A couple of thoughts about Pluto and Uranus in current configurations:
Aquarius, ruled by Uranus, is about to have Pluto visit for a long-term stay and immediately settling upon the degree upon which the harbinger of 'new social and financial conditions' of the Great Mutation took place.
Of course, one of the expressions of Uranus is tech, and the internet looms ever larger in our daily lives and how things run.
Uranus, meanwhile, currently sits on the Fixed Star ruling decapitations and is known as the 'blinking, binary star' and applying to trine Pluto, which trine takes place in Air.
From the above, I am wondering if, in the same way that Pluto trashed the banking scene upon his entry to Capricorn in 2008 and then re-empowered (bailouts by govt, etc. ), we see a switch-off or blackout of the Internet and/or other tech, perhaps to be re-configured in due course.
I would imagine in this case that if it is still functioning at all, Starlink will still provide access, which is a very democratising apparatus.
@Oliver
your thoughts on this?
You know, it's funny, but there was something in the back of my mind that prompted me to look at my own IT infrastructure. I managed to get hold of a new firmware version for my Cisco 3560-CX switch network (I have three of 'em, in a redundant, fault-tolerant configuration, spanning two addresses!) - and I was up until nearly 4:00 applying updates to everything. Especially the switches: I don't think they'd been rebooted in years.
I also found a couple of brand new in the box models with a couple of 10Gb ports on them, and in a moment of (relative) insanity, decided to buy them. They were about 10% of the original price (
that would be about £3,500), because Cisco was no longer producing them - and corporate clients only buy switch equipment that's
current: They want support, updates, etc., and they want to be able to raise tickets if they need support. But end-of-life equipment can be
really reliable - they've managed, after years, to squeeze all the bugs out, because they usually freeze introducing new features (which are, of course, the biggest source of bugs) - and if you can support it
yourself, it can be really cheap.
The newer models, also, require a
subscription for many features. Nice. Also
expensive. I have Venus in Capricorn, and I know where to find value...
Anyway, to get back on topic, Starlink does
not mean everyone is democratised. Not at all: Starlink is only an internet service provider, and while it is true that Starlink has done a wonderful job providing
layer-1 (physical) network access to areas previously unreachable, Starlink is
not "
the internet". Unless Musk decides to replicate all the needed infrastructure (including DNS), anyone connecting to Starlink when the powers-that-be bring down the master DNS servers in the United States will simply face an error page on their browser, saying that the host could not be found. That would affect everyone, not only Starlink subscribers.
Starlink also has to route traffic through a terrestrial network: It doesn't just magically fly through the ether to its destination, much as the marketing blurb might like to imply! Each satellite will route traffic to a base station on Earth, that is subject to the same internet connectivity restraints. If you take out connectivity to
those base stations, Starlink is pretty useless for communicating with anyone. I would expect Musk to know this already (or have people on his staff who know it, and have already built redundancy into their business continuity planning.)
The internet doesn't just magically connect people: You connect to an internet service provider, and that's kind of like a mini-network all of its own. In industry terminology, this is called an autonomous system (AS), and every ISP gets assigned an autonomous system number (AS number). For example, the AS number of my ISP, which is Init7, is
AS13030. (Starlink's, BTW, is
AS14593.) If Init7 wants to connect with anyone else, they have to negotiate
peering agreements. This is a voluntary
arrangement between two networks, that they will route (that is
deliver) each others' traffic to their network, if another network forwards data packets to them. It means that if my ISP has a peering agreement with, say, Deutsche Telekom, packets can be routed directly between those two ISPs.
Absence of a peering agreement does
not mean you can't reach other networks you aren't peered with (they just need to be connected to someone you
are peered with, within a certain number of hops) - but if you have no peering agreements, you face the internet equivalent of sanctions: Nobody will route your packets to you, or accept your packets to be transmitted - and that means you're effectively censored. If someone wanted to get Starlink offline, and you control a vast number of other corporations (and have the ability to put undue pressure on them), that is the primary means of choice
I would use to take someone like Starlink offline.
(Speaking as a technical devil's advocate, that is.)
This kind of information is well-known among technical professionals: It's not a secret. You can't get a Cisco CCNP or CCIE without learning about
BGP, which is the routing protocol used to peer with other networks. Unlike other automated routing protocols (which self-adjust according to network conditions), BGP is entirely manual: It requires human intervention. You can program redundant routes in (by making specific routes for your preferred gateway, and
less precise routes for your backup - BGP will always route traffic to the most
specific available route.)
Does it mean we're all screwed? Not necessarily.
I held a Raclette evening a few weeks ago with some members of my pistol club, in my garden. Many of them are amateur radio enthusiasts, (and like typical nerds, we spent most of the evening listening unashamedly to
Jan Hammer,
Genesis and
Jean-Michel Jarre. That music seems to have almost universal appeal for nerds - doesn't matter if they're into electronics or mathematics, I noticed.)
One of the subjects that came under discussion was something called
LoRa, which is a low-bandwidth, long-range radio system. It can be used to create a
LoRa mesh network. These networks are unregulated, of course, and they run on unregulated frequencies.
That means you have to be discriminating about who you mesh with
- but it means you can talk with people without internet access.
Try and do some research into your local LoRa mesh. Try and find the nerds - they will know first: We do this kind of thing for
fun. If you want to use your organisational skills to find and attract your local nerds, try and host a meetup in your area. Don't necessarily assume they're good at organising stuff, but be assured that if you pose the question on replicating a small set of internet services in your area (with the DNS error page pointing to a local web server with a community directory on it, to help lost people find the others), they
will know how to solve technical problems.
Oh, and don't forget to provide cake.
Currently, many systems are set up to connect to the internet. That's not going to work, come blackout time: Your community will need to have a backup DNS server, your own internet repository (and maybe even a forum, like this one, for your members to communicate with each other.) It requires some technical setup, and most people, these days, are used to doing everything with cloud-based tools. They edit their photos with Canva; they write documents with a Microsoft Office 365 subscription (which needs internet to get your licence entitlements), or Google Docs (also internet-based), et cetera. I have been very careful to only buy software for my Mac that's non-subscription based, and will still work offline. Even the ancient Adobe Master Collection CS6 that I still nurse and cajole into doing my evil bidding (on my Windows 7 PC) will work offline. I keep copies of source code for stuff I really want, and though it's not fun to have to hack systems to obtain
offline package downloads, I do it, because I know that at some point, when connectivity goes down, the chance for preparation is over - and you'd better be able to do everything you need, without having to download anything, use your favourite AI tool - or refer to Google, Wikipedia or whatever else.
If you want to prepare, put yourself on an internet diet: Look carefully at the software you are using. Most of the people who suffer
real financial losses are going to be those people who spent thousands on their computer hardware, which turned into digital bricks because the software they got used to using would only function with an internet connection. They will find themselves not only offline, but returning to pen and paper for many of their tasks.
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