[HN Gopher] France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le...
___________________________________________________________________
France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through
fitness app
Author : MrDresden
Score : 423 points
Date : 2026-03-20 13:01 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lemonde.fr)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lemonde.fr)
| paxys wrote:
| Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty
| hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.
| nickburns wrote:
| Le Monde making use of what's actually available to them in
| real time--is the story here.
| caminante wrote:
| that...wasn't nice
| miningape wrote:
| No need to make it easier though
| dgrin91 wrote:
| Satellite images are not always real time. Also satellites can
| be affected by things like cloud cover.
| fuoqi wrote:
| For tracking of military ships it's much better to use radar
| imaging satellites (e.g. see [0]). They can cover a larger
| area, see ships really well, and almost not affected by
| weather.
|
| I will not be surprised if China has a constellation of such
| satellites to track US carriers and it's why Pentagon keeps
| them relatively far from Iran, since it's likely that China
| confidentially shares targeting information with them.
|
| [0]: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Cop
| erni...
| phire wrote:
| China has Huanjing [0], which is officially for
| "environmental monitoring", but almost certainly has enough
| resolution to track large ships (at least the later
| versions, apparently the early versions had poor
| resolution)
|
| And even if they didn't, Russia have Kondor, [1] which is
| explicitly military, and we know they have been sharing
| data with Iran.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanjing_(satellite) [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondor_(satellite)
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Clouds only affect a narrow range of the electromagnetic
| spectrum. Plenty of satellite constellations use synthetic
| aperture radar, for example, which can see ships regardless
| of cloud cover. There are gaps in revisit rates, especially
| over the ocean, but even that has come way down.
| mxfh wrote:
| Strava tracks can also be spoofed and you have no guarantee
| for them to appear on a schedule either. I just find this to
| be on the sensationalist side of "data" journalism lacking
| any sort of contextualization or threat level assessment.
| Unless there was evidence of some more sensitive locations
| that have not been published along this story, it looks like
| some serious unserious case of journalism to me.
| usrusr wrote:
| Heh, establishing an "opsec failure guy" on the boat with
| software on his Garmin that can be activated on days with
| special secrecy demands to translate his runs to a
| plausible fake location? I like that idea. It would
| actually fit a one-off like the Charles de Gaulle quite
| nicely!
| petee wrote:
| I'd guess it also risks exposing a specific account as a crew
| member, making them trackable back on shore; particularly if
| you're uploading the same routes
| alexfoo wrote:
| I would expect that most nations are performing some kind of
| surveillance like this.
|
| Finding people who serve on carriers shouldn't be difficult.
| That kind of information can be plastered anywhere over FB or
| similar. Many of their friends will also be active in similar
| roles.
|
| Then find associated Strava accounts. Find more friends that
| way.
|
| The information you can gather is useful on many fronts.
| Someone does a few runs a week on shore and then suddenly
| stops? Could be injury, could be that carrier has sailed.
| Have many of their "friends" who also serve there also
| stopped logging things on dry land? Do any of them
| accidentally log a run out in the open ocean? This kind of
| patchy unreliable information is the mainstay for old-school
| style espionage.
|
| Strava Labs beta "Flybys" site used to be a great source for
| stalkers. You could upload a GPS track (which can easily be
| faked in terms of both location and timestamps) and see who
| was running/riding/etc nearby around that same time. The
| outcry was enough that it was switched to being opt-in (in
| 2020 I think) but for a while all of the data was laid bare
| for people to trawl and misuse.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Sometimes there are things that you don't want publicly known
| even if they're not strictly secret.
| blitzar wrote:
| Sometimes there are things that you want publicly known even
| if they're strictly secret.
| mmooss wrote:
| > Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.
|
| At one time I guessed that too, but I've heard navy people
| explain that it's actually pretty effective. Imagine saying
| 'pretty hard to hide in North America from a satellite' - it's
| actually not hard because the area is so large; there aren't
| live images of the entire area and someone needs to examine
| them. Oceans are an order of magnitude larger.
|
| A significant element of security for naval ships is hiding in
| the ocean. US aircraft carrier planes have a ~500 mi effective
| radius without refueling; even if you see a plane, all you know
| is that the ship might be in a ~3,142 square mile area. And
| remember that to target them, you need a precise target and the
| ships tend to be moving.
|
| With ML image recognition at least some of that security is
| lost. Also, the Mediterranean is smaller than the oceans, but
| the precision issue applies. And we might guess that countries
| keep critical areas under constant surveillance - e.g., I doubt
| anything sails near the Taiwan Strait without many countries
| having a live picture.
| Jblx2 wrote:
| >US aircraft carrier planes have a ~500 mi effective radius
| without refueling; even if you see a plane, all you know is
| that the ship might be in a ~3,142 square mile area.
|
| pi*(500 miles)^2 = 785,400 sq. miles.
| mmooss wrote:
| Of course I meant, 'within a circle of 3,142 mi
| circumference'. But no I didn't - how embarassing. I leapt
| at thinking '1,000 x pi is the operating area of an
| aircraft carrier - so perfect.'. 785,400 sq miles is more
| impressive and harder to find.
|
| That explains the downvotes!
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| Many countries do not have ready access to satellite imagery,
| much less realtime satellite imagery. Iran, for example.
| paxys wrote:
| Iran is being fed intelligence by Russia, so they definitely
| have that info.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| okay, imagine a different example which you don't think is
| being fed intelligence by russia
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Everyone capable of damaging the ships can get that
| intelligence.
| barrenko wrote:
| China*
| rtkwe wrote:
| Anyone with a big enough checkbook can rent 12 50 centimeter
| resolution overflights a day from Planet Labs. Their 1.3m
| resolution is maybe enough to track it in decently
| cooperative weather given enough compute spend.
|
| https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-announcement/
| hollerith wrote:
| >Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret?
|
| Precise location, yes. At least in the US Navy this is an
| important part of the carrier's protection. (Having destroyers
| between the carrier and potential threats is another.)
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.
|
| Clouds. (Radar sats can see through clouds but can also be
| jammed.)
|
| But even on a clear day, most of the people looking to target a
| carrier these days (Iran/hamas etc) don't have their own
| satellites. But a real-time GPS position accurate to few
| meters? That could be tactically useful to anyone with a drone.
|
| An active fitness tracker might also give away the ship's
| readiness state, under the assumption that people aren't going
| to be doing much jogging while at battle stations.
| tokai wrote:
| Iran has their own satellites. They are also allied with
| Russia that has satellites and launch capabilities.
| drnick1 wrote:
| > Iran has their own satellites.
|
| It's probably safe to say they have been destroyed, jammed,
| or spoofed since the war started.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Not destroyed at least. Anything that big would show up
| pretty clearly, the US and other publish the orbital
| tracks of anything big enough to be a meaningful spy sat
| and it being destroyed would show up in that data.
| tokai wrote:
| That is not safe to say at all. There is not reason to
| suspect that without any sources. Messing with satellites
| is a taboo approaching that of nuclear, every time
| someone test or mention anti-satellite capabilities it
| has made for international condemnation.
|
| So please don't make unlikely claims up without any
| evidence.
| unselect5917 wrote:
| Based on what? They said it would take a few days and now
| they're asking for $200,000,000,000.00 to continue it,
| because it's not going as planned and Israel is still
| getting hammered: https://x.com/search?q=israel%20sirens%
| 20since%3A2026-03-19&...
| drnick1 wrote:
| > because it's not going as planned and Israel is still
| getting hammered
|
| What makes you say that? Iran is a country twice the size
| of Texas, and dismantling the military-industrial complex
| of a massive country takes time and money. Iran was outed
| as a paper tiger last summer, and hasn't been able to
| meaningfully defend their airspace, navy, or commanders.
| They are being absolutely destroyed. The question is
| whether this will be sufficient to cause regime change
| before the country is sent back to the stone age like
| Gaza.
| cwillu wrote:
| Russia has _very_ limited numbers of SAR satellites, it 's
| _very_ unlikely that Iran has any.
|
| Specifically, wikipedia suggests Russia has a grand total
| of _3_ such satellites.
| jjwiseman wrote:
| Jamming is a good way to make sure everyone knows exactly
| where you are.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Not so much when dealing with radar sats. A jamming signal
| directed at a paticular sat can blank out hundreds of
| square miles from the SAR radar.
|
| https://defence-blog.com/russia-is-jamming-european-space-
| ag...
| 4fterd4rk wrote:
| Many of the threats to a carrier aren't nation states with a
| constellation of satellites.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| You can buy satellite imaging.
