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How to Jam a Worldwide Satellite TV Broadcast
An anonymous reader submits: "According to an MSNBC article, 'it's simply a matter of aiming a strong signal at the uplink transponder on the satellite and overwhelming the...broadcaster's signals...You need a dish, some power, not too much. You put up a test pattern ... and do a sweep and find the transponder on the satellite you want to jam. It could even be smaller than the standard 6-meter dish. It could be a small dish with a lot of power.' This was apparently how an Iranian satellite television station was knocked off of Loral Skynet's TelStar-12 a few days ago. Loral contacted TLS, a company which specializes in satellite broadcast security, who quickly located the source of the jamming to Cuba."
oh my god, they are in the back yard! oh wait... that was a cat. Never mind
--Matt-- "Yay!! I'm home and I wasn't attacked by a squirrel!" -Squee
I submit this story at 5:16 AM on Saturday, some "anonymous reader" submits it at 11 AM and he gets it. MY submission asked whether this sort of thing will stimulate more of the same from satellite hackers who already know how to do this which is more important than who is doing it to the US broadcasts to Iran.
There is no justice on Slashdot...
Go ahead, mod me down...Then stuff it up your ass...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I understand it there's a really big stumbling block called the "right of return".
Yes, but Arifat has stated he'd go along with the UN resolution, which calls for return OR compensation. It's pretty obvious Israel will not accept a unencumbered right of return so this really means a negotiated compensation regime with courts deciding if someone really did live in the house or on the land they claim. This might be resolved with immigration quotas and the option for palestinians to accept cash compensation in leu of their personal right of return (which in reality would mean being placed on a long waiting list.) I generally don't believe in immigration quotas, but in this case I feel like a liberterian that loves public libraries...
Additionally, you've got a minority of Israelis.. & a large number of (but it's not exactly clear how many) Palestinians who want to wipe Israel off the map.
There are very ideological factions on both sides. They are a tiny fraction of the population though, for historic reasons they have a significant influence in politics. Most of the settlers are recent immigrants who are there for economic reasons not idealogical ones. You will hear many palestinians talk of an eventual re-unification of Israel and Palestine, but if you follow up on it they see it as a peaceful unification of common interests. If you read the writings of many early Zionists you will see the same hope expressed, but years of lukewarm war have made it seem implausable. Much of that isn't from fear of their muslim and christian neighbors in the former Palestine, but fear of the neighboring countries. The Israeli extreemists see this as proof of their real desire to wipe Israel of the map, but I think no level headed person would see this hope this way, though some might say it is so for cynical reasons. Personally, I don't think this unification will ever happen, except maybe in the form a of a free trade agreement, and then probably only after a significant portion of the middle east is democratic. I don't think it will ever go further because we won't see democracy in the region until the oil is all gone, and by then it might be a hundred years since 1948, the generation that grew up as next door neighbors will be long dead.
I'm also not making the arguement that the extreemists won't make this very difficult, Yitzhak Rabin was killed by a right winger, Yigal Amir, who wasn't even a settler. It's been reported by Israeli's and some American's that Arifat kept repeating "they will kill me"(meaning muslim terrorists) when the Oslo process was falling apart. But I've talked to dozens of Israelis and Palestinians and never one that held those extreemists views you see on television. My book buyer is a guy who grew up in an extreemist settlement and he once introduced me to someone who lost his friend to the Israeli armi in a peaceful protest. One of my coworkers once talked about his service in the Israeli army and told me there is much more resentment for the settlers than the palestinians in the ranks of the army. He personally seemed to hold resentment for all Orthodox Israeli's. Their idealoges benefit most from the occupation, but the Orthodox don't have to serve in the army like all other jews (Israeli muslims and christians are not subject to the draft during "peacetime").
Hmm, Israel must be an awful big democracy to warrant a double mention. Either that, or someone is going around and renaming countries to conflict with existing countries...
Heh, well I meant to write "Turkey, Lebanon, Israel and Iran." After previewing, I went back to reverse the order of the last to from "Iran and Israel" to "Israel and Iran" to make the structure of the post better, but I screewed up. But it's not entirely off base as is. The occupied territories did hold an election as part of the Oslo accords. Not that one election gives you a democracy.
If you read on I qualified the democraticies of all those countries I meant to name. These four do have constitutions and regular elections where there is no heriditary ruler with a veto like in the other countries "on the road to democracy" like Qatar, Jordan and the UAE. Of those, only Qatar seems to have at least paved the road. The other countries in the region have complete sham parliments, they have no power and are only there to satisfy American and European businesses who want to say their presence helps the people in region. These sham parliments have no significance to their citizens except for breading contempt of western governments and encouraging the belief that we (the citizens of the west) are all dumb fucks.
Lebanon is the country Muslims and Christians flee to when things get really rotten at home and obviously most Jews fled to Israel in 1968 after the six day war. (The seven day war in '48 didn't affect Jews living in other middle eastern countries as much, though many did go anyway for the same hopeful reasons some Americans went. Though I think the tolerance for Jews was much higher in Arabia than America at the time, this has obviously completely reversed since then.) I have no idea if Zoroastrian's fled to anywhere, but I have met one Zoroastrian who left Saudi and Bahai that fled Iraq to the west so maybe other minorities did the same. Or maybe India? There are very old Zoroastrian and Jewish sects there, though the race thing might be a problem (Iranians are white and blue eyed and Semites, well neither looks very Asian.)