Cont: The Russian Invasion of Ukraine part 9

[SpuriusMaximus]

I'm sure Ukraine can adapt. GPS doesn't need any login, nor discriminate against anyone... unless you use the more precise US military system. (Which Ukraine AFAIK never had access to.) Each GPS satellite just periodically broadcasts its ID and its own timestamp. The receiver triangulates itself using the nearest 3 satellites. Plus there's inertial navigation.

Might be a pain if you want to hit a tank 20km away. Sure. But if you need to hit a refinery 2500km away... I'm guessing metre accuracy is good enough. Those things are huge and don't move.

ETA: but, of course, the world would be a better place if Musk, shall we say, consumed faeces and thus expired

 

[Random]

Basically handed Afganistan to the Taliban, too, undoing 20 years of democratization.

I actually don't really blame Trump for that one. We will never know if Trump would have stuck to the withdrawal agreement that Biden acted on, but the sheer speed with which the Afghani government collapsed after twenty years of work made it clear that Democracy was just not taking root there.

 

[a_unique_person]

I'm sure Ukraine can adapt. GPS doesn't need any login, nor discriminate against anyone... unless you use the more precise US military system. (Which Ukraine AFAIK never had access to.) Each GPS satellite just periodically broadcasts its ID and its own timestamp. The receiver triangulates itself using the nearest 3 satellites. Plus there's inertial navigation.

Might be a pain if you want to hit a tank 20km away. Sure. But if you need to hit a refinery 2500km away... I'm guessing metre accuracy is good enough. Those things are huge and don't move.

ETA: but, of course, the world would be a better place if Musk, shall we say, consumed faeces and thus expired

Russia is actively jamming GPS in those areas.

 

[Dr.Sid]

I'm sure Ukraine can adapt. GPS doesn't need any login, nor discriminate against anyone... unless you use the more precise US military system. (Which Ukraine AFAIK never had access to.) Each GPS satellite just periodically broadcasts its ID and its own timestamp. The receiver triangulates itself using the nearest 3 satellites. Plus there's inertial navigation.

Might be a pain if you want to hit a tank 20km away. Sure. But if you need to hit a refinery 2500km away... I'm guessing metre accuracy is good enough. Those things are huge and don't move.

ETA: but, of course, the world would be a better place if Musk, shall we say, consumed faeces and thus expired

GPS can be easily jammed. The energy powers reaching the ground from that distance are minuscule. AI is the only way imho.

 

[Andy_Ross]

man, hard to believe trump would be working with russia. if only anyone had seen it coming sooner

Keeping Putin happy hss been one of his two goals ever since he came down his gold escalator.
The other was getting revenge on Obama for making fun of him.

 

[a_unique_person]

I'm seeing this as a contemporary version of Dr. Strangelove.

 

[Aridas]

Basically handed Afganistan to the Taliban, too, undoing 20 years of democratization.

I actually don't really blame Trump for that one. We will never know if Trump would have stuck to the withdrawal agreement that Biden acted on, but the sheer speed with which the Afghani government collapsed after twenty years of work made it clear that Democracy was just not taking root there.

Ehh... yes and no. We can certainly blame Trump for basically handing Afghanistan to the Taliban. Trump's handling of the whole matter was just that horrible. Biden salvaged the situation to a fair extent and generally oversaw a dramatically cleaner withdrawal than it would have been after Trump left him that bomb, but all that Republican sabotage was already done and Republicans have happily worked to pin all the mess on Biden, just like they happily worked to pin pretty much all the rest of their many messes on him.

The instant collapse of the Afghani government did indeed speak volumes about how meaningful that "20 years of democratization" was, though, yes.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Ukraine will resume strikes on Russian oil refineries, Volodymyr Zelensky has said, as he accused the US of withdrawing crucial support.

The Ukrainian president said he had restricted such attacks for three days at Washington's behest, while Russia had continued striking Ukrainian energy infrastructure. "We're done," he told the Financial Times.

Zelensky also accused the US of withdrawing intelligence-sharing on Russian strikes to pressure Kyiv into ending the attacks altogether after it struck a deal to import Russian diesel, and said a slowdown of Starlink satellite services used by Ukraine's military was deliberate.