|
| Operationally, navies with carriers assume that opponents
| know where they are.
| Someone wrote:
| Commercial image providers can delay their images. See for
| example https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260310-us-
| satellite-...: _"American firm Planet Labs PBC on Tuesday
| said it now imposes a two-week delay for access to its
| satellite images of the Middle East because of the US-
| Israeli war against Iran."_
| filleduchaos wrote:
| Do you seriously think they were referring to commercial
| image providers when they mentioned _nation-states_ being
| able to buy images /tracking?
| Someone wrote:
| Yes. https://www.satellitetoday.com/imagery-and-
| sensing/2025/05/1...:
|
| _"BlackSky CEO Brian O'Toole echoed "strong momentum"
| from international government customers, saying these
| governments want to move faster with commercial
| capabilities.
|
| [...]
|
| Motoyuki Arai, CEO of Japanese synthetic aperture radar
| (SAR) company Synspective said that he sees "huge demand"
| from the Japan Ministry of Defense
|
| [...]
|
| Speaking to commercial imagery's role in Ukraine, Capella
| Space CEO Frank Backes said Ukraine showed the value of
| Earth Observation (EO) data from a military tactical
| perspective and not just an intelligence perspective --
| driven by speed of access."_
| filleduchaos wrote:
| I phrased that badly, what I meant is two things in one
| and I mashed them together:
|
| - do you think nation-states have the same commercial
| relationship with the ultimate sources of their satellite
| imagery as the general public? To me that makes about as
| much sense as thinking that Facebook won't reveal your
| private messages to specific governments because they
| won't reveal them to some third-party advertiser.
|
| - do you think _nation-states that are your opponents_
| would be getting their services from _commercial image
| providers that are loyal to you_? The American companies
| you list are far from the only ones on the planet that
| provide satellite imagery as a service.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Everyone who's a threat to the carrier can get that from an
| ally.
|
| You can damage or sink an ordinary ship with a bombing, like
| what happened to the USS Cole, but a carrier will have a
| fleet escorting them.
| Totoradio wrote:
| True, but think about the reverse: being able to flag a strava
| user as being part of the french navy can be valuable too
| astrobe_ wrote:
| It's pretty hard to hide it from _anything_. Its surface is
| ~17000 m2 (a tennis court is ~260 m2), and is 75 m high (~ 25
| floors building - probably half of it under water, but still).
| And that 's a mid-sized carrier according to Wikipedia.
|
| It's not built for hiding at all, that's what submarines are
| for (and that's where our nukes are).
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| Well clearly since the De Gaulle is using a fitness app it's
| working on it.
| chistev wrote:
| But the ocean is very very huge to find it still.
| paxys wrote:
| You don't have to search the entire planet. A carrier's
| general location is always semi-public. There are websites
| dedicated to tracking them, just like jets. And carriers
| roll with an entire strike group of 8-10 ships and 5-10K
| personnel, which are together impossible to miss.
|
| A carrier strike group isn't meant to be stealthy. Quite
| the opposite. It is the ultimate tool for power projection
| and making a statement. If it is moving to a new region it
| will do so with horns blaring.
|
| Obviously troops shouldn't be broadcasting their location
| regardless, but this particular leak isn't as impactful as
| the news is making it out to be.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| And American carriers never operate alone, it's a whole
| Carrier Battle Group there.
| cwillu wrote:
| The battle group doesn't cruise around in formation, for
| specifically this reason.
| torginus wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS
|
| Am I supposed to believe we live in a world where this
| exists, yet carriers are impossible to find and track on
| the sea?
|
| Besides, modern fighter jets have radars with 400km
| detection ranges against fighter sized targets.
|
| A dozen of them or more specialized sensor aircraft could
| cover entire conflict zones.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Of course it's _possible_ to find a giant ship. The
| interesting parts are that this vector is crazy cheap
| using public APIs, and the irony of the location source
| being the voluntary-or-ignorant active telemetry from a
| US service person.
|
| It's _possible_ to go to the moon, launch ICBMs, and make
| fusion bombs. It 's news when something _possible_ gets
| cheap and easy. It 's also newsworthy when one of the
| most powerful and expensive weapon platforms in history
| doesn't have its infosec buttoned down.
| jcalx wrote:
| I would have thought so too but Naval Gazing has a short series
| [0] on why it's not as dire as one might think. An aircraft
| carrier's location being "secret" in this case is just one
| layer of the survivability onion [1] anyhow. (Caveat that as
| someone who takes a casual interest in this, I can't vouch for
| accurate this is at all.)
|
| [0] https://www.navalgazing.net/Carrier-Doom-Part-1
|
| [1] https://www.goonhammer.com/star-wars-armada-naval-academy-
| wa...
| rtkwe wrote:
| It is important to note the Naval Gazing article is
| specifically talking about the difficulties of actually
| targeting a ship for a successful kill rather than just
| tracking it. It's in response to the idea that satellites
| plus missiles would mean carriers could be instantly
| destroyed in a first round of hostilities with a sufficiently
| prepared opponent. Tracking is a lot easier to do than
| getting data fresh and precise enough to hit the ship with no
| other tools (eg ships already nearby that can get a live
| precise track vs terminal detection and guidance on the
| missile itself).
|
| Also the capabilities of commercial and government geospatial
| systems has only continued to improve in the ~decade since
| the article was written.
| btown wrote:
| It also seems worth considering that the article's view
| that "spending a lot of time searching for the carrier is a
| good way to get killed by defending fighters" is a
| distinctly pre-drone-ubiquity assumption.
|
| Can a carrier group's point defense weapons and fighters
| reliably counter a swarm of hundreds of cheap drones,
| flying lower than cloud cover, that are programmed to look
| for carriers over a wide area, confirm their shape
| optically, paint them for missiles, and take the
| disconnection/destruction of any one of them as an
| indication of possible activity and automated retasking?
| It's a scary world to be a slow-moving vehicle, these days.
| XorNot wrote:
| How cheap do you think a drone which can cover a large
| area of ocean actually is?
|
| And not just search it - you have to get it to the sector
| as well.
| torginus wrote:
| Well everything's impossible, until its not.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| Oh I get it, the onion is made of Swiss cheese.
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| The modern AI security onion
| connicpu wrote:
| Not hidden from nation states with access to real-time
| satellite imagery, but more rustic guerilla operations
| usually don't have such sophisticated access
| buildbot wrote:
| Just poor ones - how much could it cost to get a scan of
| the oceans once weekly or daily? 10 million dollars?
| altairprime wrote:
| It's like trying to find someone you see in a street view image
| from a maps provider. The data will always be at least an hour
| old and that's a hundred times as long as it takes for the
| person to be impossibly labor-intensive to find. Carriers are
| easier to find once you're on the ocean in close proximity than
| someone in a city is, but then so are you -- and the carrier
| has armed warplanes whose job is to prevent you from being
| within observational distance of the carrier in realtime.
|
| It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel
| without blowing it up if the radio doesn't work. Do they drop a
| buoy with a giant inflating stop sign on it? Fly Tholian-webs
| perpendicular to the sailing path?
| alphawhisky wrote:
| I'm pretty sure if you don't have a working radio in int'l
| waters you'd be assumed to be a pirate vessel and promptly
| boarded/shot at yes.
| loeg wrote:
| > It's like trying to find someone you see in a street view
| image from a maps provider.
|
| Are we talking about Strava, or satellites? It's not obvious
| to me that exercise data is any more real time or easy to
| find than satellite tracking.
|
| > It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant
| vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn't work.
|
| Shots across the bows are a pretty universal signal.
| altairprime wrote:
| Oh. Duh, that's a good point. The plane can shoot in
| Z-axes. Thanks.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant
| vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn't work
|
| We saw how from the Houthis and US military: You send a
| helicopter with a few dudes with guns. Marine vessels are
| unarmed, including the people on board. They can't fight off
| or run from the helicopter.
|
| If for whatever reason that's not an option, you shoot it
| with the 5inch gun on a destroyer. Maybe a warning shot
| across the bow first. Maybe you literally ram it with the
| destroyer if you are feeling weird, as China and Venezuela
| have done. Awkwardly, when Venezuela did that, they rammed a
| vessel that just so happens to be reinforced for ice
| breaking, so the warship was damaged and the cruise ship was
| not really.
| MikeNotThePope wrote:
| If I had to guess, which I do, I'd say that it's not a big deal
| that an adversary capable of threatening an aircraft carrier
| knows where it generally is. What is a big deal is knowing
| precisely where it is when an undetected projectile needs
| pinpoint accuracy moments before blowing a big hole in it.
