FYEO
Space: Starlink Grows and Evolves
September 15, 2023: As of now SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corporation) has over 5.000 Starlink satellites in orbit. The number was achieved with the August 26 use of a SpaceX Falcon 9 SLV (Satellite Launch Vehicle) carrying 22 Starlink satellites, raiding Starlink count to 5,005. Ultimately, SpaceX wants to have 30,000 Starlink satellites in orbit. This would provide the entire planet with low-cost, high-speed Internet access via a multiple-satellite ISP (Internet Service Provider) system. Users will need a small ground station consisting of a small satellite dish and a special modem, costing $600 with service costing $90 a month. In large quantities these stations cost about $100 each. Some nations will not allow their citizens to access Starlink while others seek to regulate what portions of the Internet users can access. This has been the experience of major competitors like ViaSat and HughesNet. When all the Starlink satellites are in orbit, Starlink will be the planet’s major provider of satellite Internet service. Starlink needs about ten million monthly fee paying customers to be profitable.
The original gen1 Starlink system was designed to expand to over 40,000 satellites if demand by paying customers was large enough to justify and pay for it. Starlink gen2 is designed to provide so much more customer bandwidth (data transmission) that far fewer Starlink satellites will be needed. That could be up to 90 percent less than gen1. Gen2 is designed to operate more efficiently over countries that outlaw Starlink as an ISP. Nearly half the Internet users on the planet live in countries that heavily censor Internet use. Starlink makes it much more difficult to censor Internet users. Originally designed to provide affordable high-speed Internet use to those in remote areas, Starlink discovered it had gained a lot of new customer interest because of its experience in Ukraine.
The gen2 satellites are described as nearly ten times more capable than the gen1 (original) Starlink satellites. Gen2 are designed to work with gen1 satellites and gradually replace them. Gen1 birds are designed to last for about seven years. At that point the satellite gradually loses altitude until it burns up reentering the atmosphere. The true capabilities of gen2 won’t be known until some of them are in orbit. Gen1 satellites proved more effective than expected but the list of suggested improvements indicated that a larger gen2 satellite would be the way to go. Eventually this will mean fewer Starlink satellites in orbit but there will still be thousands of them.
The main function of Starlink is to provide cheaper, more powerful and globally available access to the Internet or any other communications network that can pay for the use of the Starlink network. That includes military users that are friendly to Starlink and not considered a threat. The threat nations include China, Russia and several smaller countries like Iran, North Korea and Cuba that are hostile to Internet access they cannot control. China estimates that Starlink is able to increase the speed and throughput of military communications over a hundred times what it is now.
Starlink is not the only multiple-satellite ISP system. There are similar efforts underway in several countries, including Russia and China. These efforts have fallen far behind Starlink in terms of numbers and capabilities. Starlink is unique in that it was the first to enter service and quickly proved it could do what it was designed to do. That included quickly adapting to the needs of military users. This was demonstrated in Ukraine where Starlink was activated over Ukraine days after Russia invaded in February 2022. The first of thousands of free user kits were delivered in less than a week. Currently there are over 100,000 user kits in Ukraine, most of them serving as small, local ISPs by adding an inexpensive router. As long as the Ukraine War continues, SpaceX and the U.S. government will pay for the service in Ukraine.
In 2022 SpaceX announced a new subsidiary called Starshield with enhanced versions of Starlink technology on larger earth-imaging satellites with sensors to provide whatever sensing capabilities a national security customer wants. This includes photos, real-time video and all manner of data which U.S. military-grade satellite sensors can collect. Potential users include the NSA, CIA and equivalent agencies of American allies.
