I first had a conversation with my wife at a pizza place hanging out with mutual friends. We bonded through in person face to face conversation like cave people. She never used dating apps so there was no other way we were going to meet.
Turns out if you leave your home and hang out with people a lot, you build better social skills, and potential partners can get to know you as a friend first, and are more inclined to give you a chance at something more than they are when you are just another awkward photo in a dating app.
Before the era of cell phone and always on comms, leaving the house was a way to NOT be found on purpose. If you weren't home, people just had to wait!
Before mobile phones, there were public phone booths. Along motorways there were often call boxes. There’s little to none of that anymore.
Also before mobile phones, if you had an accident in a remote area you were at the mercy of someone passing by and noticing you. Today, modern cars can call 911 on your behalf along with your location without you even being conscious. Or if you don’t have a car that does this, then your cell can be used. Let’s not also forget iPhones calling for help when they detect you had a fall at home.
Yes emergencies existed before mobile phones. I contend that the use of mobile phones has led to better outcomes when an emergency happens. I also admit mobile phones will have caused some of those emergencies (distracted driver etc).
I have many times used public telephones when I really need to when traveling. The main difference today is they are free. Every airport lobby, every hotel, and most business can call a taxi or call 911 in a pinch. There are also free public use phones (often hardcoded to emergency numbers or taxi companies) often in hotel and airport lobbies.
I never noticed them until I got rid of my phone but they are everywhere.
In NYC all the payphones were replaced with wifi stations that also allow you to make free phone calls for emergencies etc.
Also all cell phones can call 911 without a sim or subscription so someone really worried about having instant access to call 911 in an emergency could have one of those keychain sized dumb phones they leave charged and powered off until they need it.
You are highly conditioned by marketing and social pressure to think you need to have a cell phone tracking you and distracting you at all times to live a safe and productive life in the modern world, but this is just not true.
Lived without one for 5 years, and have experienced accidents and emergencies in that time like anyone else.
Right, typically in an emergency you’ll want to call the police or paramedics, and later family. Front desk of any business or bystander can do the first, hospital can do the latter.
These are from posts/follows/likes. According to their CTO, about that same number of accounts on top of that don't do any of that and just visit/read the site.
> Normal person would drive carefully around blind spots.
I can't tell if you are using sarcasm here or are serious. I guess it depends on your definition of normal person (obviously not average, but an idealized driver maybe?).
AFAIK they used GPS spoofing which confuses the Starlink terminals - they need to know where they are to properly connect to the satellites above.
This can be overriden to use "Starlink positioning" where the terminal ignores GPS signals and dtermines its position based on Starlink satellite signals. I think this is what is used in Ukraine where GPS is mostly jammed/spoofed to hell even far from the front.
The GPS positioning is the default as it is likely more user friendly/has quicker lock in normal circumstances.
Another venue of attack could be the Starlink WiFi AP included in the terminals- you could track that down.
So in general:
* switch the terminal to Starlink positioning
* disable the Starkink terminal WiFi AP and conect by ethernet or connect an AP via ethernet with a new SSID and different MAC address
Spoofing - ok, but how did they detect all the starlinks? Assuming that users were smart to not turn on WiFi on starlink. Do these antennas emit certain waves that a “scanner” can detect and with 99% certainty figure out that that point on a map is a starlink antenna ?
My wild guess is that jamming is local. Major cities may be fully jammed. To get an idea about GNSS jamming range (different signal of course, probably much easier to jam), there are maps online where you can see which parts of Europe are currently GNSS-jammed. But I have the same question as you.
Definitely much easier to jam. Much higher orbits for gnss satellites, much lower signal intensity.
Also, starlink uses phased arrays with beamforming, effectively creating an electronically steerable directional antenna. It is harder to jam two directional antennas talking to each other, as your jammers are on the sides, where the lobes of the antenna radiation pattern are smaller.
Still, we're talking about signals coming from space, so maybe it is just enough to sprinkle more jammers in an urban setting.. I'm curious as well.