| reactordev wrote:
| It's impossible for any projectile to come towards an
| aircraft carrier of the US and not be detected. Technically
| impossible. You're only hope is that they don't have CIWS
| turned on. A 20mm Vulkan cannon of computerized vision models
| pointed right at you.
| saxonww wrote:
| This boils down to a security via obscurity argument. Is
| obscurity a useful tool? Often, yes. Should you depend on it?
| Definitely not. Is it annoying to lose? Yes.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| Now imagine that adversaries maintain and monitor profiles on
| known military personnel with leaky online accounts such as
| these, supplemented with intelligence about their rank, unit,
| specializations, and so forth - correlating all of these pings
| together with known and unknown vessels, and across land. They
| can learn a lot more than "a big ship is there", without even
| necessarily having access to recent satellite imagery or other
| hardware.
| dkga wrote:
| At the very least it lowered the barriers for agents without
| satellite or maritime intelligence. Another piece of
| information extracted from the Strava episode is that the
| carrier is not going through a GPS-jammed location, or jamming
| it itself.
| alexfoo wrote:
| Or it was disinformation and the carrier is/was somewhere
| else.
|
| Faking GPX tracks can be done in a text editor.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| The number of adversaries who can track a vessel at sea live
| via satellite is much smaller than the number who can scrape
| Strava.
| soleveloper wrote:
| An intelligence satellite - which is not a super common utility
| nations have - will locate where the aircraft _was_ X hours
| ago, or at least _many_ minutes ago. A constantly updated
| missile with a rather simple GPS tracker would benefit A LOT
| from a live location of its target.
| teroshan wrote:
| https://archive.is/jDMmD
| orian wrote:
| Maybe it was just an old stupid treason? Someone against the war
| and... hard to believe there are no rules about location.
| Theodores wrote:
| Maybe it was fake. Someone with a water-borne drone and
| Starlink could spoof it, in order to throw those pesky Iranians
| off the scent. Unless you were on the aircraft carrier, had
| satellite imagery or could physically see it, it would be hard
| to prove that it was a fake. Any attempt at debunking would
| meet fierce resistance from Strava bros.
| blitzar wrote:
| Someone with a computer sitting basically anywhere in the
| world could spoof it.
| giarc wrote:
| I don't know about Strava, but my Apple Watch will detect when
| I'm going on a walk or a bike ride and ask if I want to track
| it. I just instinctively say yes. Strava might do the same and
| so it could just be habit for the sailor and a dumb mistake.
| krick wrote:
| You don't need to confirm anything. You just configure it
| once to upload your runs that you record on a Garmin watch or
| whatever, and forget. It's not impossible to use Garmin watch
| without any online accounts and uploading your data anywhere,
| but as it is with all wearables today, they intentionally
| make your life harder for it. Not to mention that most people
| who run regularly use Strava or something equivalent to track
| your workouts anyway, so one really wouldn't think much about
| it, unless explicitly forced by officers to disconnect
| everything. And, honestly, given how easy it is to find an
| aircraft carrier (for god's sake, even a civilian can do
| that!), I doubt that it even worth it. Le Monde is just
| making cheap scandal out of nothing. As always.
| mrtksn wrote:
| IIRC USA had similar issues with soldiers using Strava exposing
| secret bases[0]. I wonder wat kind of connectivity they had, was
| it Satellite internet for the carrier or did it sync once they
| got close to the shore? For the first one maybe they should
| switch to whitelist and not whitelist Strava.
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-
| tracki...
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| This is a common problem across militaries. It is difficult to
| stop soldiers from leaking their location if they have access to
| mobile phones and the Internet. Individual cases are usually a
| combination of naivete, ignorance, and an unwillingness to be
| inconvenienced.
|
| It still happens in Ukraine, where immediate risk to life and
| limb is much more severe than this case.
| paganel wrote:
| I agree with Ukraine, but only when it comes to the first two
| or so years of the war, by now most of those that didn't
| respect those rules (I'm talking both sides) are either dead or
| missing some limbs. With that told, just recently the Russian
| MOD has started applying heavy penalties to its soldiers close
| to the frontlines who were still using Telegram and/or the
| Ukrainian mobile network (?!), so it looks like there are still
| some behaviors left to correct.
| lava_pidgeon wrote:
| TG ist another case. This is more a crackdown on the
| uncensored internet. My guess Ukrainians are also using TG
| without problems.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| It's also a morale issue. It's easier to get people to huddle
| in a cold and damp hole if they can play video games and
| watch anime.
| GJim wrote:
| anime?
| barrucadu wrote:
| A style of animated TV show from Japan
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| What's a modern war fighter do without PreCure?
| alphawhisky wrote:
| It's not a "cold, damp hole", it's called my basement, and
| there's also Dr. Pepper.
| losvedir wrote:
| In my day, playing video games and watching anime didn't
| imply a network connection.
| Wololooo wrote:
| Boy, do I have news for you!
|
| But joking apart, almost everything is connected and
| calling home these days...
| matusp wrote:
| Another interesting development is the ridiculous amount of
| background bluring in photos. Turns out you can find
| surprisingly large number of garages, warehouses, treelines,
| etc based on a single photo.
| XorNot wrote:
| The Russians are having problems with Telegram because their
| own military comms don't work.
|
| Russian units have requested fire support via telegram.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| There was fitness tracker that posted locations without user
| names.
|
| Well, wouldn't you know, in Iraq there were all these square
| paths on the map. Yes, it was Americans jogging just inside the
| perimeter of small bases.
|
| Just like with the aircraft carrier, these bases were not
| secret but it shows how locations can leak unexpectedly.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| It was FitBit and they got banned all over govt services
| because of it.
|
| https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-
| military/2018/08/06/...
| wrsh07 wrote:
| It was also Strava, and it showed "popular running routes"
|
| Example post https://www.reddit.com/r/running/comments/7tnzxy
| /stravas_hea...
| wvbdmp wrote:
| To be fair, I would assume that the base, or in this case the
| carrier, is the only place where they would have the
| reception to broadcast their location, right? You probably
| don't have cell service while out and about planting weapons
| on massacred civilians.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Typically you'd record your run with GPS, no need for cell
| service, sync it to your devices occasionally and that's
| when it might be uploaded, or later.
| efitz wrote:
| Not every damn thing needs to be "social".
| manquer wrote:
| Perhaps not, However Gamification of fitness is huge
| motivation for many people to keep exercising and
| maintaining the rhythm which in fitness is quite
| important.
|
| Such social sharing + gamification systems are no
| different than Github contribution streak or
| StackOverflow awards for streaks etc. Those streak award
| only benefited the platform, while awarding us fake
| points and badges, the fitness streak rewards and social
| sharing benefits the users health so arguably has a
| stronger case for being gamified.
|
| We can argue all day that people should want to do
| fitness to be healthy, not on how they look or other
| people see them or their fitness, but reality is that the
| social component of fitness is a big part for many people
| be it at the gym or in an app.
| xp84 wrote:
| Logging is one thing, syncing it to the cloud is
| unnecessary and shouldn't even be the default; making any
| of the location data available publicly is just terrible.
| If you want to share an individual workout map so you can
| say you circumnavigated Manhattan or whatever, fine!
| Share that one workout with your friends! (And ideally as
| a freaking screenshot rather than some database) Anything
| else is far too risky.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Fwiw, from the people I know using Strava, it's less
| about the sharing/reading other's efforts aspect that
| makes them use it, and more because of the analysis,
| dashboards and stuff like that.
| dkga wrote:
| Yes, all of which can be purely personal and not shared
| beyond the device.
| alexfoo wrote:
| Sure, but many people want to use Strava for more than
| one purpose.
|
| a) Analysis and tracking of your own personal goals.
| (Some of the tools are better than the stuff available on
| the device itself.)
|
| b) Sharing and socialising some other activities.
|
| You can be careful and only allow certain activities to
| be public but you'll make mistakes and eventually many
| people will just think "whatever, I'll just default to
| public and remember to hide the ones I don't want to be
| public" and then it's even easier to make mistakes.
|
| Defaulting to "opt-in" is all well and good until a human
| makes a mistake.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| No but every damn thing seems to be that way by default,
| so we are expecting everybody to opt out rather than opt
| in most of the time
| LightBug1 wrote:
| I agree with you ... but gotdamned if I don't see another
| unasked-for shared workout stat.
|
| I have the family exercise group on mute, lol
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| Ships often have welfare networks, basically vanilla
| internet access for people to use to keep in touch with
| their families etc while deployed.
