[lxgr]

Iridium works extremely well for what it was designed for – truly global, low latency communications without requiring a directional antenna. Unfortunately, that also means very low data rates.

It only gained packed-switched data with the second generation satellite network, but data rates are still very low (think hundreds of kbps, and I believe even that needs high-gain antennas).

[NitpickLawyer]

~Iridium~ devices were bricked in the first days of the invasion, iirc. That's why starlink was such a big deal, and that's why the usmil wanted it "yesterday" after it proved itself in ua. They had to set up a dedicated unit to deal with starlink, as every branch was trying to get it on their own and complicated purchasing. That unit / project was also called starshield, confusing the matter with the other starshield project that uses starlink buses + ng sensor packages.

edit: it was Viasat not Iridium, I got them mixed up.

[RF_Savage]

Viasat fixed modems got bricked at start of the war in Ukraine and some collateral one's in border areas.

[snickerdoodle12]

Interesting how the US goes absolutely ballistic about some random dude violating the "Computer Security Act" on a small scale, but didn't react at all to this massive, incredibly impactful, attack.

[mschuster91]

it didn't impact Americans. it impacted us Europeans but at the time this went down we were too dependent on Russia's cheap gas (and, frankly, lacked the military power) to raise the appropriate level of stink.

Hell we let Russia freely execute dissidents (Skripal or the Berlin Tiergarten murder come to my mind) and tolerated a land-grab war by little green men in 2014. Either of these actions would have warranted serious consequences, the Crimea/Donbas grab would be a casus belli if you ask me. But again, we were too busy sucking Putin off for cheap gas.

[snickerdoodle12]

so as far as the US is concerned it's fair game to attack US companies as long as it doesn't impact US citizens?

[hansvm]

As far as the US is concerned, it's fair game to drone-strike US citizens [0,1,2] from time to time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki#Death

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Nawar_al-Awlaki

[mrguyorama]

The US does not want to go to full scale, open war with Russia.

So the US will downplay or ignore some amount of aggression from Russia to do so.

If the US wanted to go to war with Russia, we would be playing up some rather minor thing, like sending a missile system into "Europe" or something.

When that Ukrainian SAM fell in Poland and killed a farmer, there was a late night emergency meeting between a lot of very important people from NATO countries to decide WTF to do. If the west wanted to fight Russia, that meeting would have resulted in an Article 5 declaration of some sort.

Russia is behind the sabotage/blowing up of a Czech Republic arms depot. If the west wanted to go to war with Russia, that could have also been an instigating event.

Russia will continue to get passes for "minor" acts of war as long as the west does not agree with sending citizens to die in a war.

That we don't equip Ukraine with more than enough war material to do whatever they are capable of, however, is fucking stupid.

Welcome to geopolitics.

[mschuster91]

As much as I hate to say it: Trump got a point in saying that Europe should have been responsible for its security / military even 10 years back.

[mschuster91]

"Some" is an understatement lol. Here in Germany 3.800 (!) wind turbines lost remote control (and thus were forced offline) until the terminals could be changed because their command uplink was via Viasat.

[NitpickLawyer]

You are right, thanks. I mixed them up. Iridium is also providing service in ua now, and was unaffected at the start of the war.