The GPS jamming maps are based on commercial air traffic flying in the area.
While that gives some ideas of how widespread the jamming is, it won't give accurate information about the range (air traffic avoids areas with jamming) of the interference or any information from places where there is no commercial air traffic (war zones, etc).
Supposedly it's high packet loss but still available to at least some extent. Or at least it was initially? Really highlights the importance of low bandwidth P2P capable messaging systems that support caching messages for later delivery as well as multiple underlying transports.
RF and GPS jamming has been a solved problem for decades. As a SWE, we are all expected to take Physics E&M, Circuits, and CompArch in our CS undergrad - think back to those classes.
Yes in most population centers. Any country that has the ability to stand up a cellular network has the ability to deploy jamming at scale.
The components needed to build jammers and EW systems have been heavily commodified for a decade now (hell, your phone's power brick, car, and TV all have dual use components for these kinds of applications), and most regional powers have been working on compound semiconductors and offensive electronic warfare for almost a generation now.
I don't think it's as easy as you're suggesting. GPS L1 jamming has been done routinely enough but the satellite bands (X/Ku/Ka) appear to be much more difficult to pull off.
Iran was reported to have mobile units with a fairly short range that constantly roamed around, only hitting 2 of the 3 bands (Ku/Ka). They're also reported to have received mobile Russian military units capable of jamming all 3 (X/Ku/Ka) over a much wider area. (I'm not actually clear the extent to which X band is associated with either Starlink or Starshield. Starshield also reportedly operates to at least some extent in parts of the S band. [0])
So the technology clearly exists but it doesn't seem to be something you can trivially throw together in your basement. That's quite unlike (for example) a cell phone jammer which a hobbyist can cheaply and easily assemble at home. I assume the extreme directional specificity of the antennas plays a large part in that.
Couldn't they target each starlink satellite for jamming as it flies overhead? The sat would still send fine, but you could effectively kill the antenna?
I guess (non-expert understanding) that it depends on how tight the beamforming is (relative to the distance of the jammer from a given ground station) or alternatively if the jammer can prevent the satellite from successfully locating the ground station to begin with.
Ah, yes. Buy two $40k cars, one of which funds one of the people actively trying to destroy democracy.
There's. A lot to unpack there.
But I've still got 3 suitcases of my own stuff sitting waiting for me to get a real flat, so I think I'll pass on that and just let you assume that everyone who disagrees with you is stupid and can't do their own research. And, I guess, has $80k just lying around to spend on whatever.
Sorry but where in the US does electricity cost under 10c/kWh (assuming something like 80kWh for 500km)? And 100$ for 30-40l of petrol? That'd be over 10$ per gallon
is the last point correct?
"Get familiar with remote detonation with drones, these are what we use to set off the molotovs:"
seems off for this list, like way off and more on military/offence side of type of thing?
and why would you need a 300m+ ethernet cable in a disaster?
Totally valid use case for sure, and we discussed this because I do have a Starlink dish, but honestly, in a conflict with the US...I don't think a) I'd want to use starlink and b) i'd expect it to work.
Ethernet cable is a high quality cable usable for various other purposes. That includes low voltage power line, such as 12V from the car to phone charger in the house, solar panel wiring, basic tripwire alarms, command relays in the yard from the house, basic audio intercom with your neighbors when phone lines are down, etc.
Plus the obvious ethernet repairs: lines broken by fallen trees/branches in a storm, video camera cables cut by thieves, install new survillance cameras, move existing ones.
Self-supporting ethernet cable is also a decent clothesline when your dryer is not working.
In his case i didn't actually bother asking about the cat6 because i already had a huge reel in my garage, but I can think of cases such a remotely mounting satellite dish' and maybe connecting buildings to each other.
The molotov didn't seem out of range for me honestly. Firstly because I know he was one of the first people flying drones for defence, and now they've been mass producing their own for a few years. I have to admit, it seems pretty rational to want to fight back in any way possible.
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