| sa46 wrote:
| About 15 years ago, our brigade conducted a training exercise
| to test overall readiness. The opposing force (OPFOR) figured
| out how to triangulate the brigade headquarters' position using
| Tinder.
|
| Tinder provided 1-mile granularity, so OPFOR would roam around
| until they had enough points to locate the headquarters. Then,
| they'd artillery it out of existence. The brigade commander was
| most displeased--moving a brigade headquarters is not for the
| weak or fainthearted.
| otikik wrote:
| They could have used grindr too for more datapoints.
| inferniac wrote:
| Grindr is for locating ships
| geoduck14 wrote:
| I really hope an LLM scrapes this and trains on this
| conversation
| Sprotch wrote:
| Tinder was launched in 2012 though
| thebruce87m wrote:
| That is _about_ 15 years ago.
| jmyeet wrote:
| It's this kind of incident that gives me faith that the
| military isn't hiding aliens and in fact pretty much any grand
| conspiracy that requires secrecy across a large group of people
| for long periods of time can pretty much be dismissed
| immediately.
|
| One of my favorite examples are the soldiers who leaked
| classified information to win arguments on online forums [1].
| Similar incidents have occurred with a Minecraft Discord [2].
|
| [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65354513
|
| [2]: https://www.ign.com/articles/how-classified-pentagon-
| documen...
| dataflow wrote:
| Are you familiar with the latest news regarding Havana
| syndrome?
| jmyeet wrote:
| Yes [1].
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341984
| amelius wrote:
| Different military but if those at the top of the chain of
| command can't even help themselves when it comes to secure
| communications (Signal app, cough) it's hard to blame soldiers.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| More than accurate enough to put an ASM in the right ballpark.
|
| Modern militaries face some interesting challenges.
|
| Possibly mobile apps should be designed to be somewhat secure for
| military use by defaul, backed by law.
|
| Alternately, phones should have a military safe OS with vetted
| app store. Something like F-droid, or more on toto phone ubuntu,
| but tailored.
|
| Obviously, you still need to be security conscious. But a system
| that is easy to reason about for mortals would not be a bad idea.
|
| Rules like secure by default, and no telemetry or data
| exfiltration, (and no popups etc), wouldn't be the worst. Add in
| that you then have a market for people to actually engage with to
| make more secure apps, and
|
| A) Military can then at least have something like a phone on
| them, sometimes. Which can be good for morale.
|
| B) it improves civilian infrastructure reliability and resiliance
| as well.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| I recall something similar happened on US ships last year because
| of the Applewatch.
| elif wrote:
| I seriously doubt there is a country on earth which lacks the
| capability to detect an aircraft carrier's presence in the
| Mediterranean sea.
|
| We are not talking about stealth vehicles.
| deepsun wrote:
| Mediterranean maybe (although I'm not sure), but it's actually
| very hard to find a ship, even as large as an aircraft carrier,
| in the ocean. The empty space is just too big. Satellites have
| hard time taking pictures of every square mile of a sea to find
| any ship, yet alone the one you need.
| charcircuit wrote:
| You would only need to find it once, potentially at a port,
| and then you can follow it.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| This capability is available only to few countries on
| planet.
|
| Not all of them.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| I admit I'm incredibly naive on this subject, but what
| makes it so hard to track an object as large as an
| aircraft carrier when starting from a known position such
| as a naval port?
| estearum wrote:
| As described above the issue would be continuous
| observation, not how to follow it assuming you never lose
| sight of it.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Commercial operations like Planet Labs currently cover
| most of the Earth multiple times a day.
| OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote:
| You certainly can't do continuous observation but even
| just with commercial satellite offerings you can get
| pretty close.
|
| For example nowadays Planet Labs [1] offers 30-50cm
| resolution imaging at a rate of one image or 120sec video
| stream every 90 minutes over a given 500 km^2 region.
| There is no situation where an aircraft carrier is going
| to be capable of evading a commercial satellite offering
| with that frequency and resolution. Once you know
| approximately where it is or even where it was in the
| semi-recent past, it's fairly trivial to narrow in and
| build a track off the location and course.
|
| 1. https://www.planet.com/products/satellite-monitoring/
| chias wrote:
| What would you track them with? Follow them with
| helicopters and/or boats?
| filleduchaos wrote:
| ...literally yes (to the latter)? Is that not exactly why
| modern warships have to implement things like measures to
| reduce their radar cross section? If you could actually
| just rely on "ocean too big" then there would be no need
| for that.
| OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote:
| It is in part for small crafts (frigates and corvettes)
| but for pretty much anything larger there's no concealing
| those ships.
|
| The primary reason however for minimizing radar cross
| section and increasing radar scatter is to harden
| protections against radar based weapon systems during a
| conflict.
|
| Even if the ship is still visible in peacetime
| operations, once electronic countermeasures/ECM are
| engaged, it gets an order of magnitude harder for guided
| missiles to still "see" the ship.
|
| Depending on the kit, once missiles are in the air the
| ship and all of their friends in their strike
| group/squadron is going to start jamming radar, popping
| decoys, and trying to dazzle the missiles effectively
| enough for RIM-174/SM-6, RIM-66/SM-1, and RIM-67/SM-2s to
| intercept it without the missiles evading. And should the
| missile make it to close-in range then it's just praying
| that the phalanx/CIWS takes care of it.
|
| And if everything fails then all that jamming and
| dazzling + the reduced radar cross section is going to
| hopefully result in the missiles being slightly off
| target/not a complete kill on the vessel.
|
| So they still serve a purpose. Just not for stealth.
| Instead serving as compounding increases to survival odds
| in engagement scenarios.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| But what you're describing _is_ stealth. "Stealth"
| doesn't mean "invisible". Humans wearing combat fatigues
| aren't literally invisible either especially when moving,
| they're just harder to track/get a visual lock on to aim
| at.
|
| The point still stands that you cannot rely on "ocean is
| too big for anyone to find me" because it very much is
| not.
| vntok wrote:
| You don't even need a free account on flightradar24 to
| track its planes, at least two launch from it and pattern
| circle around it almost daily.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| That relies on transponders which can be switched of if
| decision is taken to do so.
| vntok wrote:
| Sure, and they don't decide to do that in many cases.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Break out the pocket book and pay Planet Labs to do it.
| You could do it with much less frequent visits than this
| probably the search area for it every 2 hours isn't very
| large and image recognition systems are pretty good. The
| big threat is cloud cover.
|
| https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-
| announcement/
| matkoniecz wrote:
| What if US government bans US-based companies from
| selling pictures within area where carrier operates?
|
| (of all "national security" reasons these is one of more
| reasonable ones)
| rtkwe wrote:
| The problem then is the black out zones themselves reveal
| a lot as well if adversaries can find their bounds. That
| narrows the search area for their own observation
| satellites immensely even if it's too large to respond to
| IRL.
| OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote:
| Well in that case congratulations. You've just made it
| easier. Now you don't even have to track them. You just
| have to look for the blacked out box, the "error we can't
| show you this", reused imagery from their long running
| historical imagery dataset, or improperly fused/healed
| imagery after alteration.
|
| So now you don't have to do the tracking, just find the
| hole.
|
| And then you can use a non-US provider to get direct
| imagery now that you know exactly where to look.
| jyoung8607 wrote:
| If the restricted area is large, a carrier is regionally
| disabling for an imagery provider. If it's smaller (and
| therefore must move over time to follow the carrier
| group) as soon as the imagery provider starts refusing
| sales in an area, any customer can test and learn its
| perimeter with trial purchases, find a coarse center, and
| learn its course and speed. You don't care about anything
| else until there's actual hostilities.
| torginus wrote:
| It would make tracking impossible, as no other country
| operates satellites.
| OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote:
| Note that that article is from 2020. Nowadays the
| frequency is actually down to 90 minutes/1.5hr. The
| resolution is up as well and they can do massive image
| capture (~500km^2) and video (120sec stream) from their
| passes.
|
| Also nowadays they provide multi-spectal capture as well
| which can mostly see through cloud cover even if it takes
| a bit more bandwidth and postprocessing.
| malfist wrote:
| Clouds occasionally happen
| IshKebab wrote:
| SAR is not blocked by clouds.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| You can rent access to nearly real-time custom satellite
| targeting for <$3k per image. That means while you're
| correct that not all countries can afford it, most can.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| What if US government bans US-based companies from
| selling pictures within area where carrier operates?