While Starlink has achieved market dominance in space-based communications for personal and commercial users, that largely consists of high-speed Internet datalinks and inexpensive ground links that can be stationary or moving in a vehicle or ship. Starshield plans to do that same with classified data government agencies collect. Starshield satellites are designed to accept many types of capabilities provided by user-supplied modules designed for compatibility with the Starshield interface. Starshield data and control links use much more robust encryption. Starshield will use larger SpaceX SLVs (satellite launch vehicles) to put new Starshield satellites in orbit. Currently Russia is actively seeking ways to disrupt Starlink service. These attacks are nothing new, because government and military users of space-based communications systems have long worked on improving security.
Starshield is organized to take business away from commercial firms like Blacksky and Maxtar that already have billions of dollars in government contracts to provide persistent imaging, including real-time video, of specific areas on earth. The United States provides these specialized imaging services to Ukraine and that provides superior satellite data on Russian forces than what the Russians can provide to their own troops.
Ukrainians were impressed by the potential for Starlink and rapidly came up with new uses, some of them military. This gave Starlink a realistic test under very adverse conditions. So far this has been a success even though Russia, apparently with some help from China, is seeking ways to shut down or disrupt Starlink.
Another advantage of Starlink was the rapidity of upgrades or modifications to deal with problems, including Russian efforts to jam or disrupt performance in Ukraine. Not only were the Russians unable to disable Starlink, but found its encrypted signals far superior to communications Russian troops had to use in Ukraine. Worse for the Russians was the Ukrainian ability to rapidly integrate Starlink with Ukrainian communications and fire control systems.
Before Gen2 satellites were ready, SpaceX pointed out that it could put additional Starlink satellites into orbit faster and more cheaply than Russia or anyone else could destroy them. This capability was part of the Starlink design that not only allowed satellite and user software to be quickly updated, but new Starlink satellites often had new features added to improve performance and that included more resistance to hacking and jamming. Complaints that Starlink satellites would become so numerous that they would be a hazard for other satellites are unproven and even less likely once the gen2 satellites are operating. Starlink operates in LEO (low earth orbit) between 300 and 600 kilometers from earth, where there is already a lot of space junk too small to quickly fall back into the atmosphere and burn up. Any plans to destroy a lot of Starlink satellites would make the situation worse without shutting down Starlink services. If left alone the gen1 and gen2 Starlink satellites are designed to burn themselves up in the atmosphere when no longer operational.
China sees Starlink as a serious threat to its current government Internet censorship and control over the population, as well as the political reliability of its military. That’s no speculation because it’s already happening, often live on TV, in Ukraine. China has not yet come up with a workable plan to disrupt or destroy Starlink, and considers Starlink a major obstacle to China eventually becoming the most powerful military force on the planet. That was supposed to happen before 2050. With Starlink it may take longer.
Starshield also aims to provide users with a dominant position in space-based sensing. Starshield is meant to be cheaper and more responsive than any existing competitor in providing a wider array of earth sensing capabilities. SpaceX has not revealed the schedule for lifting Starshield satellites into orbit, and some may already be there testing the services Starshield will provide. Starshield activities will be less public than Starlink, which is how intelligence agencies like it.

