oce 🐆

There are also other nations like India staying “neutral” in the war in Ukraine so they can profit from it by buying Russian oil at a cheaper price while maintaining their good economical relationships with Western countries

Gosh, the money to join the USB-C standard should go into RHS instead!

While Russian companies and individuals are not authorized to sell Starlink, a gray market has emerged, fueled by the high demand from military forces and private buyers.

The Post reviewed four of the many Russian sites offering direct sales for the “special military operation,” the Kremlin’s euphemism for the war. Most terminals are sold through Telegram and start their journey in the Moscow area, before being funneled to the front.

One site offers a terminal and connection fees starting at just above $1,000. Customer service is free, and each client receives recommendations “to minimize risks of blocking,” the page notes, with glowing video testimonials from soldiers.

“We have been using Starlink for about a month. No complaints, the speed is good,” one review said, showing a terminal covered in camouflage. “Technical support works great.”

“The internet is flying, the men are happy,” another said. “Gentlemen, I recommend!”

To activate a device, users need a foreign phone number, email address and bank account to pay the monthly subscription fee, prompting suppliers to seek out people willing to lend their identities. Users in “client support” Telegram chats say it is easy to buy and register Starlink kits abroad. Most are obtained in Europe and transported through the United Arab Emirates. One page warns not to activate the terminal in Russia.

One supplier advised that connections for devices bought in the European Union could be blocked after 90 days of usage, suggesting one solution is to register using Ukrainian details.

Hard to shut down

Starlink can both disable individual terminals based on their ID numbers and block areas from receiving a signal, a practice called “geofencing,” the Federal Communications Commission told a U.N. regulator this year.

One person familiar with Starlink said that the company is technically capable of identifying the location of active terminals based on their pings up to satellites, but that it can be challenging to discern the user in the “forward edge of the battle area,” where Ukrainian and Russian troops are operating.

Stacie Pettyjohn, defense program director for the Center for a New American Security, said the U.S. effort to curb Russia’s use “doesn’t seem like it’s been hugely effective,” partly because of the shifting front lines.

“Ukrainian forces are in Russia now. Where exactly are the front lines?” she said. “If there’s a line drawn as to where it works and where it doesn’t, you’re basically fixing the front lines where they are and preventing the Ukrainians from going on the offensive.”

Ukrainian troops, for their part, said they also had concerns over denying access in geographic regions because it may shut their own terminals down. As it is, the troops entering Russia as part of August’s incursion suddenly found their terminals not working because of the geographic restrictions.

Significantly, they soon found workarounds to get the Starlinks online again — probably the same methods Russians have deployed. Interrupting the software update process and tweaking GPS settings can get it working in Russia, said a Ukrainian drone pilot operating there.

There are other viable methods to control illegal terminals, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow and space security expert at the American Enterprise Institute. One possibility, he said, is for Kyiv and Washington to collect terminal IDs and provide them to SpaceX, with direction to deny access to anything else.

See the explanation in the source article https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/10/12/starlink-russia-ukraine-elon-musk/

It is pretty much what was answered to you, when it’s on the frontline it is very hard to know if it’s Ukrainian or Russian usage, even in Russia now that the Ukrainians did an incursion. Ukrainian themselves are worried to be cutoff by geo fencing.
About the billing account, there is a well organized black market that will use European identities and bank accounts before selling the service to Russians.

Some supermarket brands are made by the same factories as the original ones, the difference is mostly marketing.

By the way, this is similar to Amazon analyzing the most profitable products from their partner merchants and creating their own “basic” version to take the market. But people don’t seem as scandalized when supermarket do it.

Her argument is that “Parliamentary assistants do not work for the Parliament. They are political assistants to elected officials, political by definition”, so basically she says they can do whatever they want with the EU Parliament money if it is the decision of an elected person, which is clearly not the rules for this fund and she knows it.
To make it juicer, they found records of her party members explicitly estimating that they should not do that because it is embezzlement.
For context, this comes from a time when her party wanted Frexit similarly to the Brexit party in the UK, which the same irrational arguments. So misusing EU money was completely aligned with their idea to damage the relation. Turns out, Frexit was very unpopular even within right wing French people, so they pivoted to some kind of small EU now.

