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?
Doesn't Starlink use some sort wideband signal which is hard to jam? Combined with some sort of frequency hopping and a moving constellation should mean blocking a user or satellite signal should be pretty hard, like many times the cost of building and servicing a user terminal for use against protesters.
> Doesn't Starlink use some sort wideband signal which is hard to jam?
It probably is hard to jam, but you don't need to jam it if you can pinpoint terminal locations and send in on-the-ground enforcers to confiscate the equipment and make arrests. TV detector vans were introduced in 1952[1], the principles for finding sources of RF emissions isn't cutting edge technology.
You realize Iran is pretty big with lots of people and Iran can't run around with detector van across all those regions and people. Specially when they potentially lose control over certain areas. And those vans can be disabled pretty easily as well, specially in a proto-war zone.
That said, this would only be true if there were enough people with terminals.
TV emissions don't use beam forming. This is all a cat and mouse game, but Starlink being a distributed system should mean it is harder to completely block use of.
See my other comment upthread on how beamforming doesn't make terminals/emissions invisible, just harder to acquire, but well within reach of a determined adversary. Newer Starlink terminals have a 1.5° beam, and older ones are
3.4° wide . At 10,000 feet altitude, the tighter beam is 245 feet across. Starlink satellite orbits are public and predictable, and Iran has drones to spare.
This is just 1 passive RF-based approach, and there are others (e.g. drone-mounted FLIR surveys done at 3 am)
Like I said, this is a cat and mouse game, if you had terminals to spare or even just fake battery operated transmitting antennas, you could waste a lot of drone time. There are also masking techniques and it's not like the drones can't be tracked or misguided. It would take orders of magnitude more effort to stop Starlink than to keep using it minimally. Iran is a big country, it just depends on how determined and prepared the protestors are to evade censorship. Which by itself is hopefully just a start to other actions.
My starlink works fine under a ceramic tinted window that blocks 95% of UV and visible light, so you'd need a pretty fancy SAR camera for your fleet of drones.
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.
> Russia seems to have been ineffective at stopping the Ukranians using it.
Russia isn't in control of Ukrainian territory, where the starlink terminals are, which would be the prime targets of any disruption operation. The situations in Iran and Ukraine are materially different.
This is an incredible foretaste of what AI can enable in gaming. Not replacing humans (the creators here are former leaders from Minecraft), but rather simply unlocking more fun gameplay by offering creativity, humor, and branched storytelling customized to the player.
Hah from my knowledge of traditional AAA, there is 0 chance any AAA in development right now uses LLMs. A lot of them don't even use it for coding and gamedevs' mood about AI is abysmal.
I know, but it's a bit of an unstoppable force vs immovable object situation unless something changed. If they do it, I hope it'll be better than Copilot integrations :)
What's interesting is you might not want to see de novo AI-generated storytelling (slop factor), but you might really like the way AI can make a story crafted by humans more interactive.
It's going to be a balance act. There's going to be plenty of companies that are just going to be greedy and will generate AI slop without checking, which will undoubtedly tank the quality of many games in the near future.
When applied smartly and with human supervision, I think that AI could easily help humans build game worlds and stories that were previously impossible to achieve.
In addition to bi-facials starting to work quite well, HNers may be interested in a rising class of ultra-low-mass material that has come out of work at Stanford and Intel in transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) (e.g. for MoS₂, WS₂, WSe₂, etc.).
It turns out these enable a very high specific-power PV cell that adds another even more attractive production curve behind what is happening in vertical bi-facials. See e.g.:
Cells are subject to aggressive binning – akin to the early days of MOS process. And specs and process capability adhesion in the industry are not as "serious" as they are in the modern, U.S.-led semiconductor industry.
Source: I work on 100% Si anode batteries constructed in part with a litho-derived laser process at Enovix.
Last time I checked, most manufacturing of semiconductors isn't done in the US... sure, they are leading in design, but the manufacturing is elsewhere.
Practically, shorter path silicon does nice things for power budget for a few minutes, that then gets totally obliterated by feature builders wanting to do cooler things!
Not for cars yet, but Enovix has short-ion-path batteries intrinsic to its lithrographed 3D design. Performance is quite something: https://www.enovix.com/products/
There are other products already available to do it (DCBel), and it can be hacked of course, but at the current moment everything comes with substantial corner case blind spots, mostly related to grid-forming/following switching and to the resilience of the power electronics.
https://enphase.com/ev-chargers/bidirectional