Fighting oppressive regimes is not something I remember Must doing, yet. And he has no problem setting up shop e.g. in China.

People talk about Starlink like they never heard of RF engineering or something? I mean really, what does Starlink change when the entity doing the blocking is a state level actor?

The only thing we can do is strengthen non-authoritarian governments. Unfortunately, western business leaders made the mistake of strengthening authoritarian countries for a profit. We have a dark two to three hundred years ahead of us.

But seriously, your comment makes me want to find an article on how the Chinese have been thwarting bluetooth mesh chat in HK protests.

Radio is difficult if not impossible to block with clever operators. The system is known.

Satellite will always be subject to whoever is in power at the time and it won't work within a building.

If you want to get information in and out the best option is—and possible always will be–a network of skilled radio operators.

The knowledge is free and available to all and not that difficult. Amateur, citizens, and even AM/FM are cheap and easy to operate.

We are talking about how people get a message out in a martial law / wartime scenario. Radio is your best bet because no one can really stop you the way they can block and DNS server or just outright tell the ISP to shutdown.

If a couple of bytes of information every now and then is too expensive to fetch with Starlink in poorer countries, it is too expensive to use for normal internet use for normal people anywhere on the planet.

Since you are using normal internet except for fetching the IPs, you are not subject to government snooping or sabotage any more than you would be normally. It also would require normal people at maximum the same level of tech-savvyness as a VPN to just connect to Starlink for a second.

Another key difference would be that a VPN requires you to reach the VPN server somehow, and the country can arbitrarily block cable traffic if they have the resources and will. Whether it's technically feasible for most VPNs is another question. But anyway, for Starlink... You would really need to wreck their satellite off the orbit or mess with their radiosignals to block it.

Not that social media companies would do anything to piss off authoritarian leaders / oppressing governments. But they could if they thought it's right

EDIT: 2014 also: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26677134

> This comes after PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to "wipe out Twitter" following damaging allegations of corruption in his inner circle.

Note how my argument does not depend on whether we're talking about a good war, bad war, just war, evil war, etc.

Turkey has a long history of blocking web sites, even in peacetime. The last time I went there, I was surprised how many web sites I couldn't access.

1) You can't get an internet connection at the airport without giving up PII - either your ticket info, or your cellphone information.

2) They block Wikipedia in the airport and on the in-flight WiFi on Turkish Airlines.

Twitter and Facebook are HORRIBLE tools to rely on. They spread more wrong information than right information.

If free speech is going to survive it will require open systems and responsible journalism. Twitter and Facebook are tools that promote neither.

Bad information, I suppose, is better than no information… but damn have we regressed in a lot of ways.

To exfiltrate information, all the Social Media anti features are a plus.

(And yes the video is from RT but if you can find a more reputable source debunking it I'd like to see it.)