>The fact that critical infrastructure (e.g. utility companies using satellite links for remote-operated SCADA) was exposed is really scary too.
Really serious security risks in critical/industrial infrastructure are ... numerous. And these aren't complex vulnerabilities, these are leaving the door open with default passwords, unencrypted traffic, and that sort of thing.
The landing page has a Q&A. This is the relevant part of the response to the question, "Why aren't all GEO satellite links encrypted?"
>Encryption imposes additional overhead to an already limited bandwidth, decryption hardware may exceed the power budget of remote, off-grid receivers, and satellite terminal vendors can charge additional license fees for enabling link-layer encryption. In addition, encryption makes it harder to troubleshoot network issues and can degrade the reliability of emergency services.
So, the only suggestion that there would be greater heat/energy if they did encryption by default is the part about decryption (receiver) hardware having limited power budgets in some cases. There's more than what I copy-and-pasted above, but the overall message is that lots of organizations haven't wanted to pay the direct costs of enabling encryption... although they should.
It's not a spacecraft issue. Encryption can be done at the ground stations, and mandated as part of the standards for interfsce equipment, just like with DOCSIS. There's nothing, physically, to stop you passing unencrypted traffic down your DOCSIS cable, if you wanted to make a nonstandard modem and send unencrypted traffic on your local physical segment of the network. But the rest of the network will refuse to talk to it.
The same could have easily been mandated for satellite links - no encryption, your packet won't get forwarded to the internet at the ground station, and any packets sent to you from the internet will be sent to you encrypted. And all this can be implementd without needing to touch the satellite itself, which will continue to forward what it sees as unencrypted traffic without any design changes. It could even have been implemented incrementally on existing running services, with old and new equipment working side-by-side, but all new ground stations required to support encryption, and with a sunset date for old equipment, and a rolling upgrade program.
DOCSIS got this right in 1999; the satellite industry has had 25 yeqrs to catch up.
At first I thought, same-old same-old, but I changed my mind halfway through. I like how the author, Elke, identifies the underlying similarities between e/acc and the AGI doomers. (By AGI doomers, I'm referring to many Less Wrong folks, NOT earnest people who worry about whether AI will cause 20% unemployment or if it is hype and they're being played).
I think pmarca may have had a change of heart about being on the e/acc side, but he certainly is associated with funding lots of AI startups, so that may be more relevant.
Also, after the SBF_FTX fiasco and association with effective altruism, I'm not sure if EA should be so strongly linked to the doomers as Elke does. This and my vague recall of what Andreessen says on Twitter are minor points. Elke wrote an insightful, clever post about AGI (and even AI without attaining AGI) as a form of eschatology.
P.S. My next stop will be to look for the 1999 book she mentioned for an earlier view of tech eschatology.
The example, "Misapplication of LLMs can negatively impact productivity" was a real shocker to me. I guess I'm still too naive, but I never imagined anyone would try to do that. No surprise it didn't work out, and sad that he seems to be ready to give up on coding entirely now.
Even for non-believers in such things as alien bases, this is a good post. I say that because of the extent to which many public, i.e. free, Google services seem to have degraded.
In this case, we don't know if it is due to imposed secrecy by blurring, or due to Google Earth degrading in quality overall. Observations of the decaying quality of Google Search are quite common now.
(The video could have explained it better by focusing more on then and now images, but hey, I know that my Youtube explainer videos leave even more to be desired than this one. The message was conveyed effectively and that's what counts).
I found a good post with photos of Google Earth, pre-blurring from L.A. Almanac https://www.laalmanac.com/mysterious/my722.php It says that the spot has been referred to as Sycamore Knoll. I'd heard that name before but never knew what it was.
I saw Treasury Secretary Scott Bissent (spelling?) being interviewed on CNN about Elon a few days ago. (Elon shoved Bissent in the hallway at the White House cause he was mad about something and then he called Bissent a moron.)
Bissent told CNN that Elon completed his DOGE thing and was now needed by the shareholders of his many companies. Bissent was succinct and polite. Whomever posted the CNN video snippet said that maybe now we know who gave Elon a black eye that day.
EDIT: I just read your .is linky to article. Glad they quoted Bissent.
