German Hackers Propose Uncensorable Global Grid — With Satellites 262
braindrainbahrain writes "The members of the Stuttgart Hackerspace have taken it upon themselves to launch their own space program. The immediate goal of the Hacker Space Program is to create an uncensorable internet in space beyond the control of terrestrial entities using a network of ground stations and communications satellites. In the longer term (think the year 2035), they'd like to put a hacker astronaut on the moon!"
I Wonder... (Score:5, Funny)
Can a Hot Pocket be cooked in space?
Prediction: Bad people will use it (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone will shut it down, that's why we can't have nice things.
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Bad people use mobile phones, computers, cars, and streets too. Why not ban all of those too then?
Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason we can't have nice things is not because bad people use them, but because bad people shut them down, using the other bad people as a pretense.
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Or... (Score:2)
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Not someone. A government.
Take a guess if all the participating members of the UN Security Council could agree to use their missiles to shoot down those hacker satellites?
Hmmmm...... It's as if they think space somehow makes their communication equipment untouchable by governments.
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Nice troll, you certainly got fed :)
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> I posit that there is nothing inherently bad with any speech
Excellent. Let me know your credit card numbers. I'm sure you won't mind if broadcast them to the entire internet - it's just speech. Also, there's no such thing as "imaginary property". You suffer no loss from my telling them to everyone - you are still in possession of the numbers after I do, so this is not theft.
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Let me know your credit card numbers.
I'm fairly confident that if it was impossible to keep credit card numbers a secret, people would come up with a new system. Perhaps we would all be better off and more secure if people could freely list credit card numbers.
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Ideally a credit card number would be a public key, and part 1 of a two-factor authentication scheme, where all it did was allow someone to request a payment from a nominated account. Trading entities would publish their keys so requests could be filtered and verified, but required manual confirmation.
No "silent" charges.
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I give that random number out to merchants so if things are hacked, they only have on average a $50 limit to work with. Not $50 limit to my liability, but a fixed limit on that card number's chargeable amount.
And my cc number never leave
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You are mising the point that some things are not free speech and should not be freely available.
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> I posit that there is nothing inherently bad with any speech
Excellent. Let me know your credit card numbers. I'm sure you won't mind if broadcast them to the entire internet - it's just speech. Also, there's no such thing as "imaginary property". You suffer no loss from my telling them to everyone - you are still in possession of the numbers after I do, so this is not theft.
If a hacker has my credit card number, he doesn't need a privately run satellite network to share it.
And once he has that number, it doesn't really matter how many people he gives it to - once my credit card company discovers the suspicious activity and shuts down the card, it doesn't matter to me if one person or a million people have my card number.
Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it (Score:5, Insightful)
> I posit that there is nothing inherently bad with any speech
Excellent. Let me know your credit card numbers. I'm sure you won't mind if broadcast them to the entire internet - it's just speech. Also, there's no such thing as "imaginary property". You suffer no loss from my telling them to everyone - you are still in possession of the numbers after I do, so this is not theft.
The trick is that free speech means you can say whatever you want and never be punished for it, and you can never have your right to say shit removed, but you can be held responsible and punished for the effects of your speech.
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How is that free speech? You're still being punished for the content of your speech. If you said "hello" and that made a group of people panic and stampede all over everyone else (for some unknown reason), injuring them, would you be held responsible? Probably not. But it was still your speech that supposedly 'made' those other people do what they did (even though it's, in my opinion, entirely their fault and speech can't make anyone do anything), even if no one ever figures out that that was the case. But
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Usually most laws about cause and effect require the accusation to pass the "reasonable man" test.
Would a reasonable man dial 911 if you yell fire in a theatre? Yes. Therefore, you as the person yelling fire get the bill for the false alarm.
Would a reasonable man try to kill a senator because you posted a hardcore libertarian rant on a weblog? No. Therefore, if it happens, it's not your fault.
Yes, the reasonable man test has a lot of grey area (often related to silly stuff like religion), but that's for
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Let me know your credit card numbers.
Why would he do that? It's not the speech that I think is bad, it's how people react to it.
For what it's worth, if your credit card numbers got out there, I would say "tough luck." I'd prefer that they didn't get out because of how some people act, and it's not the speech that I think is bad, but people doing things that I think are bad.
Free speech! (Score:2)
Nevermind the swastika was actually a holy symbol... apparently they want the Nazi's tarnishing of it to stand unchallenged.