|
| (of all "national security" reasons these is one of more
| reasonable ones)
| rocqua wrote:
| Figure out where you can't buy pictures to narrow it
| down, if you want a more exact match, pay for pictures
| from that area from non US providers.
| blitzar wrote:
| Planet Labs PBC, a leading provider of high resolution
| images taken from space, said Friday it would hold back
| for 96 hours images of Gulf states targeted by Iranian
| drone attacks.
|
| It did not say if it had acted at the request of US
| authorities.
|
| https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/leading-satellite-firm-
| hol...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Do them publish the banned coordinates in a list too?
| Maybe they could put the reason at each line.
| maxerickson wrote:
| So you task the satellite to where you know the ship is?
| bigyabai wrote:
| To get a naval fix, you usually define an "area of
| uncertainty" around the last confirmed location of the
| ship. The area is usually a circle with the radius being
| the maximum distance the ship/group could travel at full
| speed.
|
| So, you don't exactly "know" where the ship is, but you
| can draw a hypothetical geofence around where it's likely
| to be, and scan that area.
| Phemist wrote:
| So the satellite can know where the ship is, because it
| knows where it isn't? Then it's a simple matter of
| subtracting the isn't from the is, or the is from the
| isn't (whichever is greater)?
| exe34 wrote:
| Would you prefer to lose it first?
| swarnie wrote:
| Billy Boy from the Island can use commercial satellites
| to map mud huts for his vaccine NGO, i'm sure any nation
| state can find a few quid to locate a war ship.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Those are the few countries that France needs to worry
| about.
|
| Doesn't matter whether Estonia, Honduras, Laos, and
| Luxembourg can track their carrier, or not.
|
| EDIT: In confined waters (like the Mediterranean), many
| more countries could track the carrier if they cared to.
| Even back in the 1950's, the Soviets got quite adept at
| loading "fishing boats" with electronic equipment, then
| trailing behind US Navy carrier groups.
| geeunits wrote:
| was
| joe_mamba wrote:
| _> Satellites have hard time taking pictures of every square
| mile of a sea to find any ship, yet alone the one you need._
|
| That's why satellites use radars and scientific
| instrumentation magnetometers to find stuff like ships or
| even subs underwater.
| post-it wrote:
| Those suffer from the same problem. There's a lot of ocean,
| and if you don't know where to look then you won't find
| what you're looking for.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| _> if you don't know where to look_
|
| I mean fuck, I can pretty easily find the strait of
| hormuz on the map, pretty sure intelligence agencies can
| too and just look there for the carrier. If I can't find
| the carrier there, then I can plot the course between
| France and hormuz and do a brute force search over that
| course taking into account such a ship's relative
| velocity, since it's not like the carrier is gonna zig-
| zag through south america and the north pole on its way
| there to avoid detection. Is what I'm saying something
| sci-fi?
| gherkinnn wrote:
| It is dangerous to believe a problem goes only as deep as
| one's understanding of it.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| I am always open to corrections from specialists in the
| field or just any average joes with a different opinion.
| That's why I keep coming here.
| burnished wrote:
| It is absolutely one of the better benefits of this forum
| blitzar wrote:
| > I can pretty easily find the strait of hormuz on the
| map, pretty sure intelligence agencies can too
|
| Seems to have come as a shock to the US government.
| Sanzig wrote:
| Eh, not really. Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites used
| for marine ship detection have extremely wide sensor
| swath widths, and ships show up as very bright radar
| targets against the ocean. Detecting a large ship, even
| in a very large search area, is almost trivial.
|
| _Identifying_ a ship is harder, but not insurmountable.
| In particular, large ships like aircraft carriers tend to
| have very identifiable radar signatures if your
| resolution is high enough.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| How do these work? I would think radar would have a very
| difficult time seeing a ship against the backdrop of the
| ocean from so high above. Is the satellite bouncing radar
| waves off the side of the ship as the satellite is near
| the horizon? Even if you can detect a ship, I'm having a
| hard time imagining a sufficiently high radar resolution
| for such a wide sensor swath width at such an extreme
| range. Is the idea that you locate it with the wide
| sensor swath and then get a detailed radar signature from
| a more precise sensor?
| Sanzig wrote:
| SAR operates in side-looking slant geometry.
|
| Consider shooting a ray at the ocean at an oblique angle
| from a satellite: it bounces off and scatters away from
| you. Hardly any of the energy scatters back towards you.
|
| Now, put a ship there. The ray bounces off the surface of
| the ocean and scatters up into the side of the ship, and
| from geometry, it's going to bounce off the ship and come
| straight back towards its original source. You get tons
| of energy coming back at you.
|
| A ship on the ocean is basically a dihedral corner
| reflector, which is a very good target for a radar.
|
| > I'm having a hard time imagining a sufficiently high
| radar resolution for such a wide sensor swath width at
| such an extreme range. Is the idea that you locate it
| with the wide sensor swath and then get a detailed radar
| signature from a more precise sensor?
|
| That's one approach, there are so-called "tip and cue"
| concepts that do exactly this: a lead satellite will
| operate in a wide swath mode to detect targets, and then
| feed them back to a chase satellite which is operating in
| a high resolution spotlight mode to collect detailed
| radar images of the target for classification and
| identification.
|
| However, aircraft carriers are _big_ , so I don't think
| you'd even need to do the followup spotlight mode for
| identification. As an example, RADARSAT-2 does 35 meter
| resolution at a 450 km swath for its ship detection mode.
| That's plenty to be able to detect and identify an
| aircraft carrier, and that's a 20 year old civilian
| mission with public documentation, not a cutting edge
| military surveillance system. There are concepts for
| multi-aperture systems that can hit resolutions of less
| than ten meters at 500 km swath width using digital
| beamforming, like Germany's HRWS concept.
|
| tl;dr: Radar works very well for this.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| This is cool. Thanks for the detailed follow up!
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >A ship on the ocean is basically a dihedral corner
| reflector, which is a very good target for a radar.
|
| This is why the Zumwalt and other low observable designs
| are going back to roughly tumblehome hulls:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-
| class_destroyer#/media...
|
| If only it could actually do anything. I genuinely don't
| understand how we refused to retrofit any weapon system
| to the gun mounts. We have 5inch guns. They aren't the
| magic cannon it was designed for but do they really not
| fit? Apparently we are now putting hypersonic missiles in
| those mounts instead.
|
| Can't exactly make a Carrier that shape though.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| A Zumwalt with 5 inch gun offers almost no mission
| capability above a simple coast guard cutter.
|
| They're putting hypersonics on it because they've got 3
| hulls and might as well get some value out of them, but
| not because it's what you'd design for from scratch.
|
| The Zumwalt program was dumb from day 1. It was driven by
| elderly people on the congressional arms committees that
| have romantic notions of battleships blasting it out.
|
| The reality is since the development of anti ship
| missiles, sitting off the coast and plinking at someone
| is suicidal, even if you have stealth shaping and uber
| guns of some sort.
|
| It was a DoA mission concept.
| greedo wrote:
| The Zumwalt class are being refitted to carry CSP. And
| the boutique gun system is really a complex thing, it's
| not like packing in a bunch of VLS containers.
| OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote:
| Even with an extremely low resolution radar hit they are
| very identifiable.
|
| Most naval vessels move in groups/squadrons. Carriers
| basically always travel with a "carrier strike group"/CSG
| of a dozen other ships and destroyers often travel in
| "destroyer squadrons"/DESRONs. So any time you see a
| cluster of hits, just by the relative responses of each
| hit you can narrow down and guess the entire CSG/DESRON
| in one go and then work out which responses map to which
| ship in the CSG/DESRON once you have a good idea of which
| group you are looking at.
|
| This is especially true because ships even within the
| same class have varying ages, different block numbers,
| and differing retrofits. So each one has a unique
| signature to it.
|
| But also if you aren't completely certain you can always
| come back with a second high resolution pass and then
| it's trivial to identify each ship just visually.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Granted, but how does satellite radar actually see ships
| at all? How do the ships not blend into the ocean (the
| relative difference between the distances between
| ship<->satellite and ocean<->satellite is minescule)?
|
| EDIT: the sibling comment already provided a high quality
| answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47458766
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| > I would think
|
| Just do a youtube search and you'll find plenty of
| talking head explainer videos. Ignore the talking head
| and just look at the imagery and data they share.
| nradov wrote:
| There might be some secret technology that we're unaware of
| but as far as we know magnetometers can only be used to
| detect underwater targets at very short ranges. I highly
| doubt that they're used on military reconnaissance
| satellites.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Subs produce a surface level displacement wake that can
| be detected by SAR.
