On October 14, 2026, SpaceX imposed an unannounced speed limit on military-grade Starshield terminals used by Ukrainian forces, automatically cutting internet connectivity for terminals moving faster than 100 mph (160 km/h) and disrupting several high-speed military drone operations.
Billionaires have too much power. They need to be cut down to size.
As long as conservatives continue to exist, the wealthy will continue to have unlimited power.
Conservatives are the only reason the normal people are not allowed to charge them with crimes. Conservatives are also the only reason billionaires don’t pay fair wages or fair taxes.
To defeat the boss, we must first erase the foot-soldiers.
I hear France invented a neat tool to do that efficiently.
Elon is probably upset; when Ukraine destroyed that bot center they killed all his friends.
His engagement is at an all time low.
SpaceX employees seduced by Mars missions are now supporting authoritarianism, speech suppression, electoral rigging, violent invasions, and petrocracy.
Funnily enough, some years back a recruiter came knocking for me to interview for SpaceX. I was not especially interested (not due to any particular insight to the true Musk or anything, just didn’t feel like it), and the recruitor seemed sincerely baffled why I didn’t immediately fall to the floor in awe at the possibility.
Space X has been in a list of top ten companies most engineering graduates wanted to work for. For the recruiter, you were a statistical deviation.
Yeah, at the time a huge factor was that I had like 4 years equivalent pay in bonuses that I would have had to forfeit, so a big hiring bonus would have been needed to offset that.
Plus I hate interviewing anyway.
Further I have had some experience with a “hot” employer and my experience was that they knew how coveted they are and generally had an attitude of “you should be grateful you get to work here at all” compared to a “wow, you actually are willing to work for us?” Attitude at a less well regarded employer. I have no insight on SpaceX, but direct or indirect experience with a handful of similarly “amazing” employers, so maybe SpaceX might have been different, but based on the musk treatment is twitter employees, I’m suspicious.
All this to be Elon’s serfs and concubines. What losers.
The usual sci-fi trope is that earth is the aggressor towards mars or other settlements. We need a new story about how all the wannabe Atlas Shrugged/40k mechanicum/racial preservation types go to Mars and are now being a bunch of jangoistic fascists.
Putin pulled out new compromat and/or offered little kids to Trump and Musk again.
He did this before, in 2022. The state department and intelligence community freaked out. I guess that was just advertising and the opposition has all been turned over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_war
No, that’s called the consequences of your actions. We allowed Trump to get elected and Trump is friends with Elon and Putin. This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone.
Not sure what you mean. Reply OP was pointing out that this isn’t surprising IMO.
I got annoyed by all the still existent butwhataboutistanists and haveyetnotseenanyrealtruthbutbelieveinbbcofallsources bros on lemmy, so I analyzed twitter posts of the big talking head himself:
Note the log scale. Now let’s ponder the ramifications of the coincidence of big talking head losing fame in the exact same day as missiles strike random data center.
Edit: more info: https://lemmy.world/post/53119699
good to see some actual data instead of hearsay and anecdotes
Bro
Thats fucking wild
Interesting.
It sounds like Russian trolls in general are still getting online, like you’d expect, being spooks with government resources. But maybe Yandex was (tangentially?) involved in whatever astroturfing Musk was using.
Think we have to realistically recognize that not all the people advancing the agenda are bots or even Russian. Even without prodding, pretty much any perspective is held sincerely by someone or someones.
Besides, presumably the campaign would have the effect of converting at least some true believers.
Also, it’s a bit of a fantasy to assume that a few datacenters would suffice for fully dismantling these sorts of compaigns.
Bots are just amplifying the disgusting, violent thoughts of conservatives.
Interesting. Most interesting…
Sounds a lot like treason
ALL conservativea are traitors and should be dealt with as such.
Sounds a lot like something I saw coming from Proxima Centauri.
The moment the news broke a few years back that Ukraine relies on an Elon Musk product for their operations this was the exact future scenario I imagined.
No one like Elon Musk should ever have the power to do this.
He has bricked people’s Tesla’s because they were mean to him. Idk why people keep giving this rapist a pass.
I believe this is a result of private infastructure. If they had their own internet satelites, they wouldn’t be at the mercy of some dickhead who has something to gain by manipulating their access on a whim.
Take it from someone from the one country that developed then abandoned indigenous space launch capability; space infrastructure is insanely expensive.
Black Arrow was actually good though, and Britain was mad to cancel it. Also cheap for its day, the government was spaffing money on far worse at the time.
The issue is resources. Ukraine has been trying to develop it’s own satellite comms network but lacks the resources particularly in the middle of a war.
It’s absolutely insane to think 1 crazy wackadoodle has more resources at his fingertips than any government entity in the world. Really goes to show how badly they need go be taxed, hell were past tax it’s time to just take their fucking bag and redistribute it
You have been banned from c/Conservatives.
That’s sad they still trusted elmo and should have known that he would try to benefit putin. It’s wrong how it is, but he is known untrustworthy.
The advantage was undeniable. Trust != use and have contingencies ready.
So this is what Putin wanted in exchange for diesel…
Bingo!!
Yes, and DT, too.
Restricting Starlink access limits Ukraine’s ability to strike at Russian diesel supplies, protecting the recent agreement between the US and Russia.
Does it though? To my knowledge Starlink doesn’t work inside Russia, maybe some near the boarder. This would more impact operations in Crimea / occupied territory, naval drones, and frontline communications.