Re:Free speech! (Score:5, Informative)
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And aren't Nazi ones usually aligned diagonally, whereas Hindus' are horizontal & vertical?
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No. They're found in all orientations in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Indian religions and philosophies, as well as their offshoots and derivatives (though they mean slightly different things). Flipped, diagonal, straight, etc. They also sometimes come with dots in the squares, but that's not a necessity either.
EMP will take care of that (Score:5, Insightful)
If the big governments want rid of it, they will find a way.
Guns (Score:2, Insightful)
I tend to agree, even as I applaud them for trying. The fact is that government = guns, and the man with the gun always wins.
To clarify, government is defined as the organization holding the unique "right" to employ deadly force (or threat thereof) as a business model. You simply cannot compete with that unless you have similar firepower (which government makes damn sure won't ever happen).
Re:Guns (Score:5, Insightful)
I always am amazed at you "government is the root of all evil" folks.
Let's say you do away with governments. Do you think that power will disappear? That government is power?
How is it that you can see the evil of governments (and yes, they do exist), but not see the fact that there has to be some entity of the people to counterbalance private power? That at least with public power, there is some sort of ability to limit private power.
Power abhors a vacuum. What you take away from governments, you hand to private entities - corporations, religious entities, whatever - something will fill the void. If you want any sort of control over what happens, you have to make the instrument of public power the tool of the public, and not the tool of the private entities. Therein lies the trick. Simply doing away with government is absolutely handing the deed to the hen house over to those that government is supposed to protect the rest of us from.
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There is little a modern military can do that a militia can't,
I'm doubtful: militias tend to have poor firepower; few or no tanks, airplanes, things like that. Note, for example, that the Libyan militia was proving relatively ineffective against the Libyan military, until the west intervened.
Armed societies with sovereign citizens simply can't be conquered,
But can be exterminated, or forced off the land the invaders want.
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I'm all for second amendment rights (to the chagrin of my rather liberal friends, often) - but nevertheless, a well trained, disciplined military force will rip through a disorganized militia.
Absolutely an armed citizenship can be subdued and conquered. Especially when you throw in the propaganda/advertising techniques that we've got these days to turn folks against themselves.
And regardless of this, you can't always be tearing down all organization - that is anarchy, and that road leads to extinction. No
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I always am amazed at you "government is the root of all evil" folks.
Where did he even say that?
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It's inherent in his definition of government.
I'd argue that his definition is that of a broken government. The definition of a functional, western democracy is, IMO, that of the instrument of the people; the collective power of the citizenry to offset other powers, both internal and external to the nation in question.
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And we know all guns are equal. Your hunting rifle against a railgun, or old technology like a phalanx, or even ancient technology like tanks.
Any sort of revolution in the US has 3 possible outcomes - probably more, but these are the 3 I can see in a few seconds after reading your post.
1 - Military force puts down the revolution.
2 - The military is composed of people, and once they're ordered to fire upon US citizens they start thinking. Once the civilian deaths start, they think even harder, and revolt a
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Maybe in your country. In the US. according to 2005 figures, there were approximately 100,000,000 gun owners. While the current number of US. troop is 1. 5 million. So in essence, a revolt in America by gun owners is almost an assured win, if you can get them all on the same page.
Ya think so? Those 1.5 million have bigger budgets, superior weaponry, more basic guns, better armor and expert training. Regardless of any constitutional bleating about "a well-armed militia", the people of the US have no chance against their own military. No militia can be sufficiently well-armed to meet that force. I suspect that the primary purpose of the US flexing its military might every few years is not to convince the rest of the world that it is invincible, nor even to make profit for the Milita
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When the telecoms and copyright house corporations decide they want to get rid of it, they'll be gone with a quickness.
There, fixed that for ya.
Uncensorable? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Uncensorable? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are worried about governments, the problem is not disrupting the satellites at all, the weak link is the ground station which by definition resides in somebody's territory.
I don't think there are enough friendly countries of convenience to give you line of sight and global access to the satellites 24/7. Symantec published a book on the different IT Security laws all over the globe, its dated now, but a map of something like that would be interesting for this discussion.
So then you end up only running ground stations out of frendly countires somewhere in the netherlands perhaps, maybe to command and control satellites that route CnC information and traffic to the other satellites in the constellation which may be over an unfriendly country at the time.
I can't really see it working unless every user is a ground station/autonomous node.
