Although to some degree, it depends on who you are directing your publicity at…no doubt he’s getting a high volume of a specific flavor of “like” from this assholishness, and also some pretty targeted and powerful favor…
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I could be wrong about this, but I would guess that the actual extra cost of operation for the Starlink network to provide service to any particular area would be negligible.
Once the basic infrastructure (similar to ground wires to homes) is installed the system really doesn’t care if you are using it or not unless you start to approach maximum bandwidth.
Essentially, the cost of operating a communications network is relatively fixed regardless of number of users.
So the service they are demanding payment for in this case may not have actually cost Starlink anything of substance. It does not cost millions to give someone an access password…
This might be different for a satellite network but seeing as how these are not geostationary satellites one would think that none of the individual satellites are dedicated to any particular region of the earths surface.
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SO MUCH THIS. This is why the Wikimedia Foundation intentionally does not accept donations from institutional investors. It relies on small, individual doners to ensure its’ mission can’t be co-opted by the whims of any one person or corporation.
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I think he’s proven that he doesn’t care much about how he looks after sphintering out opinions and declarations.
I really don’t understand why this man ever had, and still does, have such loyal fans.
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It’s truly baffling isn’t it? I find myself at a similar loss when considering Trump and his followers.
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If only he was as interesting as Scorpio.
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You can’t buy a Tesla, only lease it.
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For critical stuff (and it’s all critical stuff), I would have been wrapping both ends in crypto with a VPN or better from the start.
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You can definitely buy them here in Canada
Is it though? A starlink user to another starlink user might be able to share information without going outside of the starlink sandbox and that wouldn’t incur additional costs to starlink. However, any other technology used outside of the sandbox would require data riding on networks and fiber and servers owned by other companies that will charge per user or bit. (There may even be a network between starlink’s own transmitters/receivers and starlink’s data servers, the starlink to starlink sandbox may not even exist)
Besides that, the starlink investors did not invest in this tech to give it away for free to every nation being attacked by some dictator (although they’d be cooler if they did). Free Ukraine starlink is setting a precedent that the business does not want to continue.
I think the main goal of starlink would be to have the US government pay for the Ukrainian bill. It’s not a completely unfair ask as surely starlink is helping the US and other allied nations communicate and organize with Ukrainians. And having taxpayers fund his businesses is one of musky’s specialties.
Outside of humanitarian and political arguments, the big problem here is Musky is a “my way or fuck you” kind of guy who is terrible at moderating himself in the public eye. There is surely a way to help Ukraine, get starlink some money, and keep musky from not looking like an asshole, but asshole gonna asshole.
This is the same guy who wants to establish his own colony on Mars. Any volunteers ready to trust him with their lives now?
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Once again we’re talking about bills not costs. Other networks might bill for data on their network but not because it actually cost them anything to host it…
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I don’t understand what you are saying. Every additional starlink user added incurs additional costs to starlink.
But I do believe the true cost of Ukrainian users is a tiny fraction compared to the overall investment.
Maybe a solution to all of this would be for starlink to charge the US just for the actual cost of the connection and none of the infrastructure. The US is already paying 54 billion for bullets and food and meds to ukraine, they could easily carve a few bucks for the internet.
I mean that when they can turn features on and off by remote control, you don’t really own the car.
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If you can’t trust that your communication system hasn’t been compromised by the enemy, that makes it kind of useless, though.
He’s great at finding ways to insert himself to fuck things up, though. Especially out of spite…
Yeah, I’m kind of assuming - perhaps naively - they were already doing that. I’m wondering if there’s unmaskable basic (meta) data, though (e.g. location information for terminals) that could be used maliciously against Ukraine.
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Good summary of what happened in which order, links.
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Pretty surprised by how much newer VPNs are actually better, wireguard is so much faster to use when you know how it runs, tunnel SSH over that and you’ve got enough cover to keep your comms safe well beyond their expire by date…
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