[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 9 points 6 hours ago

I pulled this same thing in college. I was a CS major in the late 90's and I took a class from the writing department on changing discourse in a new digital era.

The professor was really good at literary analysis and knew next to nothing about computers. He was spot on that big changes were afoot but he was as wrong as anyone else on what those changes were (spoiler: we all thought we would have an alternate universe in Cyberspace TM).

We had the option of creating a website as our final project and we realized that if we just put in every possible feature we'd get an A. Animated backgrounds? Moving fonts? Music? A goofy mouse pointer? No feature was too dumb. If it was something you couldn't do on a piece of paper, we added it to our website.

We got our A. It was a dirty A but we took it.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 5 points 1 day ago

If we're just talking math, triangles can be defined in terms of 3-element subsets of all 3 (A)ngles and 3 (S)ides:
SSS - unique
SAS - unique
ASS - may be unique depending on the lengths of the sides
ASA - unique
SAA - unique
AAA - infinite solutions

Maybe someone cleverer than me can figure out how that maps on to love and gender.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 1 points 3 days ago

My bad. Maybe we could extend that policy to other aggressors?

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 2 points 3 days ago

That’s a great comparison. We should stop sending weapons to both aggressors.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 10 points 3 days ago

It kinda looks like your arguing that voting doesn’t work.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 1 points 5 days ago

Maybe.

Kessler Syndrome doesn't impact the ability to produce or launch satellites.
It impacts the ability of satellites to function in orbit but it's not a fixed limit.

Humans have a pretty good track record of developing technologies that break through insurmountable theoretical barriers.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 4 points 6 days ago

The original article said the Navy hadn't provided all the details.

It looks like those 15+ people included at least one person who should have been monitoring for such things and a bunch of people who wanted to follow sports.

They didn't give the password to most of the crew and they tried to keep the commanding officers in the dark. It sounds like everyone involved faced disciplinary action.

Those chiefs and senior chiefs who used, paid for, helped hide or knew about the system were given administrative nonjudicial punishment at commodore’s mast, according to the investigation.

It looks like that's an administrative process. https://jagdefense.com/practice-areas/non-judicial-punishmentarticle-15/ Potential penalties are listed near the bottom.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 11 points 6 days ago

The original article goes into more detail https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/

It sounds like there were over 15 people in on the scheme. At some point people noticed that there was some wi-fi network called "STINKY" and rumors started circulating about it. It took a while for those rumors to reach senior command. Then they changed the name to make it look like a printer, which further delayed the investigation.

It doesn't look like they actually scanned for the access point. I suspect that's because it would be hard on a ship. All the metal would reflect signals and give you a ton of false readings.

They only eventually found it when a technician was installing an authorized system (Starshield seems to be the version of Starlink approved for military use) and they discovered the unauthorized Starlink equipment.

The Starlink receivers have gotten fairly small. It seems like that was pretty easy to hide among all the other electronics on the ship.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 3 points 6 days ago

The original article says there were over 15 people involved https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/

With that many people, it's only a matter of time before someone spills the beans.

There are several steps they could have taken to make it much harder to discover. I expect more and more people will take those steps and we'll never hear about it.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 4 points 6 days ago

We're likely to see a variant of Moore's law when it comes to satellites. Launch costs will keep going down. Right now we have Starlink with a working satellite internet system and China with a nascent one. As the costs come down we'll likely see more and more countries, companies, organizations and individuals will be able to deploy their own systems.

A government would need to negotiate with every provider to get them to block signals over their country. Jamming is always hard. You could theoretically jam all communications or communications on certain frequency bands but it's not clear how you would selectively jam satellite internet.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 36 points 6 days ago

There's a much bigger story here.
Think about how hard it was to discover this access point. Even after it was reported and there was a known wi-fi network and the access point was known to be on a single ship, it took the Navy months to find it.

Starlink devices are cheap and it will be nearly impossible to detect them at scale. That means that anyone can get around censors. If the user turns off wi-fi, they'll be nearly impossible to detect. If they leave wi-fi on in an area with a lot of wi-fi networks it will also be nearly impossible to detect. A random farmer could have Starlink in their hut. A dissident (of any nation) could hide the dish behind their toilet.

As competing networks are launched, users will be able to choose from the least restricted network for any given topic.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 105 points 5 months ago

I took your advice and looked it up. It seems to be a work of fiction, originally published as "The Hermit" https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100322754

23
view more: next ›

nednobbins

joined 1 year ago