There are some neat things you can do once you have this up, even for broadcast. Say you used it to broadcast grain or soybean prices to farmers in rural farming villages. Reformat traffic information from publicly funded sources (traffic cameras) and send them to a generic GPS or smartphone app so I don't need to pay TomTom or Garmin for the privilege of knowing if I will be sitting in traffic or not.
LEO satellites and burst traffic (Score:2)
I re-read my post if the satellites are in Low Earth Orbit and transiting every 90 minutes or so, can you burst up all of your internet traffic, and receive your answers on the next pass?
Certainly you won't be streaming audio or video like this, but for email and web-surfing one page at a time it would work.
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but for email and web-surfing one page at a time it would work.
*click* DAMN! Missed my window. Oh well, I'll try again in 9 hours.
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Two satellites drops that 45 minutes, three to 30 minutes, 4 to 22.5 minutes...
But more realistically, if you actually had the funding for such a scheme you'd use a pair of geo-stationary satellites as a universally accessible uplink, and have them farm out downlink to low-orbit birds.
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why not, what about buffering and caching?
How do you think you do it on a cell phone?
I'm assuming they'd have the equivalent of tower to tower coverage where the next satellite would pick up where the previous one left off, otherwise this is a really inferior idea compared to proxies or usenet.
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If you are worried about governments, the problem is not disrupting the satellites at all, the weak link is the ground station which by definition resides in somebody's territory.
The weak part is the satellites. You have to launch them or their replacements from somebody's territory which is going to a whole lot less countries than what you can stick ground stations in. I imagine in addition, the ground station will be cheap and fairly easy to hide, assuming anyone needs to do that.
Sea Launch (Score:2)
Actually international waters [wikipedia.org] are the best place to launch a satellite from and are not in anyone's sovereign territory.
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They might not be anybody's sovereign territory, but you're still bound by the laws of the country of your citizenship or failing that the flag on the vessel. What's worse is that in international waters pretty much any navy can put a stop to the launch without having the same sort of international incident if you were launching from land.
On top of that sea based launches are incredibly tricky even for well funded outfits, Boeing had several of their attempts fail.
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pretty much any navy can put a stop to the launch without having the same sort of international incident if you were launching from land
I'm pretty sure that shooting at or boarding a vessel to stop a communications satellite launch in international waters would cause an international incident.
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I'm pretty sure that shooting at or boarding a vessel to stop a communications satellite launch in international waters would cause an international incident.
With who?
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If you are worried about governments, the problem is not disrupting the satellites at all, the weak link is the ground station which by definition resides in somebody's territory.
The weak part is the satellites. You have to launch them or their replacements from somebody's territory which is going to a whole lot less countries than what you can stick ground stations in. I imagine in addition, the ground station will be cheap and fairly easy to hide, assuming anyone needs to do that.
There's a technical solution to this political problem: figure out how to launch such payloads from water, and do so outside the bounds of any national power.
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There's a technical solution to this political problem: figure out how to launch such payloads from water, and do so outside the bounds of any national power.
If you're launching from international waters on Earth, then you're not outside the bounds of a number of national powers.
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Unless, they would float on top of the oceans perhaps, but if countries managed to claim pieces of the south pole (Antarctica) by "projecting" their area, what stops them to do this 40km above the sea level?
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Perhaps more to the point, what's to prevent the RIAA participants and telecoms from shutting them down?
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Unless they have access to anti-satellite weapons, and the permission to use them. Be careful you don't hit someone else's sat.
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Wanna shut down a satellite? Just need a bigger antenna/more power. Witness Captain Midnight and HBO. And he was just a bored operator at a teleport.
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Let's not forget that most if not all major governments have demonstrated fairly inexpensive (for a government) ASAT capability, such as the F-15 air-launched ASAT missiles.
Obviously these can only get to LEO, but it's going to take this group a LONG time to be able to even get to LEO - no amateur effort has ever gotten an object into orbit before. Amateur satellites have always piggybacked on commercial launches (early AMSAT sats), had MAJOR fundraising behind them (tens of thousands of dollars for launch
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Even if you do piggyback them, getting a half reasonable fleet of LEO satellites is big money. More money than typically a group of generally disorganized private parties can pull off. Hell, Globalstar, a 'real' company with a business plan is in deep financial trouble and Iridium had to be rescued by the US military.
If you go for 'white knights' then you run the serious risk of having them be the front for some serious bad boy operation like an international drug smuggling cartel who would just love to h
Radio is inherently jammable (Score:3)
to any government that cares to do so...
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It's still easier: they'll shut down the ground stations.
