It's a good idea for future satellites, but upgrading existing satellites is probably not feasible.
And these polar orbit satellite typically live a lot longer than the relatively short lived starlink satellites, potentially opening you to a (perhaps unlikely?) scenario where starlink moves to new and incompatible hardware for inter-satellite communications, and your satellite is then made obsolete.
Vertical integration is not cheap, but it does have it's upsides.
That would require replacing all the satellites with new ones capable of doing that, which doesn't seem feasible. Starlink also doesn't have great coverage of the polar regions.
“We're passing over terabits per second [of data] every day across 9,000 lasers,” SpaceX engineer Travis Brashears said today at SPIE Photonics West, an event in San Francisco focused on the latest advancements in optics and light. "We actually serve over lasers all of our users on Starlink at a given time in like a two-hour window.”
Again though, you can't do "Starlink from the satellites, so we don't rely on a specific ground station" unless all of the satellites support talking to Starlink, which they don't. That means they'd have to be replaced.
As I understand it, the Starlink network has a number of ground stations, and an active inter-satellite "mesh," thanks to laser links, which would allow it to route around the loss of one or more ground stations? (although obviously it requires at least one ground station to be live in order to access the non-Starlink-connected Internet)
The lasers began being integrated between 2020 and 2021, so it's likely SpaceX has made decent progress equipping their network with this capability, although I can't find the latest figures for the proportion of satellites that have lasers.
It sounds like there's something I'm missing if we can't do "Starlink from the satellites, so we don't rely on a specific ground station"
Do you understand what the problem trying to be solved is?
There are satellites in orbit today that have nothing to do with Starlink. Some of these have been up for a long time. We're talking weather satellites and research satellites. The ones in a polar orbit can only use one of two ground stations to communicate back with the earth, simply due to their location. One of those ground stations has lost it's fiber optic connection so it can't be used at full bandwidth right now.
None of that so far has anything to do with Starlink. We're talking about a system os satellites that already exists and predates Starlink sometimes by decades.
The person that started this thread proposed: "Maybe just use Starlink from the satellites, so we don't rely on a specific ground station." In other words, have these already existing satellites integrate with the (relatively new) Starlink system.
So they're saying that we somehow make those old satellites, which are already in orbit and have their own communication systems designed to interface with ground stations, somehow stop using the ground station and start using Starlink instead.
Limiting characters can also be a feature, so users can't use emojis in their password (this is so fun), to realize later they can't login, because they don't know how to input emojis from their desktop computer.
Hopefully passwords will be gone soon (at least that's my hope).
Don't get me wrong, it's a stupid limitation indeed -- but sometimes decisions like these are meant to stop users from doing stupider things :)
I'm no fan of oversimplification, but Apple's audience is everyone, not just power users. In that case, I'd prefer having advanced options surfaced to me as "advanced" so I can do what I want, but leave the simple experiences for the simple folk.
You might have half a point about emojis, but that's not what Apple is doing here.
Is there a reason I as a Swede should be limited from using my full native alphabet in my passwords for example?
As an example, you know how people sometimes suggest using a short sentence as a password? Here's a phrase in a local dialect, which means "and in the river there's an island"
Å i åa e ä ö
Notice how only 2 of those letters are available in ASCII.
ASCII only is not a feature, and I honestly doubt anyone would try to argue that it is if this was about any company other than Apple. Try to look past the "who" and focus on the "what".
I'm wondering if the author contacted the JAXA team. Maybe they would share how the data is encoded?
If the information is secret, it's probably encrypted (SpaceX eventually did that once radio amateurs decoded the video stream), but if it's not, maybe JAXA would be happy to help?
The number of certificates issued/inserted on 25th December, which is almost the same as any other day in December, while being a bank holiday in most Western countries, makes me happy: the industry successfully made certificate renewal fully automatic.
For LetsEncrypt, all renewal requests are done with ACME clients, so this is not a surprise.
I'm curious to know which part of DigiCert and Certigo certificates are actually renewed with an ACME request (both support it).
