#starlink

[liberalsarecool]

Oligarchs in America will destroy [global] democracy before they will every connect with humanity.

Elon Musk will assist Putin or parrot pro-Russian rhetoric without shame.

#elon musk #starlink #ukraine

[odinsblog]

Elon Musk has taken tons of money from the government, but it’s somehow different when Ukraine is quite literally fighting for its very existence and trying to eject imperialist Russia, who invaded their country unprovoked?? Mannn, GTFOHWTBS.

Also, Elon Musk can go fuck himself 🖕🏿

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are having a dome shining contest on Vladimir Putin’s dick

#politics #elon musk #ukraine #russia #russian asset #starlink #tesla #twitter #apartheid clyde #phony stark

[mairynz]

#star fox #starboy #star fox 2 #starboys #fox mccloud #nintendo 64 #the weeknd #the weekend #my art<3 #my post #my draws #star fox zero #star fox 64 #starlink

[viejospellejos]

Así capturó un satélite de Starlink, la zona de total oscuridad del eclipse solar en la Tierra:

#eclipse #sol #eclipse solar #oscuridad #tierra #satelite #starlink

[sugas6thtooth]

#elon musk #starlink #palestine #free palestine #free gaza #gaza #spacex

[azspot]

So, let's get this straight. Elon Musk decided he had the authority to cause a strategic Ukrainian military offensive operation to fail. An attack presumably coordinated with the US. And Elon Musk shut down communications once the operation was already in motion resulting in a Ukrainian defeat. Ukraine is now in the position that military actions are subject to Elon Musk’s approval. Let that sink in.

Mastodon Migration

#elonmusk #ukraine #russia #starlink

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

#republican assholes #elongated muskrat #Putin owns Elon Musk #Starlink #Republican propagandist #Russian puppet

[papetoonfox]

When I say Starlink went so hard with this model.

They really did!

Props to the amazing team that made the Star Fox Team Models. They deserve so much credit here for bringing Fox and Co to life like this (and so detailed at that).

#((they didn’t have to go this hard but they did!)) #Fox McCloud #starlink #star fox #nintendo

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How cable monopolists tricked conservatives into shooting themselves in the face

No matter how hard conservative culture-war cannon-fodder love big business, it will never love them back. Take network policy, where rural turkeys in Red State America keep on voting for Christmas, then profess outrage when Old Farmer Comcast gets to sharpening his ax.

For two years, the FCC has been hamstrung because MAGA Senators refuse to confirm Gigi Sohn, leaving the Commission with only four commissioners. What do the GOP have against Sohn? Well, to hear them tell of it, she’s some kind of radical Marxist who will undermine free enterprise and replace the internet with tin cans and string.

The reality is that Sohn favors policies that will specifically and substantially benefit the rural Americans whose senators who refuse to confirm her. For example, Sohn favors municipal fiber provision, which low-information conservatives have been trained to reflexively reject: “Get your government out of my internet!”

Boy, are they ever wrong. The private sector sucks at providing network connectivity, especially in rural places. The cable companies and phone companies have divided up the USA like the Pope dividing up the “New World,” setting out exclusive, non-competing territories that get worse service than anyone else in the wealthy world. Americans pay some of the highest prices for the lowest speeds of any OECD nation.

For ISPs, bad service is a feature, not a bug. When Frontier went bankrupt in 2020, we got to look at its books, which is how we discovered that the company booked the one rural customers with no alternative as “assets” because they could be charged more for slower, less reliable service:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/frontiers-bankruptcy-reveals-cynical-choice-deny-profitable-fiber-millions

We also learned that Frontier had calculated that it could make an extra billion in profit by bringing fiber to three million households, but chose not to, because it would take a decade to realize those profits, and during that time, executives’ stock options would decline in value as analysts punished them for making long-term bets.