They should try mesh network but getting from the Americas to anywhere else looks challenging. Even in the same country lag can be terrible as packets get routed from home router to home router but a round trip from a bunch of satellites to get on the other site of the world is not quick.
where do i donate $$$ (Score:5, Funny)
since it will cost like eleventy billion $$$ or euros where can i donate? i'll gladly donate $50,000 for this just to be able to download free movies and music
Re:where do i donate $$$ (Score:5, Funny)
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since it will cost like eleventy billion $$$ or euros where can i donate? i'll gladly donate $50,000 for this just to be able to download free movies and music
I doubt it would have the bandwidth to handle movies and music and maybe not even pictures.
Think a 1980's era BBS and that's probably able all that an underfunded group of hackers could provide in a satellite they've built themselves (and paid launch costs for - their best bet would be to find a friendly commercial space launch company and get them to launch it on a test flight with the understanding that it may not actually make it).
But even something with such limited capabilities would actually be extrem
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Don't be silly. It would be abused for trading media files and other copywritten content, eating up what limited bandwidth there is to use. In turn, the owners will start filtering it for more worthwhile causes. The the pirates will get all up in arms because "You're trying to filter free speech on a medium specifically built to be free!" Haven't you learned? That community does nothing but ruin things for the rest of us.
I think it would be relatively easy to block media files from being uploaded, even if it's ASCII (or unicode, or whatever) encoded.
File size limits, rate-limiting (only x posts from the same IP/user account per hour), algorithms to look for encoded binaries, etc can all combine to make it unattractive for media hosting. Bandwidth constraints alone would make it unattractive for large files. Or they could use a bit-coin type computational task required before a post is accepted can also help reduce binary tr
Landside? (Score:4, Insightful)
I read about this on the Make Magazine blog a few days ago. (Link for anyone who's interested.) [makezine.com]
Something that strikes me as weird though. From TFA:
In the open-source spirit of Hackerspace, Mr Bauer and some friends came up with the idea of a distributed network of low-cost ground stations that can be bought or built by individuals. Used together in a global network, these stations would be able to pinpoint satellites at any given time, while also making it easier and more reliable for fast-moving satellites to send data back to earth.
So... these ground stations would I presume be connected together by, uh, the internet? I don't get it.
Not that I'm against this at all, I think it's a fabulous idea. I'd buy one. Or build one. Or whatever.
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They'd be connected by either satellites or point-to-point wi-fi.
While it's within the means of any standing army to shut down wi-fi traffic, no one proposing that they have a modernized economy is going to be able to do so without destroying huge amounts of mundane usage as well.
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Now where have I heard this...... (Score:3)
http://thedaemon.com/ [thedaemon.com]
http://thedaemon.com/daemonsynopsis.html [thedaemon.com]
Had this idea a decade or so ago... (Score:4, Interesting)
Was going to write a science fiction tale around it, but life intervened (and I'm not the wordsmith to make "OMG, data from the skies!" interesting... Neal Stephenson can make building a data haven interesting. Me, notsomuch...).
The idea came about when I read about Sealand. Okay, sure, great, pseudo-island-nation with its own wacky laws -- but, (a) their pipes have to terminate somewhere, and (b) one pissed off Iranian speedboat[1] with a small hand-launched missile could wreak enough havoc to take Sealand offline, if push came to shove.
My idea coupled the then-burgeoning phenomenon of microsats http://slashdot.org/articles/00/06/11/2013214_F.shtml [slashdot.org] with the fuzziness of international / maritime law; rogue geeks on sailboats uploading censored data to the satellite network, that could then be received by any kid with an 18" dish and readily available receiver plans. (Transceiver seemed a bit far fetched.)
Maybe I'll write it one day. How long 'til NaNoWriMo?
[1] Leaving aside for the moment the logistics of how such a speedboat would traverse the open ocean from the Strait of Hormuz to the coast of England ... [insert African swallow reference(s) here]
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Was going to write a science fiction tale around it, but then I took an arrow to the knee...
Fixed.
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How long 'til NaNoWriMo?
Well it's not until November so another 10 months? Personally I think it would be awesome if they left that graph thing running, just resetting every month. It's a great motivator. I've been thinking about coding something similar, just haven't gotten around to it.
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How long 'til NaNoWriMo?
Well it's not until November so another 10 months? Personally I think it would be awesome if they left that graph thing running, just resetting every month. It's a great motivator. I've been thinking about coding something similar, just haven't gotten around to it.
