But How on Earth Would Musk Do It?
Published at 08:25 on 9 February 2023
Elon claims to be restricting Ukraine’s usage of Starlink for drone purposes, and my question is the one I just posed in the title above.
Consider first of all that the internet protocol used for such purposes is almost certainly encrypted. Then consider that most internet traffic these days is encrypted. (Look at your browser’s address window. If it starts with “https:”, congratulations! You are using encryption.) So all that those drones are doing is passing streams of unintelligable (to others) gibberish over an Internet full of such streams of gibberish. Good luck filtering that out.
Now, encrypted Internet protocols don’t encrypt everything. It would be possible to use IP addresses and port numbers to filter out the offending packets. It is, however, a relatively simple matter to reassign both. Make a few software tweaks (this is all software, after all) and one could easily disguise everything as traffic between a browser and a web site. Again, good luck filtering that out, at least if you don’t want to cripple Starlink for its vast majority of (non-military) uses.
I think the only plausible theory is that the Muskrat is just blowing smoke. It all goes to show just how little this self-professed technological genius actually knows about the technologies the companies he owns uses. His role is that of a capitalist with money, not a technologist with ideas.