We can bring fiber to rural America, and when we do, amazing things happen. McKee, Kentucky — one of the poorest places in America — used federal grants and its New Deal era rural electrification co-op to bring fiber to every household, using a mule called Ole Bub to run it over difficult mountain passes, and the result was an economic miracle:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

The only Americans who consistently say they like their ISPs are people who live in the 700+ small towns that have run their own fiber, mostly in Red States:

https://muninetworks.org/communitymap

Small wonder that rural Americans prefer muni fiber to commercial ISPs’ offerings. When Trump’s FCC Chair Ajit Pai gave them billions in subsidies to improve rural connectivity, the monopolists spent it pulling new copper lines, not fiber — which would have been thousands of times faster.

Given all that, it takes a lot to convince rural Americans that municipal fiber is bad for them. Specifically, it takes disinformation. More specifically, it takes the lie that municipal fiber would result in “government interference” in users’ communications.

Boy, is this ever wrong. Private companies are free to set their own content moderation policies, and can discriminate against any viewpoint they wish. They can and do remove “lawful but awful” speech like racist diatribes, vaccine denial, election denial, and other conservative fever-dreams.

Contrast that with local governments, who are bound by the First Amendment, and prohibited from practicing “viewpoint discrimination.” This means that if a local government allows one viewpoint on a subject, they are generally required to allow all other viewpoints on that subject. This is how we get the Satanic Temple’s excellent stunts, like demanding that towns that display Christian icons on public lands also display statues of Baphomet right next to them.

https://www.npr.org/2018/08/17/639726472/satanic-temple-protests-ten-commandments-monument-with-goat-headed-statue

When your town government runs 100gb fiber into your basement or garage, it will have a much harder time blocking you from, say, running a Mastodon instance devoted to election denial or GhostGun production than your commercial ISP will. Convincing American conservatives to hate municipal broadband was a gigantic self-own:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/17/turner-diaries-fanfic/#1a-fiber

Even worse is what rural America has been sold instead of municipal fiber: Starlink, the My Pillow of broadband. Starlink sells itself as blazing-fast satellite broadband, but conspicuously fails to talk up the fact that every Starlink user in your neighborhood competes for the same wireless spectrum as you, so the service can only get slower and more expensive over time:

https://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/starlink-nov-2022-data-caps.html

There’s been a concerted smear campaign against Sohn, and one of the major talking points is that Sohn is anti-cop because she sits on EFF’s board, and EFF wants to place limits on police access to commercial surveillance data. Which is wild, because one of EFF’s demands is limits on geofenced reverse warrants, where cops ask Google to reveal the identity of everyone who was in a specific place at a specific time. If you’ve heard about geofenced warrants lately, it was probably in the context of conservative outrage at their use in rounding up the January 6 insurrectionists.

Now, the primary use of these is to target Black Lives Matter demonstrators and other protestors, and EFF advocates for the normal Fourth Amendment rights that everyone is guaranteed in the Constitution. Conservative pundits didn’t give a damn about geofenced warrants until the J6 affair, and now they do — but they still insist that Sohn should be disqualified from sitting on the FCC because she shares their outrage at the abuse of private surveillance data by law enforcement.

All this raises the question: why have all these Red State senators made it their mission in life to block the appointment of an FCC commissioner who would deliver so many benefits to their constituents? It’s hard to say, of course, but Luke Goldstein has a suggestion in today’s American Prospect:

https://prospect.org/politics/democratic-majority-at-the-fcc-still-blocked/

“A torrent of lobbying money from the telecom industry has flooded Washington to block Sohn’s arrival at the FCC. AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and T-Mobile doled out over $23 million lobbying Washington this year.”

And why would these companies spend millions to block Sohn from sitting on the Commission? Because she would help the Democratic majority pass policies that make broadband cheaper and faster for America, especially rural America where costs are highest and service is worst, and this will limit the telco monopolists’ profits.

There’s a new Democratic senate majority that’ll sit in 2023, so perhaps Sohn will finally be seated and start delivering relief to all Americans, even the turkeys who can’t stop voting for Christmas.

