this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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[–] Linkerbaan@lemmy.world 166 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Don't think they were colluding with the provider. They probably just put a burner sim card into a 4g module and sent data over a VPN to China whenever it had signal.

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 38 points 10 months ago

It could have even been one of those multi SIM router things that has network redundancy.

[–] postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The blurb says primarily for navigation.

So it was using the starlink signals like gps signal and therefore they needed to correlate with the carrier to get a rough time sync.

I wonder what timing data is freely available on the starlink acquisition signal.

[–] Linkerbaan@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Why would they need data then? With GPS can get a 1metre accurate chip for like 20 bucks and it's way smaller. And no need for any carrier or subscription.

[–] postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Mapping out network topology? Who knows.

Whatever the collected data was, it could have been sent to their satellites for long haul back home.