Certigo is ZeroSSL for all intensive purposes (as far as I am concerned) so probably close to all of them were acme clients.
Digicert has been pushing acme for a while now, but it's a bit annoying as you (my company) needed to prepay/have a line of credit for it, or some annoyance that didn't make it as seemless as LE/ZeroSSL.
I think for digicert any of the certs with 89/90 day expiry would be acme renewals with a near 100% certainty.
I don't have a definite reason you (or anybody in particular) should choose Digicert but I can give you a couple of ideas of where technically they might be a good choice and ISRG (Let's Encrypt) are not.
Firstly there may be policy issues and you can pay Digicert to care whereas you can't pay Let's Encrypt to care about your problems. Meta for example pays (paid?) their issuer to obey their private extra requirements on top of the rules for the Web PKI when it comes to names in the famous facebook.com 2LD.
Secondly trust issues. Obviously for a mainstream browser or similar, ISRG are trusted, but maybe you've got a fleet of Multi-function Printers from 2015 across 54 offices and alas none of them trust Let's Encrypt for the TLS servers. Yes, this was a dumb purchase but you don't have a time machine and the people who maintain this fleet keeps telling you the next version will definitely fix it, so meanwhile you're buying Digicert certificates.
This is admittedly a rare use case, but is needed e.g. for setting up a DNS-over-HTTPS server.
ZeroSSL seems to support IPv4 SANs, but fails to validate IPv6 addresses; I tried emailing their support several times about this but they never replied. I finally got a working certificate via GeoCerts (https://www.geocerts.com/), a DigiCert reseller, but doing so required manual validation. For the record, GeoCerts support was fantastic.
Given the number of people now relying on Clouflare 1.1.1.1 to "get Internet" (ie using 1.1.1.1 as recursive name server), I can't imagine APNIC deciding to stop Clouflare using this range.
It seems "too late" to revert this decision. Otherwise people will experience "Internet stopped working", blaming their ISP.
APNIC may decide to keep a working DNS server on 1.1.1.1, but ethically, routing traffic to someone else than Cloudflare is not great.
If just temporary assigned to Cloudflare, APNIC shouldn't care if it sees a better use for the range. Supporting unintended uses only encourages various types of abuse. And changing DNS settings is easy enough.
That said, if a lot of people rely on 1.1.1.1 as DNS, it's worth considering whether reassignment qualifies as 'better' use of this resource. Not to mention the hassle caused by making changes to popular [anything].
Fixed IP addresses change and are deprecated all the time. It's of zero concern to APNIC that customers of Cloudflare or various ISPs can no longer access the internet because they relied on a temporary IP assignment, after the service was gracefully terminated and deprecated, with ample lead time.
That being said, the use by Cloudflare is an excellent way to reclaim this part of the IP space, I don't see why they would terminate this collaboration.
The SEO mess was indirectly caused by Google PageRank and other related optimizations.
Maybe we want 2007 Internet instead?
The AI world will inevitably lead to "content optimization", so the Chatbots that will be asked "questions about life" (as of Today, where people usually search on Google "I have fever/depression/a turbulent child/tomatoes in my fridge, what should I do?") will more frequently answer specific products.
Instead of promoting a single website (Current SEO strategy), content producer will be tempted to produce many texts on a great variety of sources, to reinforce the model on a specific subject.
Time will tell if in 2035, we will want 2023 ChatGPT.
SSO is not contributing to the core product USP and is pure money extraction mechanism. If company can add enough value on enterprise plan, they could easily drop SSO on less expensive tier. If company cannot add enough value to the core product, they use SSO and reachable customer support to justify more expensive subscription. This may deincentivize customers to buy more or reduce overall security if customer fails to implement processes for standalone login and manual provisioning of accounts.
Yes, you act like this is a bad thing. You hold back and charge for the features customers want enough to pay for. You’ve never noticed that whenever there’s a Free/Pro of an app the one feature
you need is always on the Pro version?
