Thread by @ErrataRob

DeSantis didn't say he's going to beam WiFi from space (which would indeed be stupid).

He's asking whether there's a way to get satellite Internet into Cuba, which is a reasonable suggestion.

https://twitter.com/KDbyProxy/status/1415450271870824450

One solution is "bent pipe". There are geostationary satellites that'll repeat a signal from the US to Cuba via a $2000 VSAT terminal that can be used to send/receive Internet signals. They are used in some places in the world, but this old tech is slow.

Then there's ViaSat/HughesNet with high-bandwidth geostationary satellites. The dishes probably cost $2k. Your chief problem with this (or VSATs) is that installation is a specialized skill.

The best solution is probably Elon Musk's recent "Starlink" (still in beta). The "dish" also costs around $2k each, but requires no skill to setup and run. Just put on the roof and connect to the dish via WiFi. Point-and-click easy.

DeSantis probably does imagine this works like radio/TVs, which are widely available in Cuba and thus can receive radio waves beamed over form the US. The satellite receivers needed for Internet are not widely available in Cuba and would need to be smuggled in.

Radios/TVs are cheap, within the budget of everyone in Cuba.

Satellite terminals are upwards of $2k, beyond the ability of almost any Cuban to pay for them. But if you are smuggling in dishs, presumably you also subsidize them.

A lot of people have mobile phones with WiFi, so maybe DeSantis really does believe you can reach these devices from space. You can't. You have to first communicate to a terminal on the ground -- but that ground station can communicate via WiFi to nearby phones.

The problem is that the police can trace the WiFi back to the source, who'd come and confiscate your (expensive) dish.

Maintaining your pirate radio transmissions would be a difficult cat and mouse game.

WiFi access points are cheap ($20 in bulk from Ali Baba). I think I could keep a pirate radio operation going in Havana, protecting the expensive satellite terminal while occasionally sacrificing access-points to the police.

BTW, this is how people get Internet access who live on the Guantanamo base: ViaSat satellite to WiFi access-points.

For geostationary-orbit satellites, it's a question whether they have antennas/phased-arrays that can point at Cuba. ViaSat and Hughesnet does.

For Starlink (low-earth-orbit) the question is essentially irrelevant.

(Starlink does need a near-enough ground-station at the moment, but Florida is easily close enough).

The following is what I was generally referring to as the "bent pipe" solution. I wrote some open-source code like 15 years ago for this (pre-GitHub, so I no longer know where this code is).

https://twitter.com/RoyWiggins/status/1415461048849739778

A lot of communications satellites in geostationary orbit are what we call "bent pipes". They have satellite dishes aimed at parts of the world and simply repeat signals on one channel/dish out another channel/dish.

There are a lot of satellite TV programs around the world. It's popular in countries with poor infrastructure for terrestrial broadcast. There's a heckava lot of Christian channels out there beaming programs in a lot of languages.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite…

The equipment to receive these signals is simple and widely available. Basically, you get an MPEG-TS stream out the other end. You can encode TCP/IP packets inside MPEG-TS, so you can layer Internet access on top of this cheap satellite TV infrastructure.

Thus, anybody can receive Internet data streams using a simple USB digital-TV receiver and a simple dish.

Indeed, there was a story 15 years ago of hackers doing this to receive feeds from US drones, which also leveraged this same standard architecture.

Like everyone else, the US rents transponders from comerical satellites when they need communication in a certain area. They use standard equipment, and encryption is as pain, so eavesdropping is more practical than you'd think.

I doubt such satellite TV is widely available in Cuba, because they'd want to censor that, too. But if it is is, then it'd be pretty easy to provide at least one-way Internet data streams to Cuba.

You guys think of the Internet as something used to transport MPEG streams, like from Netflix.

In much of the rest of the world, MPEG is something used to transport Internet streams.

Yes, that sometimes means MPEG-inside-TCP/IP-inside-MPEG.

Somewhere I have an open-source project that does this: takes an MPEG-TS (MPEG transport stream) file, decodes the TCP/IP streams, looks for multimedia TCP connections, and extracts the MPEG from them into a file.

Some people had 2-way satellite terminals, with MPEG-TS streams going in both directions, for Internet access.

But that meant anybody could point their TV satellite receiver at the satellite, tune to the channel, and receive 1-way satellite downloads.

https://twitter.com/johnefrancis/status/1415466795855761409

And they did this a lot. For porn. This was in the days of http://, when you could easily eavesdrop on just the download side of HTTP as people browsed porn.

(If you ever come across my old MPEG-TS projects lurking on the Internet, please send them to me, so I can put on GitHub :)

Oh, yes, and 'masscan' is designed for this. Find an unencrypted Internet satellite service, aim a cheap TV receive at it, and run masscan spoofing the IP address of somebody else who uses that service.

https://twitter.com/mtoecker/status/1415468404408999937

Thus, you can scan the entire Internet quickly from a high-bandwidth service, then get the low-bandwidth responses back. And they won't be able to find you, because the responses are broadcast over a million square miles.

With a little work, you can maintain spoofed Internet connections this way that are nearly completely untraceable.

I spent too much time dreaming of (and developing) ways to avoid the NSA if I were hunted like Bin Laden.