and power limitations of a mobile transmitter.
It's fairly trivial to set up a transmitter that saturates a slice of spectrum at an amount of power that is ridiculous compared to a satellite signal. There are still AM radio stations operating that go as high as 50kW. The satellite transmitters aren't going to exceed maybe a hundred Watts, at a great distance, and that falls off at 1/(distance)^2.
The Russians have developed rather efficient GPS jamming equip., as we know, Iranian Gov't is partners with Russians, providing drone technology, so no great mystery where likely the jammers originated from.
There's a difference between possible and plausible. In the most absurd case, it was always a given that a sufficiently large faraday cage or a literal iron dome would block starlink from reaching anybody in iran therefore it was never thought to be impossible to block starlink. At best it's implausible but that would refer specifically to the construction of the giant faraday cage and the literal iron dome, not the concept of blocking starlink.
Jamming or hijacking geostationary satellites signal is trivial for literally a team of 3 hm radio veterans with 10+ years of experience.
Jamming RF is easy in general. Nowadays we can even do beamforming so i guess it would be trivial.
If it were impossible, China would've had reason to blow up their satellites in orbit. The US would do the same thing for Chinese satellite ISPs.
Jamming on such a large scale is expensive, but it's hardly impossible.
There’s no evidence that China (or anybody else) has the capacity to meaningfully harm the 9000+ satellite Starlink constellation.
Debris creating debris creating debris ... ?
Only if they want to kill 99% of all sattelites since this is a game that can be played together.
Yes, I’ve seen this!
It was a small, triangular ship that blasted big asteroids, which in turn spun off and collided with other asteroids…
Funny considering the top comment from the two-day old "Iran Goes Into IPv6 Blackout" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46542683):
> Fortunately, the government cannot enforce complete blackout because thousands of startlink terminals are active inside the country. They have been complaining about it to no avail.
Seems they finally figured out a way. Seems like yet again, you shouldn't shout hello until you've crossed the stream.
I wouldn't consider it funny though when you realize the gravitas of the situation though but yea.
I just wanted to point out that it felt rude to call it funny but I understand what you mean and what intention but please be more sincere about such issues.
> Seems they finally figured out a way. Seems like yet again, you shouldn't shout hello until you've crossed the stream.
Someone mentions that there is a huge packet loss but its still possible. Other mentions that its possible to do this in rural villages and there are many nuances. I genuinely dont know the technological reasons or know how of what it is or what the ground state of reality is and what's actually happening but I hope that starlink still works or can have a work-around for the activists. We will see in sometime what really happens in the ground state as I must admit I still don't know if its 100% censored or what the reality is.
The situation as a whole is in no way funny, sorry I gave you that impression. What is funny to me, is a confidently incorrect comment from a related story just two days ago that also ended up the highest upvoted one, which quickly seemed to have been proven wrong. This is still funny to me, yet the situation itself remains helplessly depressing.
Is this not only a side effect of Iran doing widespread GPS and GNSS jamming or spoofing?
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46573384
HAM Radio still works
I am curious if there are any implications for the Russian invasion of Ukraine from this tactic working.
What do you mean, Russia has been doing the same thing for most of the war? The success relies on you controlling the territory, or at least territory close enough, so the results vary.
In a war zone any large high power jammer will be like supernova in the darkness visible for detectors from tens of kilometers away. So its gonna be immediately destroyed.
Iran protesters cant find or destroy jammers though.
Isn't Iran doing this from the air? That would be far more effective. In a contested space with AA everywhere that wouldn't be feasible (i.e. large parts of Ukraine)
I don't think it will have much implication. Jamming is a two way street. You can erase some spectrums, but you are also creating massive electromagnetic beacon for home-on-jam ammunition.
However if you are a protester without any advanced weapons, then you can't do anything against that.
Both sides are using starlink, yes?
Also there's now guowang to contend with. I'm not sure how widely available access to it is.
I would assume both sides are heavily jamming the frontlines. But presumably long range drone operations are more likely to use it.
Jamming is subject to the inverse square law.
Yes, this is why it happens only on the front line
I am curious how phones now can reach LEO for enough bandwidth for voice calls but you need a full dish, however small, for starlink?
Could you get at least 1mbps from a phone to LEO now for email and non-realtime data?
Link budget cuts both ways. If your user terminal sucks, you can compensate somewhat - by building a larger, beefier satellite that has better antenna directionality and pumps out more transmission juice, and throwing the data rate under the bus. This is how it's done now.
Having a terminal that doesn't suck puts less strain on the satellite side and, thus, scales better. But for emergencies and serving middle of nowhere, "direct to cell" makes sense.
You pretty much nailed it, its all about bandwidth.
The emergency SOS feature is optimized down to the byte to ensure it can work with poor signal and low bandwidth.
Good for them, as they’re under external attack. For example a US ghoul like Mike Pompeo had this to say recently [1]:
> Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them
so under those circumstances anything goes to defeat the likes of Mossad and associated foreign entities doing their thing on Iranian soil.
[1] https://xcancel.com/mikepompeo/status/2007180411638620659
Iranians are living under Islamic colonial dictatorship. Blaming this unrest on Israeli and US influence is absurd. And only exposes you as a sympathizer to the oppressive regime.
Is them the Iranian people or their dictators?
I think this is a major unforced error by the USG, of course we have seen plenty of those of late. There may be Israeli, American or other intelligence agencies present. But history has shown that spies can't just foment a revolution out of thin air. The Americans' first attempt at a coup in Chile, in 1970, failed. It was only after three years of US machinations and missteps by the Allende administration that Pinochet arose — Pinochet was given his fateful promotion by Allende himself! And that was in a "friendly" country where the US had many connections.
Iranians wouldn't be on the streets right now if the government had listened to its own water engineers over the years. But the new political culture in our government is more interested in braggadocio than achieving real change. I doubt that if the protesters succeed that Iran would become friendly to the West. At the same time there is probably a not too contrived worry among the Iranians that Netanyahu will seize the opportunity to attack if a political transition occurs. Bluster like this only hurts the cause.
I have to imagine the protests would stop immediately if Iran is attacked by Israel or the U.S. You can be angry at your government while not welcoming bombers.
Ordinarily I'd have faith the governments were smart enough to know better, but at this point I've lost hope.
I had an AI explain this. Usual AI caveats apply.
Aside from your location, GPS also provides a very precise timestamp. Starlink terminals use that to compute where the satellite they're talking to is this nanosecond, and aim the antenna there.
This is the main way GPS jamming breaks Starlink.
The terminals also use it to know their own location. Maybe it can ignore "movements" when jammed, IDK.
The receiver does have a fallback mode when jammed. It blindly searches the sky for any satellite to talk to. Once found, it's can limp along at much lower bandwidth.
I publicly beg people not to do this.
Sharing anything but the prompt you wrote is useless and arguably harmful.