By Mike Grafton (Mike_Grafton) on Monday, September 18, 2023 - 09:08 am: Edit

I wonder when each Starlink sat gets a small camera. Even a cell phone camera these days has a pretty capable system.

Each one would give a pretty useless pic, but treated as a synthetic aperture, I can see them being very powerful... Lots of math of course.

https://graphics.stanford.edu/~vaibhav/pubs/thesis.pdf

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031320316301674

By Matthew Lawson (Mglawson) on Tuesday, September 19, 2023 - 11:06 am: Edit

Here in Dayton, a deal is being made to bring the Joby Aviation air taxi manufacturing service to the airport. I honestly didn't know this vertical take-off air service was a thing, looks like they could be pretty cool.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, September 25, 2023 - 05:15 pm: Edit

FYEO
Information Warfare: North Korean Cyber War Efforts
September 23, 2023: TAG, the Google Threat Analysis Group, recently revealed how it had detected and disrupted an ambitious North Korean effort to use social engineering to persuade Internet security specialists to look at an interesting document of mutual interest. The document included malware that was capable of infecting the recipient's PC and any network that PC was connected to. The recipients soon discovered the true malicious nature of what they had received, developed a procedure to fix any damage and then informed the rest of the Internet security about what happened. It was eventually discovered that the perpetrator of this malware distribution effort was North Korea, which would secretly receive useful data from any system that was infected with their malware.
North Korea has long been regarded as an APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) and a major practitioner of Cyber War because of its hacking efforts that attempt to steal money and information. The North Korean efforts often succeed and bring in nearly a billion dollars a year on average and more in some years.
North Korea has maintained and expanded its hacking capabilities for years and took part in the worldwide expansion of professional hacking groups. One side effect is the creation of many tools and techniques hackers created to carry out these Cyber War attacks. What this all means is that nations see Cyber War weapons as major components of their military power because the Cyber War weapons available keep getting more effective. This evolution came into focus since the Internet and the World Wide Web became widely used and truly international after 2000. Within a decade, researchers began to encounter major APTs. Since then, the APTs have become scarier. Consider TajMahal and the White Company. These major malware producers and users came to be called APTs and that said it all. The White Company was discovered in 2017 by computer security companies as this new APT quietly tried to hack its way into Pakistani Air Force networks. White Company was deliberate, effective and discreet. It was called the “white” company because the group placed a premium on concealing its operations as well as its origins. This sort of thing was first noted in 2010 when Stuxnet was discovered and attributed to an Israeli-American state-level effort that produced a very elaborate, professional and stealthy bit of malware that did major damage to the Iranian nuclear program. In 2018 Iran was hit with a similar attack but this Stuxnet-like malware was even more elaborate, its source is still unknown and the Iranians would rather not talk about it. In 2020 there was another well publicized series of Cyber War battles between Israel and Iran.
North Korea took this further. For example, in 2020 they established yet another specialized college for intelligence operations. The Mangyongdae Revolutionary Academy offered a three-year course for international IW (information warfare) specialists. Students in this course will also study the detection and monitoring of radio traffic, including location of radio signals. These tech elements are already taught at Mangyongdae but not as intensively as will be the case with the new IW major. Another important area of study is how to block certain types of wireless communications at the North Korean border. This will include unwanted cell phone signals.
Prime candidates for the new course are younger (under 30) officers who demonstrate technical skills on the entry exam. Those who get into the course and graduate will have much improved career and promotion prospects. This new specialty is the latest of several new programs at Mangyongdae that are only available to the most loyal and capable upper-class North Koreans.
This new IW course is part of a trend. During the last five years, North Korea has established a program for foreign agents that was only open to members of the elite North Korean families. The children of these families are eligible to attend the Mangyongdae Revolutionary Academy, but many courses of study are only open to applicants with special aptitudes. Graduates of Mangyongdae are likely to get the most senior government and military jobs and there are only about a hundred graduates a year. A growing number of those graduates have gained some very special skills. There is a computer science program for Mangyongdae students seeking to become foreign agents in “enemy” countries, especially South Korea. These agents are trained to hunt down high-level defectors in foreign countries and either arrange to kill the defector or at least find out how the defector is doing, how many secrets they have divulged and, if possible, persuade the defector to shut up or even return to North Korea.
To accomplish this “defector remediation” task the Mangyongdae students are taught the latest hacking techniques, what tools and mercenary hackers are available in the hacker underground and how to deal with the tools, and the mercs, to put together specialized efforts to track down defectors and monitor them. This means the Mangyongdae must be able to pass as a South Korean, as in speak with a South Korea accent, as well as use the customs and slang. This is to make it possible to assume a false identity convincingly and play the role of an Internet criminal. There are a lot of those in both Koreas.
As important as all these skills are, the most important item is loyalty to North Korea. The Mangyongdae agents go after the growing number of high-level North Koreans who are illegally leaving the country. The agents are trained to use social media to seek out known or suspected defectors, make contact and obtain more information about them.
