Excerpt:
Astronomical radio sources, while intrinsically intense, are also far away. What little of their signal reaches Earth is therefore really faint: A single mobile phone on the surface of the Moon would outshine all but the very brightest of them.
Communication signals of Earth-orbiting satellites are much stronger but are by regulation limited to certain wavelengths. They’re also known to radio astronomers, who can filter them out. However, leakage radiation may result in artificial signals at unintended wavelengths. Leakage typically comes from human activity on the ground, but with the number of satellites literally skyrocketing, astronomers are becoming concerned about the effect from space. Now, a team has announced the first detection of this electromagnetic interference from satellites.
“Leakage radiation from artificial satellites as a possible interference first appeared in our minds only about two years ago,” recalls Benjamin Winkel (Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, Germany, and Committee on Radio Astronomy Frequencies, France). “Back then, nobody knew how strong such an effect would be, and if this was more than just a theoretical problem.”
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That's probably a fair assessment.
But I feel like the core of my argument remains: I'm not disputing that MS or Google or Amazon or Apple services are sold to people and orgs who use them to commit evil. Of course they are.
But these aren't munitions. They are general-purpose computing products being turned to evil outcomes by bad actors. The article, for example, cites Microsoft's open-source LAVENDER, which is a general purpose image and video analysis tool for AI. Describing it as:
This simply isn't true. Somebody in the Israeli military used LAVENDER to process video data to identify bombing targets, like somebody might use a hammer to smash someone's head in. The articles you cite are full of rhetorical tricks to imply that Microsoft corporate had some hand in the decision making, but it's genuinely all "well the Israeli military has some Azure servers, therefore Microsoft killed people".
Which militaries should Microsoft (or Google or Apple or Amazon, etc) be allowed to sell products to? Who makes that determination? A cohort of employees or consumers? NGOs?
If government makes the call -- distilling a public consensus on the matter, one hopes -- then I can see some reasonable way to approach this question.
EDIT: Details on LAVENDER:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/lavender-unifying-video-language-understanding-as-masked-language-modeling/