nednobbins @ nednobbins @lemm.ee

Posts

1

Comments

364

Joined

2 yr. ago

The original article said the Navy hadn't provided all the details.

It looks like those 15+ people included at least one person who should have been monitoring for such things and a bunch of people who wanted to follow sports.

They didn't give the password to most of the crew and they tried to keep the commanding officers in the dark. It sounds like everyone involved faced disciplinary action.

Those chiefs and senior chiefs who used, paid for, helped hide or knew about the system were given administrative nonjudicial punishment at commodore’s mast, according to the investigation.

It looks like that's an administrative process. https://jagdefense.com/practice-areas/non-judicial-punishmentarticle-15/ Potential penalties are listed near the bottom.

The original article goes into more detail https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/

It sounds like there were over 15 people in on the scheme. At some point people noticed that there was some wi-fi network called "STINKY" and rumors started circulating about it. It took a while for those rumors to reach senior command. Then they changed the name to make it look like a printer, which further delayed the investigation.

It doesn't look like they actually scanned for the access point. I suspect that's because it would be hard on a ship. All the metal would reflect signals and give you a ton of false readings.

They only eventually found it when a technician was installing an authorized system (Starshield seems to be the version of Starlink approved for military use) and they discovered the unauthorized Starlink equipment.

The Starlink receivers have gotten fairly small. It seems like that was pretty easy to hide among all the other electronics on the ship.

The original article says there were over 15 people involved https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/

With that many people, it's only a matter of time before someone spills the beans.

There are several steps they could have taken to make it much harder to discover. I expect more and more people will take those steps and we'll never hear about it.

We're likely to see a variant of Moore's law when it comes to satellites. Launch costs will keep going down. Right now we have Starlink with a working satellite internet system and China with a nascent one. As the costs come down we'll likely see more and more countries, companies, organizations and individuals will be able to deploy their own systems.

A government would need to negotiate with every provider to get them to block signals over their country. Jamming is always hard. You could theoretically jam all communications or communications on certain frequency bands but it's not clear how you would selectively jam satellite internet.

There's a much bigger story here.
Think about how hard it was to discover this access point. Even after it was reported and there was a known wi-fi network and the access point was known to be on a single ship, it took the Navy months to find it.

Starlink devices are cheap and it will be nearly impossible to detect them at scale. That means that anyone can get around censors. If the user turns off wi-fi, they'll be nearly impossible to detect. If they leave wi-fi on in an area with a lot of wi-fi networks it will also be nearly impossible to detect. A random farmer could have Starlink in their hut. A dissident (of any nation) could hide the dish behind their toilet.

As competing networks are launched, users will be able to choose from the least restricted network for any given topic.

Yes and emergent behavior goes both ways. Organizations have many properties that the individuals they're made up of don't have and they lack many properties that individuals have. Organizations don't have feelings. Even in the rare cases when the feelings of the people in those organizations are homogeneous, the organizations almost never manifest those feelings without significant alterations.

Are you seriously comparing Joe Rogan with NATO strategists?

There's a bit more to it than that.

NATO is a strategic alliance lead by the US. NATO doesn't have any feelings and isn't pleased or displeased about anything. Instead it generally does whatever is the US believes is most strategically advantageous.

Those strategist are typically smart people who listen to all kinds of things. They're definitely careful about what they say though and won't go around promoting information they don't want suppressed.

The effect is mostly from the total number of computer users increasing.

That is, the total number of "tech-savvy" users keeps increasing (https://datausa.io/profile/cip/computer-science-110701) but the number of "non-tech-savvy" computer users has absolutely exploded (https://semiconalpha.substack.com/p/global-semiconductor-sales-increase) (that actually undercounts computers since every dollar in 2020 buys you much more computer power than a dollar in 1987)

You had to pass a nerd gauntlet just to get online in the 80's or 90's that meant that everyone you met online had also passed that gauntlet and was tech savvy. Even if you looked in the social usenet groups, a lot of non-technical users were just filtered out. So it looked like everyone was tech savvy but that's because we were sampling a tiny, tech-savvy portion of the population.

