The dish may be shoddily engineered, but no-one sends sub-par hardware into space. I am quite sure that the satellite's own critical power, communications and positioning systems are entirely physically separate from the Starlink communications equipment. They will just as surely include the capability to remotely shut down power to that equipment, wipe the memory, boot it into a safe mode and overwrite the firmware with an update, all while ensuring not a byte of potentially dangerous data flows in the other direction.

They use steerable phase-array antennas, which gives /some/ resistance to such an attack. But yes, that would work - at the very least you could cause a localised degradation of service.

If someone is going to do that though, my money would be on a state actor. Maybe Russia, trying to shut down Starlink connectivity in occupied Ukraine. They have the technology, the motivation, and the ability to thumb their nose an international authority. "Us, jamming satellites? No, we would never do that. That array of high-powered transmitter dishes that turn to follow the satellites are just an atmospheric science research program."

It doesn't matter who has the stronger navy: In any serious US-vs-China war, both sides lose. And the governments of both side know it. Top priority for both will be to avoid an actual war, while also using the possibility of that war to achieve their objectives. For China, that means they can predict the US response should they invade Taiwan: Economic and diplomatic, but not military.

China plans long term. They won't just invade Taiwan. They'll enact a naval blockade first. The rest of the world will send angry diplomatic protests and impose sanctions, but won't dare to intervene militarily, for the same reason they won't directly intervene in defending Ukraine: Because protecting one ally isn't worth the risk of escalation into a nuclear WW3. And you're right, Taiwan is an island: They are not self-sufficient for even basics like food. How long would they hold out?

The sanctions would tank China's economy, so they won't do it yet. Not until they are in a position to resist the sanctions, which they one day will be.

You'd need to establish a community of people willing to run that network. And as the technology would have to be accessible to the public, that community would be infiltrated. Russia doesn't need to out-tech the activists, it just needs to intimidate them.

Stop random people on the street. Demand to see their phone. If they refuse, beat them. If they accept, check the phone for the app. See the app? Beat them, then drag them off to the police station and charge them with distributing misinformation. Make sure that rumor gets around - you want your beatings to be ab open secret - so that any other potential dissident knows the consequences.

You can try to tax it, but it was designed with the purpose of tax evasion. If the operator decides to shuffle half their bitcoin off to Luxembourg, how will anyone ever know?

That actually worked in Northern Ireland, for a time. They used to have a generous and fixed subsidy on biomass fuel. Fixed... so when the cost of the fuel actually fell below the subsidy, people on the scheme realized they could make lots of money by just heating an empty building as hot as practical. To make matters worse, the subsidies were guaranteed with legally-binding long-term contracts - because no-one is going to buy an expansive new furnace if they are not assured that the subsidy is safe from the whims of future governments - so even once the not-quite-fraud was discovered there was nothing that could be done to stop it.

It caused some serious political fallout, triggering a collapse of the ruling coalition - though that coalition was so fragile that any scandal may well have done the same.

I think that's the point: Anyone with even a basic knowledge of the telescope could recognize that it was a fake. It was a deliberately bad fake, so anyone who repeated it is demonstrating their lack of verification.

News organizations especially are under great pressure to be fast - got to catch a story right away, or the readers will go elsewhere to find the breaking topic. So they can't afford to wait a couple of hours for a scientist to respond to emails and tell how plausible something is.

The ruling stresses and and over how Mindgeek is distributing child sexual abuse material. And yet, this is only a civil case: If Mindgeek really were responsible for this, why have they not faced any criminal prosecution?

Didn't need to use CSAM here: The ruling just uses the more emotive term 'child pornography' over and over.

A pyramid scheme is one type of fraud you can't do with NFTs. You can do pump-and-dump though, they are great for that.

Also lifespan. But solid state cells promise to solve that, by providing batteries with a working life of decades rather than years. If they ever make it into large-scale production.

I view blockchain as a solution looking for a problem. The technology is great - if we could just find something it's actually useful for. But every time I've seen someone propose blockchain as a solution, it's always been something that more conventional databases can solve better.

Because sometimes people are more inclined to donate if they feel they are getting something, even if the something is a worthless token like a paper flower.

A few animal shelters and wildlife protection charities come to mind that will promise to send photos of 'your' rescued animal if you set up a monthly donation.

Doesn't need to be that complicated. Lots of sites today have a little bit of javascript on the page file that tests if the adverts have loaded properly. If it finds no adverts then it disables scrolling and displays an overlay begging the user to disable their ad-blocker, or else they are not allowed to use the site.

It makes said user miserable. But, realistically, a lot of websites do depend on advertising revenue to pay their operating costs.