• Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          Crimea is geofenced. That’s why Ukraine officials contacted Elon and asked him to enable it so that their drone boats could attack Russian navy there which Elon refused to do. It’s literally illegal due to US sanctions to Russia. This is what the author Walter Isaacson wrote about in his book but for some reason spun it around claiming Elon disabled it to prevent the attack when in fact it wasn’t enabled in the first place. He has later issued a correction stating that what he originally said was incorrect but this is conveniently ignored by pretty much everyone and when ever I point it out I get downvoted.

          To clarify on the Starlink issue: the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.

          And before someone comments on the “major war” point, those are Walter’s words, not Musk’s. Elon said that agreeing to do so would “make SpaceX explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation” but also later added that had he been contacted by the White House and asked to enable it he would have but they didn’t.

      • sep@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        So if they can isolate the russian starlink terminals… and they have gps… sounds like targeting coordinates for ukrainians to me.

        • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Not necessarily. They may have identified all the serial numbers of terminals legitimately used by Ukraine then simply blocked all terminals not on that list.

            • Toes♀@ani.social
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              4 months ago

              I bet its really challenging to do inventory after distribution if your records were junk.

              • sunzu@kbin.run
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                4 months ago

                if your records were junk.

                Ohh wow… All those export controls and records are still shite?!

                No way to tell how that would happen!

        • Daxtron2@startrek.website
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          4 months ago

          They’re not registered as Russian, many were stolen. If you just start handing out their coordinates the chances that some are civilian are too high.