Ah, gotcha. It sounds like it's been provided in aid packages for a while.

https://defensescoop.com/2023/05/09/commercial-satellite-imagery-services-included-in-new-1-2b-ukraine-security-assistance-package/

The latest U.S. security assistance tranche for Ukraine, valued at $1.2 billion, includes funding for commercial satellite imagery services as well as a slew of air-defense capabilities.

My guess is that the drones that they're using don't have a payload large enough to obliterate an entire refinery, and that they're doing more-precise targeting of things at a refinery than "hit the refinery somewhere". If Russia could block access to all satellite imagery of the refinery, it'd probably have an impact.

The problem, though, as others have pointed out, is that Ukraine probably doesn't depend on Yandex-provided satellite imagery.

The Soviet-era approach to trying to secure map data was also a lot more elaborate than what's happening here.

https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide-admits-maps-were-faked-for-50-years.html

Soviet Aide Admits Maps Were Faked for 50 Years

Sept. 3, 1988

The Soviet Union's chief cartographer acknowledged today that for the last 50 years the Soviet Union had deliberately falsified virtually all public maps of the country, misplacing rivers and streets, distorting boundaries and omitting geographical features, on orders of the secret police.

In an interview published tonight in the Government newspaper Izvestia, the chief map maker, Viktor R. Yashchenko, said the authorities had agreed to begin releasing accurate maps that have been classified as state secrets since the time of Stalin. Western experts said the maps apparently were distorted out of fear of aerial bombing or foreign intelligence operations.

As one example, American diplomats and correspondents based in Moscow find that the most reliable street map of Moscow is produced in the United States, by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The falsification of Soviet maps, Mr. Yashchenko told Izvestia, began in the late 1930's when the map-making administration was put under control of the security police, then known as the N.K.V.D.

''Even in the post-Stalin time the distortion of generally available maps continued as a requirement of the work of our administration,'' he said. ''This work became senseless with the appearance of space photography,'' which meant foreign countries could make their own extremely accurate maps from satellite data. ''But nevertheless it continued until this year,'' he said.

Choosing one commercial provider, Planet Labs in the US stores and sells current and historical images of world land masses every day.

https://www.planet.com/products/satellite-monitoring/

Planet Monitoring provides near-daily, 3.7-meter resolution imagery covering all of Earth’s landmass.

That's just generally-available commercial stuff, not even military stuff, which I suspect Ukraine gets.

in every possible scenario

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunge_mine

The conical mine body was 11.6 inches (29 cm) long and 8 inches (20 cm) in diameter at its base, weighing 11 pounds (5.0 kg) including the 6.6 pounds (3.0 kg) of crude TNT filling. The three metal legs welded to it were 6 inches (15 cm) long, intended to ensure the proper stand-off distance for the shaped charge to achieve maximum penetration. The 1.25-inch (3.2 cm) diameter handle was 59 inches (150 cm) long and weighed 3.3 pounds (1.5 kg), for an overall length of 78 inches (200 cm) (including the three legs) and weight of 14.3 pounds (6.5 kg).

https://gitnux.org/average-arm-length/

The average arm length of adult males is around 25.4 inches.

So you've got a weapon that has a range of roughly 100 inches, counting arm length and lunge mine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_Abrams

Hull length: 26.02 ft

Width: 12 ft

The furthest extent from the tank center that the tank hull will extend is sqrt((12÷2)²+(26÷2)²)=14.3 ft, or about 171 in. So being generous as to angle of impact and weak points, this means that the attacker needs to get within about 272 inches of the center of the tank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M256_(tank_gun)

The M256 is an American 120 mm smoothbore tank gun. It is a licensed-built German-designed Rheinmetall Rh-120 L44 gun tube and combustible cartridges with an American-designed mount, cradle and recoil mechanism. It is primarily used by the M1 Abrams main battle tank.

Length: 5,593 mm (220.20 in) (overall)

It looks like, from the gun-forward length of the M1A2 at 32.04 ft, the turret has the gun mounted maybe four feet forward of the center of the tank, so that's another 48 inches.

Thus the tank gun reaches about 268 in from the center of the tank. This is about four inches short of the lunge mine operator's total range, assuming full arm extension.

