1984: Starlink First Partner: Local Cops and State Military

[Zenaan Harkness]

On Thu, Oct 01, 2020 at 03:54:26AM +0000, jim bell wrote:
>  On Wednesday, September 30, 2020, 11:48:44 AM PDT, Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 <punks at tfwno.gf> wrote:
>  
>  
>  > >    Cool! So Jim Bell was right! Musko is a Libertarian Randroidic Hero and US Technology is making the world even more freer and perfect!
> > 
> > I think you are (deliberately) misrepresenting what I actually said.  
> 
> > 
> > What I believe I DID say, and what I will say again, is that Musk is putting himself into a position where he could do a great deal of good for libertarian causes, in part by bypassing governments' ability to censor or cut off Internet access.   
> 
>     There's little to no connection between "libertarian causes" and "internet access".
> 
> Then you have a poor imagination.  Access to the Internet _IS_ a "libertarian cause".   The fact that nations such as India are selectiely  obstructing its people's access to the Internet should anger you immensely.  Authoritarian (and certainly totalitarian!) nations are merely the epitome of such obstruction.  Many people might not think mere "India" as being unfree, but nevertheless it's a problem.
...


Our right, and more importantly 'freedom' to communicate is absolutely something we should foster, build, encourage, create, live.

Juan made it clear "we don't control our lives".

There are certain tasks before us in the realm of "modern communication", including #OpenHW, #OpenFabs, seamless peer to peer mesh networks (ethernet between neighbours, mobile phone wifis etc), and given a new properly distributed (etc) overlay net, then there is no reason that some links cannot go via Musk's Starlink satellites - just another rando hop in the mesh, with its own characteristics (bandwidth, cost, latency, etc).

There is no -inherent- reason to disclude any particular link type (although yes, satellite-accessing nodes may be well require highly proprietary equipment which ought be "firewalled" in some way, at least from the immediate/ accessing/ paying user, we cannot say the situation is any better with say the ubiquitous Intel ethernet hardware and firmware stack... pot meet kettle).

Our primary hurdle in the medium term is hardware, since the software is, from a design perspective afaict, mostly a solved problem ... proof by result still pending of course :)

Ultimately, how different types of links are used shall be up to people and their creativity - if folks do nothing towards creating a better world for themselves, then the moneyed powers that be are the only players left on the field.  Some of us here ain't that type o' people :D