Since 2005 North Korea has been increasingly concerned about key people defecting to South Korea or simply getting into China and making asylum deals with the Chinese government. The Chinese have always been receptive to such arrangements and there have been more of this as the hundreds of families at the top of the social pyramid in North Korea get out. This is a risky endeavor although there are more and more people smugglers who, for enough money, can get anyone out of the country. Worse, many senior officials became defectors while already outside North Korea on official business. There they can arrange to disappear and defect. Some of these defectors have been diplomats and some of them were senior enough to be noticed when they disappeared.
These high-caste North Koreans report that there is a sense in the ruling families that the system isn’t working and is doomed. The top people in North Korea are easy to identify. When North Korea was founded in the late 1940s, a caste system was established to ensure that the most loyal and capable North Korean communists were recognized and rewarded for their efforts to maintain the new communist government for generations to come. The newly established secret police and communist party reported on everyone, making it possible to create an official list of every family assigned to one of 51 social classes. From the beginning, most (29) of these classes were composed of people considered either hostile to the government or leaning that way. These new lower classes are where most of the new (and often quite wealthy) donju (entrepreneurs) are coming from. Most of the population falls into these 29 social classes, and many of them are now getting increasingly hostile to a government that seems to do nothing but create one disaster after another.
Members of higher-caste families are catching on as well and younger members are increasingly abandoning promising careers to flee the country. All that bribe money making its way to the higher caste North Koreans doesn’t just go to buy an easier life in North Korea because that is already assured if you are high caste. The bribe money often goes to buy an escape. To deal with this problem among the most trusted classes, another special program at the Mangyongdae Revolutionary Academy created elite counter-intelligence (spy catcher) agents who often operate in China and South Korea. Apparently, some of the Mangyongdae agents have been identified or even caught and this program is no longer as secret as it once was. Meanwhile, the Mangyongdae Revolutionary Academy and its ultra-loyal students get a lot more publicity inside (and outside) North Korea.
In addition to tracking down high-caste defectors, some Mangyongdae graduates are also assigned to monitor the loyalty of North Korean hackers working outside North Korea. North Korean defectors have revealed much about how North Korea has managed to establish and maintain hacking operations outside North Korea, an operation whose main purpose is to make a lot of money for the cash hungry North Korea government. This became a higher priority operation because of the growing list of economic sanctions imposed, while at the same time there were more opportunities for Internet-based misbehavior. Some of these defectors were associated with the North Korean hackers who are, it turns out, mostly based outside North Korea because Internet access is better and operating outside North Korea makes it easier to deny that North Korean hackers are engaged in illegal activity. South Korea has obtained a lot of details about the North Korean hacker operations and even allowed some defectors familiar with those operations to speak openly about it. Obviously many of these North Korean hackers are not as loyal as they are supposed to be so North Korea became determined to identify and punish the ones that defect and expose how the hacker program works. Each time that happens North Korea has to revise the way its hackers operate. This is time-consuming and expensive.
The Mangyongdae agents are also trained in the usual methods of secretly contacting “the center”, usually via North Korea operatives based outside of North Korea and able to relay messages to and from North Korea itself. The skills North Korea hackers have developed are world-class and increasingly difficult to counter or even detect. But this edge in skills and techniques depends on having loyal operatives in key positions, thus the importance of the Mangyongdae agents.
Deceased (since 2011) North Korean leader Kim Jong Il had always been a big fan of PCs and electronic gadgets in general. Kim Jong Il founded Mirim College to train hackers and backed this new school consistently. The only instance of displeasure from Kim Jong Il was suspicions about those who graduated from Mirim between 1986 through the early 1990s. These Mirim graduates had been tainted by visits (until 1991) by Russian electronic warfare experts. Some Mirim students also went to Russia to study for a semester or two. All these students were suspected of having become spies for the Russians, and most, if not all, were purged from the Internet hacking program. Thus, it wasn't until the late 1990s that there were a sufficient number of trusted Internet experts that could be used to begin building a Cyber War organization.
South Korea has to be wary because South Korea has become more dependent on the Internet than any other on the planet, with the exception of the United States. As in the past, if the north is to start any new kind of Internet mischief, they try it out in South Korea first. While many of the first serious attacks in 2009 were more annoying than anything else, they revealed a new threat out there, and one that not only got worse but turned out to be from the usual suspects. Now the threat is very real and growing rapidly. North Korea is seeing its Internet-based capabilities damaged by the growing number of high-level defectors with valuable secrets to sell to China, South Korea or whoever will pay the most. Given the worldwide depredations of North Korean hackers, this provides defectors with a lot of potential hiding places. This led to the Mangyongdae Academy programs for specialized agents. Now some of the Mangyongdae grads are suspected of wavering loyalty and reliability. North Korea may lack food, electrical power, freedom and much more but there is no shortage of paranoia.