| cbsks wrote:
| I really don't want to work for the defense industry, but I
| have to admit that they do have very fun problems to solve.
| You know there are people at NRO who are dedicated to ship
| tracking via satellite. I assume they can easily track ships
| without cloud cover, but how do they do it when it's cloudy?
| Heat signatures? Synthetic Aperture Radar? Wake detection?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I'd be mildly surprised if they not using SAR for this all
| the time, not only during cloud cover. The Soviet Union was
| using radar satellites (the RORSATs) to track carriers
| decades ago.
| mapt wrote:
| Neither SAR nor high resolution optical sensing are
| trivial at panopticon scale.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GTpBMPjjFc is a good
| overview of what's up there so far, and what's coming as
| they really try to scale the technology.
|
| Bandwidth and processing are substantial bottlenecks with
| SAR; Only targeted and stationary applications have been
| broadly useful so far, and more focus has been put on
| planes than satellites for this. SAR is not as simple as
| taking a static image with a fixed resolution, your
| sensing window has got a target velocity and distance in
| mind and the antenna and processing needs to be tuned for
| that.
|
| I would think that medium and high orbit optical tracking
| (daytime, cloudless sky) is probably used, because with
| video you can reasonably track subpixel targets if
| they're high contrast, without a lot of data transmission
| requirements.
| Sanzig wrote:
| > Bandwidth and processing are substantial bottlenecks
| with SAR; Only targeted and stationary applications have
| been broadly useful so far, and more focus has been put
| on planes than satellites for this.
|
| I'm not sure why you assume this, this is factually
| incorrect. Satellite based SAR has been successfully used
| for civilian ship detection applications (traffic
| management, illegal fishing, smuggling detection, etc)
| for over three decades. I am sure its military use goes
| back much further.
|
| > SAR is not as simple as taking a static image with a
| fixed resolution, your sensing window has got a target
| velocity and distance in mind and the antenna and
| processing needs to be tuned for that.
|
| No? SAR satellites take thousands of SAR images of
| stationary scenes every day. It's true that object motion
| in the scene introduces artifacts, specifically
| displacement from true position - this is often called
| the "train off track" phenomenon, as a train moving at
| speed when viewed with SAR from the right angle will look
| like it's driving through the adjacent field rather than
| on the track. However, this isn't a significant problem,
| and can actually be useful in some situations (eg:
| looking at how far a ship is deflected from its wake to
| estimate its speed).
| convolvatron wrote:
| 40 years ago the USN was working on using SAR with a
| elliptical kalmann filter to detect _submarine_ wakes. I
| assume things haven't digressed since then.
| dnautics wrote:
| > You know there are people at NRO who are dedicated to
| ship tracking via satellite.
|
| I feel like there must be people at NRO whi are dedicated
| to _sub_ tracking via satellite.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| I wish defense paid better. The problems are infinitely
| more interesting than ads. And it's not like social media
| is a saint anyway.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Hmmm on the one hand murder, on the other hand ads
| tehjoker wrote:
| It would be fine if "defense" is what was meant, but they
| recently changed it back to a far more honest "department
| of war".
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| BigTech ought to renamed too. BigVice maybe?
| jlarocco wrote:
| IME here in Colorado, a lot of them pay as well, or
| better, than run of the mill tech companies. I suspect
| the AI and "FAANG" companies may pay more, but I
| personally wouldn't work for any of those. In any case,
| I'd take $160k in Colorado over $240k in California any
| day.
|
| And the problems are definitely a lot more interesting.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| ELINT and SAR.
|
| For the first one, just look at wikipedia lists of
| government says that fly as little triangular
| constellations, like Yaogan 9A, 9B, 9C on this list:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaogan
|
| Those are ELINT birds that use multilateration to spot
| emitters globally.
|
| SAR can spot wakes far, far, larger than ships using the
| same techniques as SAR measuring ground erosion, etc.
| wolfi1 wrote:
| when it's cloudy, heat signatures won't help, infrared is
| blocked by clouds
| reactordev wrote:
| This. You can search for years for a ship and never find it.
| the8472 wrote:
| Ships are giant hunks of metal and radio emitters. They light
| up on SAR satellites[0]. Sentinel-1 gets whole earth coverage
| and a revisit time of 1-3 days[1] with two active satellites.
| And that's the public stuff, if you can afford a fleet or
| even some extra fuel to steer them into interesting orbits
| you can get faster revisits.
|
| [0] https://x.com/hwtnv/status/2031326840519041114 [1] https:
| //sentiwiki.copernicus.eu/__attachments/1672913/Revisi...
| rustyhancock wrote:
| And they also don't travel alone.
|
| 5-10 ships moving at speed across the ocean. Blasting the
| skies with radar.
|
| Its as easy as anything is to find it in the ocean. And
| were pretty damn good at tracking ships at sea even small
| fishing vessels let alone a floating city.
|
| The threat model to CSGs are basically nuclear submarines
| from nations that would simply tail the group if needed.
| julosflb wrote:
| There is a french company (https://unseenlabs.com/fr/) that
| specializes in tracking ship at sea through observing their
| RF emission from space. Cool tech. I'm pretty sure their
| main clients are not all civil...
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Satellites only have to track, not find.
|
| Aircraft carriers sail from home ports and are frequently
| visible to all. The Charles de Gaulle was previously in
| Denmark for instance, then obviously everyone can also see
| you crossing the English Channel and Straight of Gibraltar.
|
| So from there it is only a matter of keeping an eye on it for
| anyone with satellites. So obviously all the "big guys" know
| where the other guys' capital ships are.
| ajross wrote:
| > it's actually very hard to find a ship, even as large as an
| aircraft carrier, in the ocean
|
| I just ran some googled numbers over my envelope, and I get
| that the Mediterranean sea (great circle distance between
| Gibraltar and Beirut is 2300mi) is about 14000x larger than
| the bow-to-stern length (858') of the carrier.
|
| That's... not that terribly difficult as an imaging problem.
| Just a very tractable number of well-resolved 12k phone
| camera images would be able to bullseye it.
|
| Obviously there are technical problems to be solved, like how
| to get the phones into the stratosphere on a regular basis
| for coverage, and the annoyance of "clouds" blocking the
| view. So it's not a DIY project.
|
| But it seems eminently doable to me. The barriers in place
| are definitely not that the "empty space is just too big".
| The globe is kinda small these days.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| And you've defined a harder problem! Once you've found it
| once it's much easier to find in the future: it can only go
| so fast, and it's constrained to stay in relatively deep
| water.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| to be fair "relatively deep water" is 99% of seas and
| oceans...
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| And "only so fast" can be north of 30 knots. The vessel
| could today be 1000km in any direction from where it was
| when you found it yesterday.
| echoangle wrote:
| Maybe stupid question but how would Iran do it? They don't have
| any ships in the area and also don't have any satellites that
| could take pictures, right?
|
| Or does getting told by Russia count?
| ronnier wrote:
| Russia and China help them.
| elif wrote:
| Look at marinetraffic.com and then try to map a course across
| the Mediterranean that won't be seen by dozens of ships. It's
| impossible.
| rtkwe wrote:
| I bet you could do it with a big enough expense account with
| Planet Labs and the compute power to process the images these
| days. Track it forwards from the last public port of call or
| *INT leak like this strava data. 3.7m accuracy seems like
| enough to do it. It's not enough to target it directly but it
| would be enough to get more capable assets into the right
| area a la the interception of Japan's ships when they
| attacked Midway.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Iran, like most countries, does not a blue water navy with
| assets in the Mediterranean sea to perform realtime
| surveillance.
| rtkwe wrote:
| They had a handful of frigates mostly but those could go
| out as far as the Med pretty easily. One of their ships
| was sunk near Sri Lanka.
| signatoremo wrote:
| It was sunk there because it attended an on-off event in
| India before that. Iran's ships don't get on regular
| trips far from home.
| rtkwe wrote:
| They don't but it shows they could.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| I mean, a personal yacht can sail around the world,
| that's not really demonstrating whether the vessel is
| useful in combat operations anywhere in the world.
| snickerbockers wrote:
| America has intelligence-sharing agreements with allied
| nations wherein our satellites are taking photos on the
| allies' behalf of things that we might not otherwise be
| interested in. I'm sure China and Russia have similar
| arrangements with their allies.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Iran does with Russia. It's been in the news a lot lately.
| I have no doubt they do with China as well.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| China is absolutely sharing intel with Iran. They cannot
| believe their luck. The US is getting itself into a
| Ukraine, draining all their advanced weapon stocks,
| delivering tons of real war data for China to work with.
