Technology

59697 readers

5025 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

511

U.S. intelligence officials determined the Chinese spy balloon used a U.S. internet provider to communicate (www.nbcnews.com)

submitted 11 months ago by return2ozma to c/technology

50 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] paultimate14 90 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I was having a hard time imagining which company this could be. Not that I'm a fan of Verizon or Comcast, but I think they know what side their bread is buttered on. Which one wouldn't?

Then I remembered Starlink exists.

[–] Linkerbaan 171 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Don't think they were colluding with the provider. They probably just put a burner sim card into a 4g module and sent data over a VPN to China whenever it had signal.

[–] paraphrand 38 points 11 months ago

It could have even been one of those multi SIM router things that has network redundancy.

[–] postmateDumbass 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The blurb says primarily for navigation.

So it was using the starlink signals like gps signal and therefore they needed to correlate with the carrier to get a rough time sync.

I wonder what timing data is freely available on the starlink acquisition signal.

[–] Linkerbaan 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Why would they need data then? With GPS can get a 1metre accurate chip for like 20 bucks and it's way smaller. And no need for any carrier or subscription.

[–] postmateDumbass 1 points 11 months ago

Mapping out network topology? Who knows.

Whatever the collected data was, it could have been sent to their satellites for long haul back home.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 11 months ago (2 children)

It’s a satellite provider. Cell networks don’t work at that altitude. Starlink was my first guess too but, after some more thought, it could be Hughesnet. They probably have wider coverage.

[–] Nurse_Robot 29 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

Yeah, their coverage is hughe

[–] snausagesinablanket 10 points 11 months ago

Y U G E N E T

[–] crsu 7 points 11 months ago

So are their pings

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Hugh Mungous

[–] Evilcoleslaw 9 points 11 months ago

Probably Hughesnet or Viasat.