> add enough value on enterprise plan, they could easily drop SSO
That really isn’t how it works. You find some small set of features that enterprises must have like SSO, auditing, and compliance and charge them out the ass for it. This is where the real money for every B2B SaaS comes from and subsidizes the low cost tiers which they hope will translate to an enterprise sale when you ask for it at work.
It makes more sense to them to add that other value to the non-enterprise plans or licensing to attract more users, then charge the businesses that MUST have the SSO or audit functionality, because they know enterprise will pay it without blinking an eye.
It is a common misconception that SSO is useful only on enterprise scale and that companies where SSO and provisioning is crucial for security have huge IT budgets. Any scale-up still on the way to profitability needs it at few hundreds of employees and it’s really hard to justify 100k budget for it. Couple junior admins for provisioning and accepted and misunderstood risk of credentials explosion look more attractive than tripling the bills for every subscription. Who suffers? Customer who is exposed to cybersecurity risks.
I’m not at all discounting the value of SSO to all users, totally agreed. Just that in the business of software this just plainly makes the most sense for most companies. It’s useful for everyone, but it’s required for enterprise (via security policy or other mandate), hence why the screws are put to them.
I’m a bit curious why we don’t see more price segmentation happening with the SSO feature set included, presumably most of these SaaS are seat-limited by plan anyway. If I had to guess, they just don’t want to deal with the headache of tons of small SSO implementations clogging up their support resources.
Unrelated to SSO, I’m involved in audits that regularly seek changes which don’t improve safety or security but which often help the bottom line of big providers.
If you want a product to succeed without natural growth, get an an auditor to require it.
It’s selling your soul and those being audited will hate you, but it’s very lucrative.
I find it funny that people say things like this, because not only is it demonstrably not true looking at different product segments, but even if it was you're basically admitting to self-selecting as a customer who would never have paid in the first place and so companies are overjoyed that you're not using them.
"I would have paid you if you gave me X for free" is the biggest lie.
It is more nuanced like that. If you do not have any other value proposition for paid tiers, you might keep telling yourself that, it is your sales model after all.
Okay, look. There's two universes here. Universe A is where split up the features of our product into tiers based on "value" -- some arbitrary groups based on how useful we think each feature is, how expensive they are, how long they took to develop, estimated person-hours saved, whatever. Sweet, it feels right. Now the free/low cost tiers are genuinely less useful than the higher tiers. Pay more for more. SSO probably still lives at the mid or enterprise tier for no other reason that it's a PITA, is the cause of like 20% of support requests, and our SSO vendor charges us per month per SSO connection.
Universe B is where the free/low cost tiers have every feature except for specifically the features and increased usage limits that get SMBs and Enterprise to pay us.
Both on the sales side and the user side I want to live in Universe B.
There is no magic universe where "just increase your value proposition to Enterprise customers" -- it's the same product just carved up differently and non-enterprise customers lose in Universe A.
Imagine you go to a supermarket and see the same brand carry two tiers of eggs: "Eggs" and "Salmonella-free Eggs".
Even if you could easily afford the salmonella-free eggs, the mere fact that they are willing to sell salmonella eggs at all says a lot about how many shits they give about food safety.
SSO isn't a premium or differentiator feature, it's table stakes.
> SSO isn't a premium or differentiator feature, it's table stakes.
Not for B2C, hobby projects, very small businesses. That's why it's great as a differentiator: because it separates the wheat from the chaff. And is often non-trivial as the number of integrations grows. Hence the SSO middleware market.
The feature is implemented. I'd prefer to use it. It would cost them nothing to let me do so. Yet, I can't, because then big corporates wouldn't be milked for as much cash. I accept this as just another one of those inefficiencies of market capitalism, but it's still a little irksome.
> The feature is implemented. I'd prefer to use it. It would cost them nothing to let me do so.
The other way to view it is, by withholding a nonessential feature, Docker gets big customers to subsidize all the little guys, and their product is more accessible overall.
Hopefully it will eventually be deployed [0]
[0] https://techport.nasa.gov/projects/146938