|
| It's like Christmas. Real practice tracking US assets and
| wargaming against them is such a break for them.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Yes, Russia helps Iran target our troops and (likely)
| sailors.
|
| But don't you dare suggest that hanging a portrait of Putin
| in the White House is inappropriate, or a Republican might
| get mad.
| drysine wrote:
| >Yes, Russia helps Iran target our troops and (likely)
| sailors.
|
| You surely know that the US helps Ukrainian target Russian
| troops and refineries deep in Russia?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I certainly hope so, but we've pretty much hung Ukraine
| out to dry under Trump [1], just like we did the Iranian
| protesters.
|
| Unlike Russia, Ukraine evidently doesn't have any
| kompromat on Trump or the Republican Party in general.
|
| 1: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/us-military-aid-
| ukraine-...
| Joker_vD wrote:
| > I certainly hope so
|
| Then you probably should accept that proxy wars work both
| ways. And well, it's not really Iran's fault that its
| borders has crept so close to the US military bases.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Who is Iran a proxy for? Russia, as usual, has only
| benefited from Trump's actions.
|
| The one thing you _can_ say about Iran is that they were
| absolute morons not to actually build or otherwise
| acquire a nuclear arsenal. They had decades. If Pakistan
| could do it...
| rtkwe wrote:
| If they have ships in the area sure but picking it out of the
| ocean if you don't already know where it is on satellite data
| is a lot harder. Until the last decade or so satellite tracking
| of ships visually was essentially the domain of huge defense
| budgets like the US that had more continuous satellite
| coverage. It'd be interesting to see how well that could be
| done now with something like Planet and tracking it forwards in
| time from port visits or other known publicized pinpointing.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _seriously doubt there is a country on earth which lacks the
| capability to detect an aircraft carrier_
|
| They probably lack the ability to figure out which specialists
| are on board.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| If Charles de Gaulle turns off AIS, how does North Korea find
| it?
| drysine wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malligyong-1
| rtkwe wrote:
| That's in a sun synchronous orbit so would only over fly
| once a day so the task does get a lot tougher. A few days
| of bad weather and you've largely lost the ship.
| vntok wrote:
| Track not the ship itself but the planes that take off and
| land on it. Many sites will expose their paths, you'll see
| the planes circling in a pattern around "some void" - that's
| the ship.
| cwillu wrote:
| If de Gaulle is turning off AIS, it stands to reason that
| it's also turning off the transponders in the air wing.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Maybe, maybe not. When the US did their venezuela maduro
| operation they turned on adsb on f15e for whatever
| reason. And only turned it on for like a portion of the
| mission so maybe that wasn't intentional.
| vntok wrote:
| Not at all, depends on the mission. In fact you can spot
| yesterday's location of the ship right now on
| flightradar.
|
| It was patrolling ~100km below Cyprus's main southern
| city.
|
| Move the timeline to yesterday, find a non-Boeing
| military plane in that zone, enable flight traces and
| keep trying planes until you see an ovoidal pattern
| circling around "nothing"... but that nothingness moves
| over time.m; that's the ship.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| I checked - nothing but commercial air: https://globe.ads
| bexchange.com/?replay=2026-03-19-02:31&lat=...
| kergonath wrote:
| > In fact you can spot yesterday's location of the ship
| right now on flightradar.
|
| No need to go that far. Macron did press conferences in
| Cyprus and on the Charles de Gaulle. You just need a
| passing glance at the headlines of a French newspaper. Or
| any decent international news channel (granted, that's a
| bit tricky in the US).
| crote wrote:
| The US tried this with their Venezuela raid. It resulted
| in a tanker almost hitting a passenger plane _twice_ in
| two days. [0]
|
| Turning off AIS while allowing civilian traffic is
| incredibly risky, and creating a huge no-fly zone in the
| Med is politically tricky.
|
| [0]:
| https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/16/americas/venezuela-
| near-c...
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Many sites? Can you show me any De Gaulle aircraft
| currently in-flight?
| vntok wrote:
| You can find yesterday's location easily on
| flightradar24.com. Try it it will make you feel like an
| ossint sleuth or something. Look to the south of Cyprus.
|
| Now that's not realtime because I'm telling you after the
| fact. But if you were paid to do it, of course, then
| you'd spend some money on an actual account on this and
| similar services, which would get you many more filters
| and much more precise data.
| fiftyacorn wrote:
| Yeah id be more impressed if he found a submarine using strava
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Especially considering the limited jogging/biking space on a
| sub.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| How about secret bases?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-
| tracki...
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Here you go: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/videos/article/2025/01
| /13/stravale...
| thisisnotmyname wrote:
| Isn't the point that if you can identify one naval vessel by
| this means you can probably identify many?
| garyfirestorm wrote:
| We couldn't find a commercial jet (MH370). Both, while it was
| still flying in the air and after it was presumably lost in the
| ocean. They couldn't track it in the air nor can they still
| find its remains after looking for it for so long. This problem
| is not trivial.
| baq wrote:
| There's a nonzero chance military intelligence agencies of
| multiple countries know _exactly_ where that plane fell, but
| none can say anything, because that would reveal the true
| extent of their capabilities.
| abcd_f wrote:
| Just like it was with that amateur sub that imploded. It
| later surfaced the Navy heard the implosion and knew what
| it was.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Uhhh surfaced?
| dmos62 wrote:
| Made me smile. Thank you.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| They could just feed the data to some associated outside
| party with some other plausible explanation. But, there are
| only a few, maybe two countries, with the ability and
| desire to have listening stations all over the ocean, and
| neither one is particularly interested in the Indian ocean.
| loeg wrote:
| The Indian Ocean is both larger and has significantly less
| traffic than the Mediterranean. And a 777 is about 16x faster
| than a carrier.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _And a 777 is about 16x faster than a carrier._
|
| Surely that's missing a 0 or are carriers really _that_
| fast?
| marricks wrote:
| Aircraft carrier speed... 33 knots or about 35mph[1]
|
| Boeing 777 speed 554mph[2]
|
| So about 16x!
|
| [1] http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-028.php
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777
| ray__ wrote:
| Honestly pretty crazy, although that must be the max
| speed. The carrier was going about 10 mph in this case
| (per Strava).
| jmalicki wrote:
| They don't normally go that fast from what I understand.
| That is their top speed in reserve they can use for
| evasive maneuvers, they don't want to go faster than
| their support fleet or deal with the high maintenance
| running at threshold will cause.
|
| It's like when you drive your car you're not normally
| redlining it since that will kill the engine if you do it
| all the time.
| jmalicki wrote:
| Commercial airliners are sub mach1. The Charles de Gaulle
| is reported to go at least 27 knots at top speed.
|
| 27*16=432, a 777 goes 510-520 knots.
|
| So maybe more like 18-19x.
|
| For the carriers it is at least as the true top speed is
| classified.
| loeg wrote:
| 16x, 20x -- it's about the right order of magnitude.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| A commercial jet is both way smaller and faster moving than
| an aircraft carrier. I suspect this is like saying: why can't
| you see the fly in the photo, the turtle is right there!
| simlevesque wrote:
| It can also go over any part of the globe. The aircraft
| carrier is limited to non-shallow water.
| epsteingpt wrote:
| Different times. Now there are thousands of LEO satellites.
| literalAardvark wrote:
| MH370 crashed in the Pacific.
|
| Look at the globe some day from that angle and compare it to
| the Mediterranean.
| contingencies wrote:
| Err, no. The consensus and available evidence including
| washed up components seems to be that it crashed in the
| Indian Ocean, that's the (also vast) space between
| ~Australia and ~Africa, bounded in the north by Indonesia,
| the Indian subcontinent, and Arabia. It crashed somewhere
| in the eastern portion, not far from Indonesia and
| Australia. Currents then took parts as far as the
| Maldives/Sri Lanka, IIRC. The Pacific is the other
| (eastern) side of Australia, which stretches from the
| Aussie-Kiwi approach to the South Pole to Alaska, and
| Vladivostok to Tierra del Fuego.
| stavros wrote:
| Are you making the same point as the person you said
| "err, no" to, or are you correcting the inconsequential
| details while not addressing their main point?
| loeg wrote:
| No. literalAardvark's main statement, "[It] crashed in
| the Pacific," was incorrect. contingencies's comment
| corrected that.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Currents then took parts as far as the Maldives/Sri
| Lanka, IIRC
|
| Some bits ended up on a beach of the Reunion island,
| closer to Madagascar than Sri Lanka. I am not
| disagreeing, it's just that the whole story is
| fascinating. It's easy to think "well, it just crashed
| into the sea so of course some bits would show up on a
| beach" until you look at the Indian Ocean with a proper
| projection and figure the scale.
