Message-ID: <6840d511@news.ausics.net>
From: not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev)
Subject: Re: Odd - China Building "Space Supercomputer"
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,comp.os.linux.misc
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In comp.os.linux.misc c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote:
>   My concern is not with the underlying TECH- but
>   the underlying INTENT.

The driving force now is probably military applications. Various
autonomous fighting machines in Ukraine have shown the usefullness
of Starlink in wartime, and that's prompted China to renew work on
building an internet constellation of their own. Then, this AI
constellation might be useful for efficiently processing all the
data from thousands of drones swarming over our heads come WWIII.
But it's too early to tell where they'll really go with that.

>   You don't invest THIS much without INTENT.

It's not clear how much they've invested at this stage, having only
launched the first 12 satellites of the planned thousands. These
announcements are prone to vapour-ware, there was the Chinese
"LinkSure" company in 2018 who were launching a free global
internet constellation like what Starlink's became:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-30/chinese-company-to-provide-free-internet-worldwide-by-2026/10568434

There's not much news since, that I can find, but this page claims
it's cancelled:
https://www.newspace.im/constellations/linksure

But there are new Chinese Starlink clone projects that are gaining
more traction now:
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/12/china-orbits-first-guowang-internet-satellites-with-thousands-more-to-come/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guowang
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qianfan

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