[Image ID: A hunter in camo firing a rifle whose barrel has been bent back to point at his own face. A muzzle flash emerges from the barrel. The hunter wears a MAGA hat. Behind the hunter is a telephone pole with many radiating lines. In the bottom left corner of the image is a 1950s-style illustration of a broadly smiling salesman, pointing at a box that is emblazoned with the logo for ALEC.]

#pluralistic #ripoffs #skylink #frontier #monopoly #dark money #january 6 #geofenced warrants #first amendment #1a #municipal fiber #alec #useful idiots #self-owning . #net neutrality #culture wars #gigi sohn #fcc #turkeys voting for christmas #starlink

[odinsblog]

Elon Musk essentially has veto power over our government on Ukraine. This is no less than a national security concern, and everyone should have a BIG problem with Elon Musk, an unelected Libertarian billionaire, being the sole veto over whether or not Ukraine can take back their own country. Today he’s siding with Russia against Ukraine, but tomorrow, who knows…? StarLink and SpaceX need to be nationalized.

👉🏿 https://apple.news/A5IfJ-36wQLStZuLoGvDd-g

👉🏿 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/elon-musks-shadow-rule

#politics #elon musk #starlink #ukraine #russia #spacex #shadow rule

[destielmemenews]

Musk was afraid that Russia could respond to the drone attack with a nuclear strike against Ukraine. This fear was reinforced by Musk's discussions with Russian government officials. Musk called the horror scenario “Mini Pearl Harbor."

source 1

source 2

source 3 (in German)

#destiel meme #destiel meme news #united states #us news #news #world news #russia #ukraine 🇺🇦 #russia ukraine conflict #russia ukraine war #ukraine #russia news #elon musk #fuck elon musk #starlink #starlink satellites #i hate elon musk #slava ukraini

[mairynz]

Fox looks so happy, I wonder why

#star fox zero #star fox 64 #star fox adventures #fox mccloud #furry #furry fandom #nintendo 64 #star wolf #starlink

[starlightshadowsworld]

Updates from 28.10.2023

The mother's wanting to see their dead child, and that child being unidentifiable... And everyone telling them no because they want to save them from that pain..

#Twitter #starlink #elon musk #free palestine #free gaza #gaza #palestine #anti israel #anti zionisim #israel #israel is a terrorist state

[probablyasocialecologist]

The band of orbital space just above our atmosphere is becoming so densely populated with satellites that it may threaten the practice of astronomy. Whereas the main source of light interference used to be the cities below, it is now increasingly the satellites above. These artificial stars can be a billion times brighter than the objects astronomers hope to study, and they emit radio waves that can interfere with telescopes. By some estimates, around one in twenty images from the Hubble Telescope are affected by the streaks of passing satellites. By 2030, the authors say, a third of Hubble’s images could be impacted.

Clutter in low-Earth orbit also threatens ways of life for entire communities of people here on the ground. The traditions and cosmologies of many Indigenous peoples, for example, are rooted in the movements of the stars. Polynesian sailors’ feats of navigation by starlight are unparalleled. The Palikur people of the Amazon see constellations as boats driven by shamans that bring rain and seasonal fish. The recent deluge of light pollution in our night skies is more than a headache to these and other Indigenous peoples, whose cosmologies may wither if the numbers of satellites aren’t kept in check. New artificial mega constellations could mask those that have been relied on for millennia. (This issue may provide rare common ground between Indigenous peoples and professional astronomers, the latter of whom have historically been aligned with colonialism and courted controversy with the construction of new telescopes on sacred Indigenous lands.)

For many non-human animals, evidence suggests that a clear night sky might be a basic survival need. The hazy stripe of the Milky Way is used by dung beetles to navigate back to their burrows. Migratory birds, harbor seals, and some species of moths all use the movement of the stars as a compass too. Who knows how many other creatures might depend on a clear view of the night sky?

#space #astronomy #satellites #Starlink

[rednblacksalamander]

Nationalize Starlink. Elon can't be trusted with this much power.

#elon musk #ukraine russia war #starlink #internet #capitalism #political cartoon