By Warren Mathews (Turtle) on Monday, October 23, 2023 - 09:36 pm: Edit

Over the summer my sister gave me her old Acer which is an i5-8th Generation chip and is otherwise fairly well equipped for when it was first released. For the month of October I did a factory restore on it, just so I could set it up my way. Then because it does qualify for the free Win 11 upgrade I did that. This past week I took out the 8GB of RAM and put in 32GB of RAM. What a difference that makes on Windows 11. My next upgrade to it will be cloning the hard drive in it to a M2 solid state drive. Once that is done, and I can find a graphics card that will support 3 monitors and doesn't require the 6 Pin power connector it will go from my back up computer to my primary computer.

If you got any good suggestions for cloning an electro-mechanical hard drive to a M2 solid state drive let me know.

By Jeff Guthridge (Jeff_Guthridge) on Tuesday, October 24, 2023 - 02:12 pm: Edit

Turtle, it depends on the available hardware on the machine.

Probably the easy way would be to install the M2 drive in the Acer machine, then using tools like Macrium Reflect Free to clone the drive, update the boot table, then remove the old drive.

Shouldn't need any extra hardware in that use case. If you need to do the cloning on a different machine, then there are a number of inexpensive ($25+-) dongle style adapters that will plug into the HDD and then let you plug that into the USB bus of the other computer. Plugging an M2 stick into the other machine might be complicated, but there are gadgets that do that too. I've seen one on Amazon recently that lets you slot the M2 stick in like an old-school game cartridge! But I digress.

If you need specific recommendations on what to do or get, shoot me an email and I'll see what I can do to help.

By Robert Russell Lender (Rusman) on Wednesday, October 25, 2023 - 12:56 am: Edit

Hello all,

I'm trying to load the Discuss page via its URL: https://www.starfleetgames.com/discus/

But it won't load. The white background loads, and the line that separates the discussion topics on the right side from the formatting and other things on the left. Is there something wrong with the page on ADB's side?

Anyone else having this issue?

By Jeff Guthridge (Jeff_Guthridge) on Wednesday, October 25, 2023 - 02:57 am: Edit

Robert, this is a known issue. This board is not hosted on a secure server, so try taking the 's' out of https on your address line. You may also have to turn off a trick setting in your browser to allow you to visit insecure web pages.

By Robert Russell Lender (Rusman) on Wednesday, October 25, 2023 - 09:58 am: Edit

Ok, that didn't do the trick. But it was related to the issue and I found another way around it.

Many thanks! :-)

By Warren Mathews (Turtle) on Monday, October 30, 2023 - 02:32 pm: Edit

I got my laptop's Hardrive cloned to a Samsung 980 NVME drive via Samsung's Data Migration software. With the exception of not cloning the recovery partion it went smoothly and only took 20 minutes. I spent more time on having it defrag the source disk first. Afterwards I just had to enter the BIOS to change the boot sequence.

WOW. 6 seconds from power on to login screen. This on a 7th Gen i3 Procressor with 12 GB Ram (Maxed out for this laptop). That boot time is on both battery power and AC power to test

I have removed the original laptop drive to keep it safe and replaced that with 1 TB 2.5in SSD for data.

I'm going to follow a similar path for my back up desktop. The question will be if I want to swap the power supply out for a stronger one to add a video card that will support 3 monitors. I will probably use the Samsung 980 Pro for the desktop upgrade.

By Mike Erickson (Mike_Erickson) on Monday, October 30, 2023 - 06:57 pm: Edit

>> 6 seconds from power on to login screen

When I upgraded my Mac to an SSD, the big wow factor was shutdown time. It would normally take around 45 seconds to shutdown that (admittedly older) machine. With the new SSD it was about 4 seconds. So nice at the end of the day to have my computer shut down promptly!

--Mike

By Warren Mathews (Turtle) on Friday, December 15, 2023 - 08:34 am: Edit

Update on the Acer i5 Desktop. I decided to get a second Samsung M2 980 SSD drive and do it the same way I did the laptop. While the desktop takes a little longer to get to the login screen than the laptop, the improvement is noticeable. Also, once I login on both it doesn't feel like I'm waiting for ever to start using the programs I have installed on them.

By Warren Mathews (Turtle) on Friday, December 15, 2023 - 08:38 am: Edit

Can anyone send me screenshots of what needs to be changed in both Chrome and Edge to make the BBS display properly in those browsers? Just use the address in my profile.