Now anyone can get online. The tech savvy gen-zers are still there but their hidden in a sea of non-technical users. If you go to places like Github or Hackernews (or even more specifically technical fora), you'll find plenty of enthusiastic young people poking at technology and trying to make it better. They no longer have to mess around with autoexec.bat and config.sys to get their mouse working but they can (and do) get a bunch of Jupyter notebooks and start playing around with Tensorflow.

A great modern example of this is 3-D printing. Modern 3-D printers suck. If you're a big company you can get super expensive 3-D printers that take up giant rooms and need a team of experts to run. If you're a home user you can get a cheap FDM printer but you best be prepared to tinker with it. The first thing most people do with their Ender is print mods for their Ender. Bambu Labs is a big improvement but they also attract a lot of users who at least could mod their printer https://forum.bambulab.com/c/bambu-lab-x1-series/user-mods/19

Some day we may have little boxes like in "Diamond Age". Kids in the future may not even know about crap like bed adhesion and stringing and they'll concentrate on whatever the new problems are revealed once the current ones are taken care of.

There's nothing false about all the dead civilians.

This is a horrible ad hominem attack and actively fuels racism.

Wanting Israel to stop its genocide is a good thing. Antisemitism is a bad thing.

If you insist on equating the two, antisemitism will stop being a bad thing. That would be bad.

This is just insane. No normal person would doubt that arms shipments are a military subsidy.

Reply or not. I'm blocking you.

That sounds just fine. I'm pretty suspicious of someone who claims that being able to save 30 seconds typing that post would make you more tech savvy.

A rational person would take the information in context. The shooter was not acting in isolation. The shooter was part of an organized military that is heavily subsidized by the US government.

What's hyperbolic about the last sentence? It's an easily demonstrated fact that the US sends billions of dollars in military aid to Israel. It's an easily verified fact that this is a large portion of Israel's military budget.

If you look hard enough you can always find a nit to pick.

When there are billions of dollars of heavy weapons pounding the entire area to dust, it's completely disingenuous to talk about who paid for a particular bullet or gun.

The entire operation is heavily subsidized by US military donations.

I think that true "tech-savvyness" isn't really a generational thing.

Some people are just really curious about how stuff works. When they see something they aren't satisfied with, "Just do it." or "Shit just works." They want to know how and why it works. When you hand those people a computer, machine or flower they'll poke at it and try to understand it better.

It's not clear that typing skills are actually needed for that.

I max out at around 80-100 WPM but I only sustain that when I'm transcribing something. When I need to learn about technology, it's much more about reading than typing. When I actually need to do some coding, I spend much more time staring at the screen and looking up stuff on Stackoverlow than I do actually typing.

Most of Z is not savvy at all, just like with every generation. And just like with every generation, some of them will push the envelope of technology. I doubt that lack of typing will slow those folks down.

Weapons. That's the connection.

The US sends vast arsenals to Israel and Israel uses those weapons for genocide and other war crimes.

That's outrageous. We should immediately stop funding Hamas.

No more weapons packages.
No more military funding.
The Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group should stop supporting them now.

China knows that the US has a lot of economic leverage. They've been working very hard to change that and a lot of those efforts have flown under the radar.

BRI is pretty obvious and it's seen as one of the major reason the ASEAN countries are pivoting towards China. But consider the whole South China Sea issue. Everyone frames it as a contest over sea resources and few people consider the strait of Malacca. It's a potential choke point for all trade west of Southeast Asia. While China is working to be able to defend that they're also working with Thailand to build a canal that would bypass the straight of Malacca all together. All of that is primarily to reduce US leverage and those initiatives tend to work more often than they fail.

US is by far it’s largest customer

That's true and there's also more to it.

The US is China's largest single trading partner but China has many many trading partners.

May nations now trade or at least negotiate in blocks. Both ASEAN and the UE, as blocks, do more trade with China than the US does. When it comes to individual nations the US isn't as far ahead as it might seem. Russia, Vietnam and Taiwan together trade more with China than the US does, despite having a combined GDP that's a tiny fraction of the US.

The key issue is that China has been working really hard to make itself less dependent on the US. They still have a way to go but they're much less vulnerable than they were a few years ago.

The current president of the USA is a Democrat.

Democrats used to say, "The buck stops here."