I think they have a long history of privileging business over ethics.

What an impressively brave, determined and free person he was.

You pray your private god that there will be a Taliban Gorbachev in a few decades?

I wish there were a way to eradicate religious fundamentalism from this world.

Mandatory laic secular free public education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Ferry_laws

It is not taking away vacations or delicious fruits, there are many lower impact alternatives for vacations and food, you just have to get out of the habits and trends, there are great things to discovers everywhere.
Also, I don’t advocate for prohibition but rather for reduction proportional to footprint. Your dream is to take the plane to go to another continent? Do it, but maybe once every 5 years instead of every year, and switch to train and discovery of your region with hiking for the other years.

You can always detail something and say it’s only x percent. Every percent counts, and we have to start with the ones that are not vital. Planes for vacations or luxury mangoes are very far from being vital.

This is two days ago and not related to today’s railway sabotage, for now.

French newspapers don’t mention any of those for now, the only mention is that the methodology is similar to previous far-left activism (source: https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/live/2024/07/26/en-direct-attaque-massive-contre-la-sncf-reprise-progressive-du-trafic-un-tiers-des-trains-circuleront-vendredi-apres-midi_6258634_3224.html), which could be a disguise of course. As to why the far-left would do that, there are radical-ecologists that argue it is an unacceptable waste simply for entertainment, considering the climate crisis, for example. It could also be both, local activists helped by foreign influence, willingly or not.

In many European countries, there’s no American style free speech, there are laws that forbid some contents, such as racism, sexism and lgbtq-hate. People get fined and associations are dissolved because of it frequently.
I understand the argument for not letting a government control speech, because it seems against democratic. But when you see what’s happening to the USA where about half the voters are voting for someone who wants to undermine its democracy, attack women, the poor and the minorities, maybe you would think that the impact of free hate speech on democracy can be destructive.

This a French scientific study showing how the Russian regime tries to influence the political debate in France with Twitter accounts, especially before the last parliamentary elections. The goal is to promote a party that is more favorable to them, namely, the far right. https://hal.science/hal-04629585v1/file/Chavalarias_23h50_Putin_s_Clock.pdf

In France, we have a concept called the “Republican front” that is kind of tacit agreement between almost all parties, left, center and right, to work together to prevent far-right from reaching power and threaten the values of the French Republic. This front has been weakening at every election, with the far right rising and lately some of the traditional right joining them. But it still worked out at the last one, far right was given first by the polls, but thanks to the front, they eventually ended up 3rd.

What this article says, is that the Russian regime has been working for years to invert this front and push most parties to consider that it is part of the left that is against the Republic values, more than the far right.
One of their most cynical tactic is using videos from the Gaza war to traumatize leftists until they say something that may sound antisemitic. Then they repost those words and push the agenda that the left is antisemitic and therefore against the Republican values.

A big reason is India is getting cheaper Russian gas and oil since Europe has stopped or lowered its imports.

Except for her monumental mistake of giving up on nuclear and consequently giving enough leverage to Putin to finance his imperialist plans peacefully.

How fucking cool is it to have a woman IPCC scientist as your president?

Wouldn’t they have this kind of prediction every other week due to the intense threat, but this one happened to be true? If that’s the case, it is a bit easy to come after the fact and say that this one should have been considered better than the 20 others.
European countries, for example, are constantly getting attacked, even if it’s rarely big enough to be noticed in the current times.

In 2022, 16 terrorist attacks took place in the EU and an additional 12 attacks failed or were foiled. https://www.europol.europa.eu/cms/sites/default/files/documents/European Union Terrorism Situation and Trend report 2023.pdf