This is the 1862 US Navy saber bayonet. It has a 25 inch blade:

I don't think that it's too hard to see which era of cavalry forces come out on top here.

A lot of this sounds pretty abstract to me.

It argues that drones transmit data about use to Chinese drone manufacturers, which could leverage that data to provide an edge globally.

Okay, fine. I'll believe that farms have models of when to spray and such, and that these models have value. And this effectively gives drone manufacturers a fair bit of that data.

But...how secret is that data now? Like, is this actually data not generally available? There are a lot of corn farms out there. Did each corn farm go carefully work up their own model on their own in a way that China can't obtain that data? Or can I go read information publicly about recommended spraying intervals?

More radically, agricultural data could be used to unleash biological warfare against crops, annihilating an adversary’s food supply. Such scenarios pose a significant threat to national security, offering China multiple avenues to undermine critical infrastructures by devastating food availability, threatening trade and economic resilience, and destabilizing agricultural systems.

That seems like an awful stretch.

Biowarfare with infectious disease is hard to control. Countries historically have been more interested militarily in stuff like anthrax, which works more like a chemical weapon. I am dubious that China has a raging interest in biowarfare against American crops.

Even if we assume that China does have the intent and ability to develop something like a crop disease, I have a very hard time seeing as how somewhat finer-grained information about agriculture is going to make such an attack much more effective. Let's say that China identifies a crop that is principally grown in the US and develops an infectious diease targeting it. Does it really need to know the fine points of that crop, or can it just release it at various points and let it spread?

As for food security, the US is not really a country at any sort of food security risk.

• It exports a lot of staple food. It's the source, not the consumer.

• It has large margins due to producing luxuries that could be reduced in a wartime emergency -- I recall once reading a statistic that if the US went vegetarian, it could provide for all of Europe's food needs purely from the increased output without bringing any more land into production.

• It is wealthy enough to have access to the global food market. If the US is starving, a lot of the world is going to be starving first. In some cases, one can cut off physical transport access to the global market via blockade even where a country could normally buy from those markets -- as Germany tried to do to the UK in World War II or the US did to Japan in World War II, but that would be extraordinarily difficult to do to the US given the present balance of power. The US is by far the largest naval power in the world. This assessment is that in a defensive naval and air war, which is what such a blockade would involve, it could alone prevail against the combined militaries of the entire rest of the world. And on top of that, a substantial portion of the other major naval powers are allied to the US. China is very unlikely to be in a position where it could blockade the US, and if we imagine the kind of changes necessary to create some scenario where it was, I'd suggest that this scenario would also very probably bring with it other issues that would be of greater concern to the US than food security.

I'm willing to believe that it might be possible to target "university IT systems" for commercially-useful data, but it's not clear to me that that's something specific to drones or to China. There are shit-tons of devices on all kinds of networks that come out of China. I'd be more worried about the firmware on one's Lenovo Thinkpad as being a practical attack vector than agricultural drones.

Now, okay. The article is referencing both American national security concerns and potential risks to other places, fine. It's talking about Brazil, Spain, etc. Some of my response is specific to the US. But I'm going to need some rather less hand-wavy and concrete issues to get that excited about this. You cannot hedge against every risk. Yes, there are risks that I can imagine agricultural drones represent, though I think that just being remotely-bricked around harvest time would be a more-realistic concern. But there are also counters. Sure, China no doubt has vectors via which it could hit the US. But the same is also true going the other way, and if China starts pulling levers, well, the US can pull some in response. That's a pretty significant deterrent. Unless an attack can put the US in a position where it cannot respond, like enabling a Chinese nuclear first strike or something, those deterrents are probably going to be reasonably substantial. If we reach a point where China is conducting biowarfare against American crops to starve out the US, then we've got a shooting war on, and there are other things that are going to be higher on the priority list.

5G infrastructure is, I agree, critical. TikTok might be from an information warfare perspective. You can mitigate some of the worst risks. But you cannot just run down the list of every product that China sells and block every way in which one might be leveraged. Do that and you're looking at heading towards autarky and that also hurts a country -- look at North Korea. Sanctions might not do much to it, but it's also unable to do much.

