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SpaceX Disables 2,500 Starlink Terminals Allegedly Used By Asian Scam Centers

Slashdot
2 weeks ago
SpaceX has deactivated over 2,500 Starlink terminals allegedly used by scam operations in Myanmar, where the service isn't licensed but was reportedly enabling large-scale cybercrime networks tied to human trafficking and fraud. Ars Technica reports: Lauren Dreyer, vice president of Starlink business operations, described the action in an X post last night after reports that Myanmar's military shut down a major scam operation: "SpaceX complies with local laws in all 150+ markets where Starlink is licensed to operate," Dreyer wrote. "SpaceX continually works to identify violations of our Acceptable Use Policy and applicable law... On the rare occasion we identify a violation, we take appropriate action, including working with law enforcement agencies around the world. In Myanmar, for example, SpaceX proactively identified and disabled over 2,500 Starlink Kits in the vicinity of suspected 'scam centers.'" Starlink is not licensed to operate in Myanmar. While Dreyer didn't say how the terminals were disabled, it's known that Starlink can disable individual terminals based on their ID numbers or use geofencing to block areas from receiving signals. On Monday, Myanmar state media reported that "Myanmar's military has shut down a major online scam operation near the border with Thailand, detaining more than 2,000 people and seizing dozens of Starlink satellite Internet terminals," according to an Associated Press article. The army reportedly raided a cybercrime center known as KK Park as part of operations that began in early September. The operations reportedly targeted 260 unregistered buildings and resulted in seizure of 30 Starlink terminals and detention of 2,198 people. "Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, the spokesperson for the military government, charged in a statement Monday night that the top leaders of the Karen National Union, an armed ethnic organization opposed to army rule, were involved in the scam projects at KK Park," the AP wrote. The Karen National Union is "part of the larger armed resistance movement in Myanmar's civil war" and "deny any involvement in the scams."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BeauHD

CodeSOD: This Is Really Empty

The Daily WTF
2 weeks ago

Konrad was trying to understand how an input form worked, and found this validation function.

function IsReallyEmpty($subject) { $trimmed = trim(preg_replace("/&.*;/", "", $subject)); return strlen($trimmed) != 0; }

Now, I can understand why one might want to have a different definition of "empty" when it comes to strings. An all whitespace string, like " " may rightfully be considered an empty input for many applications.

So calling trim makes a lot of sense. It's the preg_replace that starts to worry me, because that regex is clearly trying to match an HTML entity, aka  . But it matches all HTML entities, not just ones like   which are whitespace characters, but ampersands and greater/less-than signs.

But there's another problem with the regex. The * operator is greedy. So  Hello World  would see the opening &, the closing ; and decide the entire string could be rejected.

But that's not the real WTF. The real WTF is the very last line. In a function called IsReallyEmpty, it returns true if the input string is not empty, thus stretching the definition of "really" to new levels.

"Is this string really empty?" "No, it is."

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Remy Porter