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Russia is signaling it could take out the West's internet and GPS. There's no good backup plan.
(www.businessinsider.com)
Bark bark bark
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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politics
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Yes, this is really like a tiny dog barking its head off, because it's convinced it can't be harmed.
Russia and Putin have been embarrassing themselves for a while now.
suuure, they couldn't even take out ukraines communication systems
Cutting a couple undersea fiber cables and completely fucking the whole internet is very easy. Humanity has so far just kinda silently agreed to not fuck with that.
Sure, but welcome to 2024, where we have mirrors and cdns and the cloud with distributed everything.
Not saying disconnecting the americas from eurasia wouldn't be a big deal, but the internet would keep working.
Elon would be very happy.
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Maybe they could get an compromised/friendly/useful idiot/individual installed in the hightest levels of government who, either intentionally or unintentionally, would funnel secrets to them which help facilitate mass disruption?
ohh wait...
I find the threat of GPS loss to be hard to believe. Theyd have to take out 38 GPS satelites and presumably any of the other navagation satellites American allies have in orbit, and presumably theyd have to not damage their own navigation satelites in the process. I also doubt they could do that all at the same time, or quick enough that no one could respond. Im sure they have the capability, and im sure they have an idea of what the operation would have to look like but in terms of a plan that's actionable, I have big doubts.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss that threat.
They know exactly where in the sky they are. They know what frequencies their antennas are tuned to. I'm betting burning out those transceivers would not be an impossible feat.
I also don't know how well they put up against really large lasers
They've also been fully capable of putting s*** into space for years. I would not put it past them to have some form of combination weather/spy satellite and weapons platform out there.
They must be aware of the concept of re-ta-lia-tion. You shoot down my satellites, I shoot down yours. Nobody wins and we are all back 40 years.
or they could jam the signal.
Where though? They just gonna fly enough jammers up into orbit to cover the entire path and all the satelites and pretend thats not going to also jam every navagation satelite including their own and China, their biggest allys? I don't see it.
Blowing up the GPS satellites is certainly an option and there's not much we could do to stop them. We know that China has succesfuly tested an anti-satellite missile in 2007. I would not be surprised if Russia was working on the technology at the same time. If they can't or don't want to blow up the satellites, then they could perhaps launch their own jamming satellites to orbit near the existing GPS satellites would work.
Edit: It just occurred to me that you don't need to jam them. Just put up your own satellites that mimic the GPS satellites to throw off the calculations of anyone trying to use them. Your devices wouldn't know which signals were legit.
The Soviet Union proved that it was able to shoot down satellites in the 60s. The technical difficulty of hitting a satellite with a missile is not really an obstacle here
Yeah, the Soviet union could also mass produce tanks and planes. Russia today...
Glances at Ukraine
Is using almost exclusively Soviet stock.
It may not be a problem technology wise, but do they really have the equipment today to blow up dozens of satellites?
I seriously doubt it, Russia isn't the Soviet Union, they seem less capable, and corruption would probably have undermined the program even if it still existed.
And even if they can, can they also do it without harming their own and China's geopositioning systems?
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Just put up your own satellites that mimic the GPS satellites to throw off the calculations of anyone trying to use them. Your devices wouldn't know which signals were legit.
Do this, then get absolutely raw dog fucked by the US (and any other competent) military, who has absolutely no issue with ground nav or weapons guidance because they all use encrypted GPS signals.
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They just have to give them the raspberry.
I don't get why this is so hard.
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Yeah?
And we'd retaliate. Which is why they haven't done it. They didn't shoot down the satellites in the cold war and they aren't going to do it now unless they've decided the world without satellites is just so much better.
How is this news? China could nuke the West Coast tomorrow and the Canadians might invade Maine to secure a maple syrup monopoly! Actually, that's more likely than anything else in this thread...
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Russia said they'd take over Ukraine in three days.
Russia says a lot of shit.
Russia has become the embarrassing relative you hate seeing at holiday gatherings.
How would they interfere with our elections without the Internet?
The same Russia that "indicated" the Ukraine special operation would take three days?
Lol
What? The whole fuckin internet is the backup plan
Like bro do you even BGP?
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that's basically russia asking to get wiped out
No one takes them seriously, they just bark. Here's a hilarious wiki article on all the red lines Russia set in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_lines_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War
Date notified: February 24, 2022
Red line: “Interference” in Ukraine by outside powers
Date broken: February 24, 2022
This one send me flying.
It's like a mini MAAD...
To Putin, any significant threat to his power in Russia is destruction. Ukraine is making inroads as I type this, if they get too far into Russia, it could dominoe into Putin losing power.
If it ever actually looks close to that, he ain't going to be attacking Internet cables, he'll be launching nukes.
But once a nuke launches, it's over for all of us. So he needs an intermediate step that he could do and would fuck a bunch of shit up by doing, but it's not a nuclear bomb.
once a nuke launches, it's over for all of us
No, it really isn't. Nuclear winter and the idea of thousands of Tsar Bombas belongs to the 70s. Even in an all out nuclear war today using the full (working? - doubtful regarding Russia) arsenals it would be a catastrophe with hundreds of thousands of dead but mostly we'd be continuing on as before afterwards.
I grew up during "duck and cover" and iodine in the cupboard. That's not where we are anylonger.
Also rockets are a pain to maintain, theres a reason the US military is trying to move away from the minutemen over towards gravity controlled nukes. Does anyone think Russia can properly maintain theirs.
Uhhh I’m not trusting nobody named vault dweller about this particular topic
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Russia couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag.
Russia continuing to signal why it's a good idea to take them out. Thanks, Russia!
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They’re afraid to use their glide bombs in Kursk because they’re not accurate enough to avoid hitting their own friendlies and they think they can hit a satellite moving ten of thousand + miles an hour in orbit!? lol
For real. People talking like Russia is going to jam GPS or something, while they can’t even jam GPS or RF well enough to prevent FPV drones from slamming in to their own people. I just saw a video of a Ukrainian FPV drone taking out a Russian EW platform that’s purpose built to counter drones for fucks sake.
Edit - oh. This statement was from Medvedev back in June. lol ok bro. How you gonna run those sub generators you need to fuck with those cables when all your diesel is currently burning off in a fucking epic conflagration? Your country is literally cooked rn.
In the Julia Roberts move "Leave the World Behind", they mention a process of destroying a country. (I vaguely recall that the process was attributed to a real person.) One of the steps was to take down the internet. With lack of information chaos develops, and the country destroys itself.
i feel like taking down the internet is harder than it sounds. you could easily disrupt satellite, but the world will route around this... its actually designed for it.
they would have to poison dns or major routing points somehow.
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Just imagine the outrage if Russia is the reason that tiktok goes down
That's hilarious bro this putin guy needs his own stand up special he's probably got a million of these
I really don’t think they have the capability, actually. They might be able to degrade the network, but I don’t think they would be able to actually physically destroy enough elements of the constellation to make it generally useless.
Not to mention, I’d be a bit shocked if the DoD doesn’t have some backups sitting quietly (as in: not broadcasting at the moment) in geosync. After all, it’s the first rule of government spending.
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