Unironically you're missing the point. The point being, it's not a problem for many apps to start because oh how powerful PCs got. The problem is when some apps use so much resources that regardless of how powerful your PC gets, it's wasteful to have them opened all the time.
Reason for that problem is them using unoptimized frameworks such as Electron and CEF (seriously, check each app on the image).
And main reasons for that are:
Google posing browser component as a GUI framework.
Devs not caring (or being lazy) enough to do native coding.
I wish every person would realize the above so we could force developers do their job better.
You’re not actually following what I’m saying and just keep going.
This is false.
If you want to believe there are zero Russians with basic opsec knowledge
This was never assumed in my comments.
Though if you want to believe actions of Russian army like "buying Starlink terminals and using them on the front lines" can't be opposed, I wish there would be enough people around to point out this fallacy publicly.
It's not about what I want. It's about what Starlink can do to make sure their help to Ukrainian army (which is paid by the US department of defense) goes only to Ukrainian army.
I said it about what you described, not about actual VPN. In context of Starlink it's like proposing to wear a mask while your neighbor still sees you from your window in your room.
And it doesn’t matter where they currently are.
Check the Starlink availability map. Starlink is able to command what each satellite does, and surely they can see the list of connected modules for each satellite, with accounts. Wether they use VPN or not is irrelevant.
Unless you think starlink employees are going to be analyzing the location data of every device in and around Ukraine in an attempt to figure out which devices are potentially under Russian control?
They could, it won't take much effort, and it will be in everyone's interest to analyze what can be done about it.
Have them delivered anywhere in Ukraine, wherever improves their chances of it actually arriving, and then transport it north.
North - where? Europe? Then to Russia and to the front lines? Then there is no point in involving Ukraine at all. Ukraine bashes EU for not controlling export with Russia properly, why would it not strictly control its own exports anywhere?
They aren’t going to have it shipped to the front lines
Where they were shipped before getting delivered to the front lines is not much of an interest, as it will still be different from batches that Starlink directly shiping to Ukrainian military as per agreement with the US government.
You keep approaching this like the people involved would be idiots.
I know a lot of people involved are not educated good enough to understand that they should not help Russian aggression.
What approach do you recommend? All I see is nasicay "Russians control everything and we are powerless".
A VPN would prevent anyone from being able to tell what the data was, where it was going, what it was for. The moment a VPN is introduced, there’s no way to tell what the device is being used for.
VPN will not let the module use a satellite outside of its current location. Starlink is the service operator, not the website you connect to. Also SSL makes the VPN you describe redundant.
Russian operatives can still purchase things in Ukraine.
Puchasing anything through Ukraine is unviable at the thought level from the perspective of Russian army. Hence why it's much more likely to come from elsewhere.
Using VPN for what purpose exactly? VPN won't deliver you a device from Ukraine. VPN won't change your physical location.
Russian military was using Ukraine's own mobile operators and its talks has been recorded (and locations discovered probably) many times thanks to that. Yes, they are stupid enough to not know about messengers sometimes.
I also don't exactly buy the possibility of Russian intelligence agencies being able to do stuff like this adequately. As anything else in Russia, they degraded seriously under Putin's regime. They might not even be involved - I wouldn't be surprised if those Starlink modules were just a nice opportunity found by whatever volunteers buying stuff like drones from Aliexpress and sending it to Russian army. Reports say they were purchased from UAE.
Since when can you not spoof any of that? Grab a used android phone from local used market. Put any rooted rom on it. Spoof the gps… Device id is irrelevant at that point.
Starlink modules are not Android devices.
Device ids should be required for pairing with the satellite from my understanding. Same with IMEI on smartphones - except it should be useless to try to fake it as the number of devices is magnitudes lower than smartphones and it should be possible to pin-point any misbehaving device.
Spoofing GPS is not exactly useful. Starlink satellites are very low-orbit so again misbehavior should be detectable. I mean you can connect to some satellite but if you report location that should be served by a different satellite then you got yourself caught.
you can just order the starlink equipment to a random address in a different country
Starlink is shipping devices to Ukraine directly for the military it seems. It should know the difference between these and others that are shipped all over the world by anyone.
Once you got the connection up and running you just use a vpn to hide everyrhing.
VPN is out of scope for this I think. It's about locating the device physically by the provider, not about specific sites trying to watch actual internet activity.
they could do is block starlink for a whole region
They are already doing this but not the whole region. Occupied territories of Ukraine are selectively blocked according to their own availability map.