Seems like you could use the NaNaNoWriMoCoWriMO - National NaNOWriMO Code Writing Month.
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The problem is that it's easy to quantify when a book is done (you have done x words today) but much harder to quantify the goals for a coding project.
Uncensorable? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think China has already demonstrated the ability [wikipedia.org] to censor satellite-based communications.
What about money? (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, putting satellites in orbit is kind of expensive. Who is going to pay for all that?
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Serious answer SpaceX, they have a really low cost per kilo to launch to LEO, and higher cost to launch to GEO. They will be doing a lot of satellite launches for Iridium to put up their satellite network.
So now the problem is really architecting your standardized satellite not using a standardized picosat or microsat designed for limited experiments, but something meant to be up there for years handling comms.
Then bundle them in a multiple satellite payload of some sort and have them spread to their final
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The cost to launch something like this is still several orders of magnitude more than most Kickstarter campaigns could fund, however.
Bandwidth? (Score:3)
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well, who wouldn't like a bunch of telecom satellites for themselfs to play with?
problem is, who's global grid would that be? theirs? mine? yours? 23432423 chinese villagers?
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Power vs Bandwidth.
Want lots of bandwidth? You need lots of "received power", either via high power transmitters or large aperture antennas. DBS satellites (Dish/DirectTV) have large solar arrays/batteries and high power amplifers for their transponders. The video streams are also run on fully saturated transponders, so they can use every bit of power available rather than share it with other transponder users.
Can't generate that much power? You don't get the bandwidth. I've run 45Mbps+ full duplex ove
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Nice idea for a perfect world (Score:2)
We need to stop indulging in fantasies and accept the reality: We need to save the Internet we have, keep the asshole corporations and the asshole dictators of the world from destroying it. If everyone stopped using the Internet
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..but it's a childish idea that completely ignores the realities that it'd either get fucked up when too many people got involved with it, or it'd be used to commit crimes, or it'd be assumed to be used to commit crimes, so one government or the other would confiscate control of it.
We need to stop indulging in fantasies and accept the reality: We need to save the Internet we have, keep the asshole corporations and the asshole dictators of the world from destroying it. If everyone stopped using the Internet there would be no Internet; the power to shape what the Internet will become is in the hands of the people who use it, not the asshole corporations and dictators of the world. Stand up for it.
Alas, it is those selfsame asshole corporations and governments that created and funded it in the first place. They hired geeks who thought they could change the world, but forgot about human nature, which is to be greedy, grabby and generally as grubby as possible.
This is a sociological problem being band-aided with technological solutions and ultimately the bandaid is going to have to be removed.
Hackers on the Moon? (Score:2)
When I saw that in the summary, the first thing that came to mind is that a number of people would like put hackers on the moon.
It might rank number two after putting hackers in a blender but it's definitely in the top five.
myke
Amateur Radio Satellites (Score:4, Informative)
Are you aware of the more than 70 Amateur-Radio Satellites which have been launched since 1961?
see http://www.spacetoday.org/Satellites/Hamsats/HamsatsBasics.html [spacetoday.org]
A few hurdles .. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just off the top of my head. A worthy endeavor, but one that would require significant investment and planning.
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One Major Problem (Score:2)
There is no defense against said attacks.
Comment removed (Score:3)
This was first discussed this summer (Score:3)
at the CCC Camp in Germany. A lot of space-related topics were presented there [media.ccc.de]
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Oh no, no lobbyists here. Just paid company advisers/historians who may make occasional mentioning of their day job while entertaining friends after hours off the clock.
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I don't think lobbyists would be the ones shooting down these satellites.
Re:Only... (Score:5, Funny)
(Solving Pirating American Copyright Enforcement Junk Orbiting Ban)
A bill sold as protecting American satellites from this terrible problem of space junk in orbit, American jobs from overseas satellite hackers bent on stealing movies, and national security.
It stipulates that the military will, at the RIAA/MPAA's command, blow up any satellite that the RIAA/MPAA lawyers say probably has pirated material on it. Additionally, large amounts of metal objects will be placed in orbit make it difficult for pirates to launch any more satellites. Sponsors of the bill say they don't really understand physics, but they doubt that could damage innocent satellites. They also point out that the constitution doesn't apply in space.
NO! (Score:3)
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yes, it would.
like http://www.servalproject.org/ [servalproject.org] (there's also an app [android.com])
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this makes so much more sense.
and also http://www.servalproject.org/ [servalproject.org]