“disrupting, degrading and denying hostile threats in space”
Not even pretending to be building and defending anything positive in space.
Oh no! Not our precious banking apps! What a weird thing to call out specifically. It's also kind of strange to talk at such length about how critical satellites have become to people's lives, national economy, emergency services, and people's "daily freedoms", only to conclude with "So now we're using ground-based systems to take out the satellites other countries depend on for all of those things"
Accurate timing is needed for banks accepting/sending payments (not just £5 for the window cleaner - more billions flowing every day).
So, who's the UK actually attacking?
Russia makes whole regions inaccessible to GPS and it’s ultimately for the same underlying reason: soft kill systems and area denial scale better than kinetic options and are deniable.
It’s disappointing to see the majority of conversation here is moralizing and grandstanding rather than analysis.
With great power yadda yadda
Its OK for the UK for the UK to be strong.
Lots of people in former British colonies like and trust the UK.
But the meaning of a statement is not solely determined by the words in it.
Instead they are hell bent on criticizing and tearing down anyone that does, especially when their finance bros are invested in the legacy competition.
It's more accurate than getting it from a NTP pool.
- In event of all undersea cables being cut (which is a serious threat from Russia), satellite internet is your only option to have traffic leave the UK
- Unfortunately most major banks in the UK have very fragile infra that relies on foreign cloud hosts e.g AWS or Azure, which could well fall over in unexpected ways if the UK was cut off from the world
To be clear I disagree with Wes Streeting on a lot of this but the UK is in a uniquely precarious spot when it comes to how much is reliant on internet access.
Some bank apps can block this access or request more validation
The internet for most people doesn't depend on banking apps, or satellites. Wifi would still work great. If the internet actually did go out everywhere, how would an app help you?
I would guess that was how Wes Streeting was briefed (and then completely bungled in public comms).
https://monzo.com/blog/tolerating-full-cloud-outages-with-mo...
If you allow your banks and courts to be hacked freely by an adversary, then you can be manipulated into losing control of the escalation ladder.
That being the internet, which in the vast majority of cases doesn't depend on satellites either. Wifi, fiber, coax, and copper would continue to work just fine.
ck2•1h ago
or a whole new technology invented other than radio waves for data transmission
are any satellites using laser downlink yet or is line-of-sight too temperamental with weather and planes?
cheschire•57m ago
chris_va•53m ago
ck2•52m ago
but seriously, the first spy satellites used to drop film rolls and they had a crazy way for the military to track and catch them via planes
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)
pixl97•52m ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)
They'd drop their film back down to earth.
GolfPopper•50m ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon
a4isms•6m ago
nefarious_ends•33m ago
someonebaggy•27m ago
pixl97•54m ago
In that case you don't need to ground lasers, you just beam the data where you have unjammed communications with the cost of higher latency.
LorenDB•48m ago
exe34•46m ago
Kevcmk•39m ago
notahacker•26m ago