To quote Sun Tzu:

For should the enemy strengthen his van, he will weaken his rear; should he strengthen his rear, he will weaken his van; should he strengthen his left, he will weaken his right; should he strengthen his right, he will weaken his left. If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.

You have a finite amount of resources. You can use them to mitigate some threats. You cannot effectively counter all potential threats. You have to prioritize. If we want to counter agricultural drones as an attack vector, then we accept greater vulnerability elsewhere to do so. The question is not simply "does a potential vulnerability exist", but "is this the optimal place to expend resources"?

While it sucks, people like me (and there’s a heavy majority of Californians like me) will get lower rates because we live in cities with low wildfire and low flood potential.

It doesn't sound to me like this is the situation.

Insurers can offer whatever they want, but if they want to be able to sell to non-high-risk people, they will also have to complete a sufficient number of sales to high-risk customers.

The rule will require home insurers to offer coverage in high-risk areas, something the state has never done, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara's office said in a statement. Insurers will have to start increasing their coverage by 5% every two years until they hit the equivalent of 85% of their market share. That means if an insurer writes 20 out of every 100 state policies, they'd need to write 17 in a high-risk area, Lara's office said.

That will cause them to need to set lower rates in higher risk areas than they normally would to be able to complete sufficient high-risk-area sales. That will decrease competition to provide coverage in low risk areas, which will raise insurance rates there.

I'd expect this to be causing people who live in low-risk areas to be subsidizing people who live in high risk areas via higher insurance prices in low risk areas than would be the case in an unconstrained market.

That is, this is a good deal relative to an unconstrained market for people living in high-risk areas and a bad deal relative to an unconstrained market for people living in low risk areas.

The problem, apparently, was that the Serve robot wasn't a pedestrian. Waymo told TechCrunch that its driver system had seen the delivery bot and correctly identified it as an inanimate object — and such is the disdain the autonomous vehicle harbors towards its Fellow Robot — so it didn't exercise the level of caution it would around human beings as it's programmed to do.

And so that was why all the robots made after 2024 were made to look like humans.

The longest recording centers on Jabbar’s interpreting scripture to mean that “poetry, like rapping” could gradually lure people “into the things that God has made forbidden to us: the intoxicants like marijuana, alcohol, sedatives, opioids, stimulants and others”.

“Then there’s the way that music entices us to illicit sex, vulgarity, violence, betrayal, arrogance, burglary, cheating, ingratitude to our spouses or others in general,” he continued. Suggesting music was “Satan’s voice,” he added: “It drives us to waste our wealth, sever the ties to kinship – and even idolatry by calling us to worship … the artist themselves.”

The music is enticing people to violence. This must be stopped. The only thing to be done about this is to try to kill as many random people as possible.

I think that it is unlikely that China will do this.

I think that it is more-likely that Beijing will seek to dominate Russia, not to conquer it. China has a 2023 GDP of $17 trillion, Russia of $2 trillion. Russia has ensured that it has to rely on China for various things for at least some time. China doesn't need to invade to see increasing influence in Russia moving forward.

https://jamestown.org/program/russias-fiscal-dependence-on-china-grows/

• As Western sanctions increasingly isolate Russia, it has become highly dependent on China for trade and economic support, particularly in energy exports sold at discounted prices.
• China has capitalized on Russia’s isolation by expanding its investments and economic influence within Russia, with Chinese companies increasing their share of Russian market participation. This economic relationship shows an imbalance, with China benefiting from favorable trade terms.
• Western sanctions and the war in Ukraine have deeply impacted Russia’s economy, as seen in the weakening ruble, increasing reliance on China, and signs of Russia potentially becoming a subordinate economic partner to China rather than an equal.

That's maybe not as evocative as the image of Chinese tanks rumbling into Russia, but I think that it's probably a much more realistic geopolitical issue for Russia.

I imagine Washington and Beijing are probably in some degree of concurrence about US defense contractors not having a supply chain that goes through China.

I'd choose one at least somewhat near yourself. It'll improve latency, and it's your window to the world, so you'll always feel that latency when browsing.

There's probably some webpage out there that will measure load times, if you don't have tools yourself.

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/ or https://mbin.fediverse.observer/ will geolocate your IP and try to show a list of geographically-nearby instances; not quite the same thing as network latency, but correlated.