Russia accuses Ukraine of attacking oil refinery after Zelensky says strikes to resume

Ukraine's president says a pause on striking energy sites is over following fresh Russian attacks.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[Safe-Keeper]

Give 'em hell, Ukraine.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

it is incorrect that Starlink doesn't work in Russia.
What Russia lacks is authorized terminals - when the US finally decided to fully support Ukraine, all terminals in the region had to be cleared against a list of "not Russia" operators or they would be blocked. Ukrainians made good business selling Russian companies supposedly "hacked" terminals that would work - but didn't.
But if Musk doesn't throttle bandwidth for the region, a Ukrainian drone with a Starlink terminal can operate in most of Russia remotely.

 

[Gulliver Foyle]

I actually don't really blame Trump for that one. We will never know if Trump would have stuck to the withdrawal agreement that Biden acted on, but the sheer speed with which the Afghani government collapsed after twenty years of work made it clear that Democracy was just not taking root there.

Most of the groundwork that cut the legs from under the Afghani government and forced Biden into bugging out was carried out by the first TACO junta.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Elon Musk
@elonmusk

And so the slaughter continues …

Time for Zelensky to go

Link

 

[Jack by the hedge]

Elon Musk
@elonmusk

And so the slaughter continues …

Time for Zelensky to go

By which you mean time for Ukraine to go.

You just want to save those lucrative Russian bot farms. Be ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ honest. Tell Zelensky you'll turn Starlink up again if he goes back to smashing their refineries and warehouses, and leaves Yandex alone to spit out its poison so you can keep creaming off the ad money.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

There is more at stake here: the number of Musk's bot followers on social media.

 

[Andy_Ross]

He was always on the side of the Russians.

Elon Musk
@elonmusk

Exactly what I predicted has happened

Quote

X Freeze
@XFreeze
Elon laid out a path to peace between Ukraine and Russia back in October 2022, and he was attacked for it by almost everyone

In November 2023, he explained to Lex Fridman why he had proposed peace: “a lot of people dying for basically almost no changes in land,” with an entire generation of young Ukrainians and Russians paying the price

Two and a half years after his original proposal, he warned that Ukraine should seek peace or suffer severe loss of life for no gains, and called continuing the war cruel and inhumane

Today the world is talking about the same kind of deal he proposed, only after hundreds of thousands more lives were thrown into a meat grinder for almost nothing

He was right then, and he is right now

Link

 

[Andy_Ross]

Seeing reports that Ukrainian cruise missiles have destroyed 6 Russian airforce Su-34 fighter-bomber at Borisoglebsk Airbase overnight.
If it's confirmed it would be one of the heaviest single-strike losses of this aircraft type Russia has suffered in the war.

 

[Safe-Keeper]

Maybe just send Elonia to El Salvador? We know she's an illegal immigrant ?

 

[Jack by the hedge]

He was always on the side of the Russians.

Elon Musk
@elonmusk

Exactly what I predicted has happened

Elon laid out a path to peace between Ukraine and Russia back in October 2022 [...] Today the world is talking about the same kind of deal he proposed...

I see no mention of what deal he proposed. Was it capitulation, and the destruction of Ukraine as a sovereign nation?

Just a lucky guess.

 

[plague311]

@Dr.Sid pointed this out before, but the claims about the strikes on Yandex data centres disrupting far-right influence networks is likely a myth. Yandex is Russia’s Google and operates maps and browsers and a kind of Uber service as well. The “bots” are mostly ordinary search engine crawlers.

Renee DiResta has a good post about it, going into specific claims about AfD and how actual disinfo bot networks tend to work:

The Russian Bots Went Silent. Or Did They?

Did Ukrainian strikes on Yandex silence Russian bots? The evidence doesn’t show it, and shrinking data access makes it harder to check.

www.lawfaremedia.org

It's a good article, but the one thing I'm not seeing it address is that Yandex's cloud compute was severely affected by the attack. That infrastructure hosts VMs, which are commonly used to operate bot farms, and I ain't talking small ones. Perhaps I follow a different crowd of technical people online, but that's mostly what I had seen people claiming. That knocking the AWS-style infrastructure offline caused the automated software on web hosted VMs through Yandex to fail, thereby decreasing traffic.

I understand the point that this gentleman is making, and it's absolutely true. Trying to imply that bot activity fell based on HTTPS traffic from cloudflare is not a convincing statistic, but that doesn't mean it wasn't true. Just that the specific evidence that some folks are using isn't the best way to prove it.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Sources in Ukraine's Ministry of Defence told the BBC early on Thursday that Starshield's "operation while on the move" had been restored, referring to the the military-focused version of Starlink.