For once, this actually makes sense.
Hah, Elon got a bit butthurt when his bots were taken down…
Bots were not taken down 😀 Anyway, We should create awareness and advocate to not use of twitter
I thought it was well established that bot traffic declined since the yanked data centre stuff.
Is that not the case?
The bots that were taken down on the “bot traffic” graph are web crawler bots used to index webpages for the yandex search engine. Propaganda “bots” aren’t actually labeled as “bot traffic”, for obvious reasons.
Why would anyone want to use Twitter still?
This mistifies me also. No one really stands for anything anymore.
I wrote my “independent” government news outlet to say that they should probably distance themselves from fascists.
They wrote back, saying “right now, our mission is to reach as many as possible, and right now X has many of our followers.”
Cowards.
It wouldn’t cost them a lot to diversify and be present on more platforms to transition away, cowards indeed.
Unfortunately, with a widespread reach it’s a platform bigger than Bluesky or Mastodon; the EFF made itself Bluesky-exclusive, so effectively reducing its reach, but some progressive news outlets like Al-Jazeera still maintains a presence on Twitter and is free to criticize Israeli and American actions.
Yandex is a search engine, it has legitimate crawler bots. So this statistic is not really beneficial to the conversation.
Also, most likely propaganda bots would be under the radar and not self-declaring as bots.
Or they’re self-declaring as crawler bots for a search engine company.
Unlikely. The “bot” traffic that cloudflare here identifies, is traffic according to the useragent, that is not an actual user + heuristics cloudflare uses to identify bot devices.
Since ruski propaganda bots would want to act as legitimate users, spreading LLM and/or organically generated word soup, and/or pumping views. They not only have to not be identified as bots, but also to act well enough as a user no captcha and/or cloudflare bot identification catches them.
Might interest you: https://lemmy.world/post/53107580/26329832
See Yandex strikes
How much are the Russians paying Musk? Like seriously this is just insane.
They hit musks bot farm ofc he mad af
We all know for which side of this war they are playing
Whichever side gives them the most money and power
If its Starshield it was probably ordered by Trump. The DoD controls that, and its unlikely SpaceX would alter it without their request.
Imagine how the DoD would feel if SpaceX unilaterally altered DoD service. The DoD needs to believe, even if its not true, that they have operational control.
If Ukraine had any sense they would try to be as little as possible dependent on the Trumps ilk and I think they have. Message was clear from the start.
What gives you the impression that they don’t try? That they don’t launch hundreds of satellites themselves?
What?
Your comment gives me the impression that you think Ukraine is too dependent on Starlink and not making an effort to change that. And my question is why you might think that.
Well you are reading it wrong
What alternative to Starlink could they use?
Since my earlier interpretation of this question was inaccurate - I’d like to try this again:
There are a number of satellite operators that currently do business around the world that offer worldwide coverage at similar data speeds. Many of these already offer services to governments.
Given that StarLink is preventing them from conducting missions, any and every company that they can use is an alternative at the moment. StarLink is no longer on the board for them.
So two Chinese companies that are pro-Russia and another American billionaire like Musk. The French company only has 600 satellites and it’s not clear that it could even work.
I don’t really want to get drawn into this, because no one was arguing about this until someone decided to advocate for SpaceX.
But fuck it - EutelSat is partnered with Airbus, one of the largest defense contractors on the fucking planet.
As far as number of satellites go, 600 is plenty. They can provide service worldwide with 600 satellites. The thing that is tripping you and the other commenter up relates to volume/saturation. They’re a smaller company. They have less volume. They don’t need more coverage.
Maybe that means it’s not as robust, but given the choice between a company that randomly pulls the plug on your ops without advanced notice and (maybe?) being slightly more susceptible to jamming, the choice is clear. I’ll take an imperfect solution over no solution any day.Not to put too fine a point on it, but:
Don’t give nazi’s money.
Don’t entrust your (or your nations) safety to people and organizations that operate in bad faith and do not treat that safety responsibly.
Do what works to see your needs met, not what you wish worked.There’s a whole Ukraiunian Ignea album to your name on that.
Oh, you already knew! You just wanted to argue.
I’ll save you the effort, bud: You’re the smartest in the room, and we bow before you! We quiver in awe before your superior genitals.
…. Anyway.
Ignore the purple bars - they mean nothing today. I can’t speak for coverage or bandwidth, but second place has 6% the number of satellites of Starlink as of April.
Good insight. I actually blew the entire graphic off as soon as I saw it. The person posed a question to bait people into responding. My response didn’t advocate for anything in particular, but they still responded as if it had.
It’s also just a pointless stance to argue - number of satellites is irrelevant when the ‘biggest’ option is slowing your traffic down so you cannot operate.Starlink is off the board. Regardless of the pros and cons of other providers, Starlink is non-viable.
If the next best isn’t capable of allowing you to operate at any time, being able to operate some of the time is still better. But you can bet Ukraine is looking at the most viable alternative right now and seeing if they pass the threshold required to meet their needs.
My question was rhetorical, as most people realized, and was simply pointing out that there are no alternatives to Starling at this moment.
The graphic I posted was meant to show it to those who didn’t knew it but were interested in learning.
You failed to understand both comments, even the simple graphic, and became offensive for no reason. You’re the worst that lemmy has to offer. Noisy, toxic and pointless.
