Illegal Starlink terminals helped Russia advance at front line, particularly in capturing Vuhledar.

there is a well organized black market that will use European identities and bank accounts before selling the service to Russians.

I don't think people would particularly mind if their Portuguese account didn't work, specifically, on the Ukrainian front line. Unless they're Russian soldiers in which case boo-hoo. The only accounts who should work anywhere close to the Ukrainian-Russian border should be Ukrainian army ones.

I feel like they’ve got to have something like MAC address filtering that they could easily employ in combination with geofencing. Specifically, have the Ukrainians give the MACs of transceivers they’re using in/near contested areas, and only let those have connectivity. To not have that would be kinda insane.

Also, Musk just doesn’t want to, because he thinks it’s better if the Russians win.

Really a bit shocked the DoD isn’t stepping in over this matter and how he’s handling it.

It's paywalled. And I'm pretty sure they could work with the Ukrainian military so they can say "turn it off over in this place."

How is it hard to send an RSA key to the Ukrainians and geofence every starlink in the region that doesn't provide it.

It is pretty much what was answered to you, when it’s on the frontline it is very hard to know if it’s Ukrainian or Russian usage

You could collect Serial Numbers from any node that moves from inside of russian space to outside of russian space and hard block them.

This would even keep units that move from Ukraine to Russia working in the case of Ukrainian military using it.

There are definitely solutions but they all involve giving a Russian agent direct knowledge of troop movements.

Starlink terminals are activated using a unique identifier. It's how billing works.

SpaceX knows which terminals have been provided to Ukraine. We know they can geofence service. Geofencing the Ukrainian theater to terminals that were provided to Ukraine shouldn't be a massive technical leap and doesn't provide any information they don't already have.

You know what's weird? There's an Xfinity wi-fi access point near me, but unless I have the right credentials, I can't log in.

Yet I'm in the same area as others who can log in. What gives????

Almost like, I dunno, there are other ways to block people besides being completely location-based. Especially when we are talking about military-use.

I would think you could wait until Russia took over a town and then cut off Starlink to that town until Ukraine makes advances.

When you look at the regulatory environment and enforcement under the Trump admin, even before they were best buds, it's very clear that Elon is absolutely terrified of a Harris administration. The moment Biden took office, he was almost instantly under investigation from basically every letter agency in the USA, and they've been slowly chipping away at his Jenga tower of fraud. He sees Trump as the only way to hold on to his ill-gotten gains and avoid a prison cell.

Not shocking a sociopath would choose a sociopath as a role model.

You forgot the Catholic church. But that was for different reasons...

Either you have no idea how the government works or you're lying.

Vice presidents have absolutely no power to affect anything at all in the US government. The only power they do have is to break a tie in the Senate which never happens.

They're forging the GPS to look like it's in the EU. Do we turn off all the EU terminals too?

I'm a little surprised they can't identify spoofing by comparing the incoming signal to the proposed location. They already have antennas that can be steered using the phased array.

Across the whole wide world? So only Ukraine's military and gov't can use them? (And maybe a few related exceptions, e.g. for US gov't and military.)

That would do the trick, I think (except for the rare case of the Russians capturing a terminal from a Ukraine unit and then using it before Ukraine can notify Starlink to deactivate it).

Probably a major money losing proposition for Starlink, but on the other hand, does Musk really need any more money?

Not saying it’s bad to reported [sic] this, but I’m getting really fucking sick of shit not changing.

No, they're saying they're sick of all the obvious corruption and obvious bullshit going unpunished.