So far Firefox version: 120.0.1 is working fine.

By Warren Mathews (Turtle) on Friday, December 15, 2023 - 08:45 am: Edit

If anyone has a working IOmega 250GB USB Zip Drive that they don't want and need, please email me as I will be willing to purchase it from you.

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Friday, December 15, 2023 - 09:19 am: Edit

In Chrome, click in the address line at the top of the browser. Then click *again* in the address line. You'll see it starting with "https://[etc]". Delete the "s" from "https", and Enter.

By Kenneth Humpherys (Pmthecat) on Friday, December 15, 2023 - 11:24 am: Edit

In chrome, click the symbol before the address.
(If you hover the mouse over it, it says "view site information".)
Next click on site settings. (Has a gear symbol)
This will open a page containing the settings.
Scroll down to the line "Insecure content" with a caution symbol in front.
In the check box next to it, click and select allow.
Exit the settings page and reload the starfleetgames page.

By Warren Mathews (Turtle) on Friday, December 15, 2023 - 06:15 pm: Edit

Thanks guys. Lar sent me an email with what I needed. Firefox is on my laptop and I didn't think to do a search on the BBS earlier when I had it up.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Sunday, January 14, 2024 - 10:11 am: Edit

My kid brother's daughter gave him gave him a 3D printer for Christmas. It's an "Ender-3 V2 Neo". If anyone has experience with that model, or 3D printers in general, and is willing to give some tips via email, please let me know. Thanks!!

P.S> When I say 'kid brother' ... he's 55.


Garth L. Getgen

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Sunday, February 11, 2024 - 07:36 pm: Edit

SCSI isn't dead yet — new SSD for old or obsolete systems is a boon for retro computing fans- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/scsi-isnt-dead-yet-new-ssd-for-old-or-obsolete-systems-is-a-boon-for-retro-computing-fans

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Friday, May 24, 2024 - 06:13 pm: Edit

Had to fix a friends computer today. It was a really odd problem. The Windows task bar stopped working. No, it didn't disappear, but rather all of the pinned icon were missing and the Start button didn't respond. I took a wild guess and suggested going into Task Manager and restarting Windows Explorer. The problem there was Ctrl-Alt-Del did not bring up the pop-up to get into Task Manager. I knew there was another way to get to Task Manager (saw it on YouTube once) but couldn't remember how. Fortunately, the desktop icons allowed me to bring up a browser and Google the answer. Using Ctrl-Shift-Esc, the Task Manager opened, and then I restarted Windows Explorer. Ta-Da! It was back to normal. I had just never seen Windows Explorer hang like that before. Rather odd, but easy fix.


Garth L. Getgen

By Mike Grafton (Mike_Grafton) on Saturday, May 25, 2024 - 07:54 am: Edit

I've been seeing ads for "Opera." Anyone have experience with that web browser?

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Saturday, December 21, 2024 - 06:14 pm: Edit

For a real world example of how things go together, check out:

On you tube, terms:

Enterprise
(CVA-80)
Rudder
Post
Installation

Starboard

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Sunday, January 26, 2025 - 03:41 pm: Edit

Just saw a YouTube short that took me to a site called ShadeMap.app that will show where sun-cast shadows fall anywhere in the world based on date/time.

Pretty neat. It'll project shadows of trees in your back yard. But it can't handle open structures like the Gateway Arch or Eiffel Tower. Still fun to play with.


Garth L. Getgen

By Mike Grafton (Mike_Grafton) on Friday, March 21, 2025 - 10:22 am: Edit

Youtube (aka AdTube) has gone over the top with pushing ads. They wanted me to sit through a EIGHT minute ad before I could watch a 22 minute video.

And they are pi$$y about ad blockers.

So for now, I think I am out.

By Eddie E Crutchfield (Librarian101) on Friday, March 21, 2025 - 10:58 am: Edit

Mike I used it years ago, but it became outdated, it appears this is a new version. The older version was very good, but like I said became outdated. I have not tried the new version yet. if you do a search for opera reviews you get a pretty good idea of the pros and cons. A note it is now owned by a Chinese company.