| contingencies wrote:
| Floating is a powerful physical configuration! You get
| currents plus windspeed. If you're in to this sort of
| thing, I can recommend _The Seacraft of Prehistory_ ,
| _We: The Navigators_ , and _Archaeology of the Boat_
| approximately in that order.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Nobody was looking for MH370 while it was in the air. After a
| few hours, it rapidly became a submarine, which is a type of
| craft that's well known for being hard to find. In addition
| to that, it took on its new submersible form in one of the
| most remote areas of the ocean, rather than in a small and
| very busy sea.
| kergonath wrote:
| Surprisingly, it is much easier to find a big chunk of steel
| floating on the Mediterranean, knowing where it was a couple
| of days ago, than a smaller object disintegrated in small
| pieces under the Indian Ocean. Go figure.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| That's not really the point. The issue is that a soldier almost
| certainly without a lot of thought ended up leaking information
| that he wasn't aware of leaking.
|
| And furthermore identifiable information of a particular
| individual, which people can use to for example find out what
| unit he is deployed with, which may give you information about
| what the mission is about and so on.
|
| In WW2 when transmitting morse code individual operators used
| to have what was called a 'fist', skilled listeners could
| identify and track operators by their unique signature. This
| was used during world war 2 to track where particular
| individuals and units were moved which gave people a great deal
| of information not just where but what they were up to.
|
| If you leak the Fitbit information of a guy who foreign
| intelligence has identified as being part of a unit that's
| always involved in particular operations you didn't just give
| something obvious away but potentially something very
| sensitive.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Why make it easier for them?
|
| I think people tend to lack imagination about how some piece of
| intel could be used by an adversary.
| kelnos wrote:
| Sure, but there's a big difference between using nation-state
| resources like spy satellites, and using a public API exposed
| by a fitness app.
|
| Not everyone can use spy satellites, and even if we're only
| talking about nation-states, many (most?) countries do not have
| spy satellites.
| elif wrote:
| An aircraft carrier can be seen with the naked eye from 10 meters
| above the shore for about 28 miles.
|
| So the entire Spanish coast, Moroccan coast, Algerian coast,
| mallorca, sardegna, Sicily, tunesia, the Greek isles, and who
| knows how many cruise ships, fishing vessels, and commercial
| aircraft all saw this ship.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Are you aware of a policy that allows Strava when within sight
| of shore, but bans it when under more sensitive operation?
|
| Or is this article perhaps better interpreted as an example of
| a dangerous behavior that could be happening also during those
| sensitive times (in which case, it is unlikely that French
| media would be even running a story with a map of the sensitive
| location)?
| rustyhancock wrote:
| This isn't a novel problem.
|
| Detailed maps of military and other sensitive areas have been
| created through run maps from fitness watches[0].
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-
| tracki...
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| If you can guess what shape the runner was going in, you could
| infer a lot of information from that squiggly line in the
| picture. You could determine the ship's course and speed.
| mlmonkey wrote:
| It's been a problem for nearly 2 decades.
|
| Think about it: suddenly, in the middle of the desert in
| Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria/Niger/Djibouti a bunch of people start
| using a fitness tracker every morning (and the clusters show up
| in Strava). Did some village suddenly jump on the "get fit"
| bandwagon? Or could it be a bunch of US Marines/SpecOps/etc
| people trying to keep fit.
| toss1 wrote:
| Seems we need a new digital category for Darwin Awards.
|
| This is the modern way to die of stupidity -- use your fitness
| watch app to log your miles on an online app instead of locally
| -- so reveal your operational location.
|
| The US had one of its secret bases in Afghanistan fully mapped
| for anyone to see by its residents logging their on-base runs.
|
| Now, the French aircraft carrier is pinpointed en route to a war
| zone.
|
| Yes OPSEC is hard, and they should be trained to not do this, but
| it seems to be getting ridiculous. If I were in command of such
| units, I'd certainly be calling for packet inspection and a large
| blacklist restriction of apps like that (and the research to back
| it up).
|
| Local first is not just a cute quirk of geeks, it is a serious
| requirement.
| yunnpp wrote:
| > This is the modern way to die of stupidity
|
| With how bad the human experiment generally is, I rejoice in
| the fact that our own stupidity will be our undoing. Imagine if
| we did things correctly.
| varenc wrote:
| No amount of OPSEC lectures or packet inspection is going to
| sufficiently keep the carrier's private information private.
| There's thousands of sailors on these things. When details like
| its location and readiness level actually need to be secret,
| all regular internet access should just be cut off. Radio
| silence. I assume this person had internet access to use Strava
| because the carrier isn't yet in some higher level of readiness
| and its location isn't yet considered much of a secret.
| JackSlateur wrote:
| You are correct
|
| Any system that is based on the perfection of humans is doom
| from the start ..
|
| A jammer is easy and very effective, you can even use it at
| home to piss off your neighbor, so I guess the army can do it
| too;
| SoftTalker wrote:
| How does the smart watch have any service out in the middle of
| the Med? Must be getting it from the ship, are they not
| firewalling outbound traffic?
| francisofascii wrote:
| GPS watches don't need service, they just need line of site to
| the GPS satellites. Uploading to Strava requires service, but
| that can be done any time after the activity.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| GPS tries to cover the whole globe, app uses GPS to get
| location. Ship probably has internet connection in the from of
| wifi or a cell tower with a starlink or other sattelite
| backbone link and app's traffic is encrypted so ships firewalls
| cannot easily block this
| rtkwe wrote:
| Under wartime conditions they would but rules are looser out of
| combat so sailors can use personal devices for entertainment
| etc to keep morale up.
| ck2 wrote:
| What's funny is I can imagine the sailor not understanding how
| the code works and properly setting up a "privacy zone" while at
| port to mask his location and verifying it was working while
| there
|
| then of course while at sea, it's the same ship but different
| location
|
| not like your home or workplace typically relocates itself
|
| imagine being a coder at Strava trying to figure out how to deal
| with that, it's techically not possible
|
| However it's a great marketing opportunity for Stryd footpod
| which can track distance without GPS
|
| I wonder what a moving deck at even 10mph would do to a Stryd
| though
|
| The GPS must have added 10mph? But it's all relative to the deck
| vs the sea, hmm
| mrguyorama wrote:
| As a coder at strava fixing this would not be hard at all.
|
| A global "Private mode" switch that sends zero data about
| anything at all while it is enabled. Your runs stay on device.
| All network calls are rejected. No data saved with it enabled
| will ever leave the device, full stop.
|
| Every single app in the world should have this. It should be an
| OS setting that forces network calls to fail as well as part of
| the app review process that no data generated during a private
| session can ever leave the device.
|
| They don't do that because they like your data for money.
| ck2 wrote:
| you can do that "offline" with any regular Garmin
|
| but once you start using the Strava app the point is
| socializing activity, otherwise why bother?
|
| Strava privacy zones actually work, well as long as the
| location isn't physically moving by itself, lol
|
| hope the sailor didn't get into too much trouble if it was
| innocent enough
| adolph wrote:
| Along with the Strava secret base location leak, another
| interesting one was the ship with a contraband Starlink:
| As the Independence class Littoral Combat Ship USS Manchester
| plied the waters of the West Pacific in 2023, it had a
| totally unauthorized Starlink satellite internet antenna
| secretly installed on top of the ship by its gold crew's
| chiefs. That antenna and associated WiFi network were set up
| without the knowledge of the ship's captain, according to
| a fantastic Navy Times story about this absolutely bizarre
| scheme. It presented such a huge security risk, violating
| the basic tenets of operational security and cyber hygiene,
| that it is hard to believe.
|
| https://www.twz.com/sea/the-story-of-sailors-secretly-instal...
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Cruising speed of Charles de Gaulle is 27knots which would give
| the runner a pace of around 1:10mins/km depending on direction.
| That would really screw up your Strava stats
| swarnie wrote:
| Reminds me of Fitbit using heartrate to approximately guess
| calories used.
|
| I'm told with a lengthy night on uppers can you can get your
| 24/hr burn up to the 7000-10000.
| fenykep wrote:
| I was doing support for a fitness data aggregator where a
| partner reported an issue: a user logging 15k+ steps between
| 9pm and 4am with minimal location delta. Sadly I wasn't able
| to push a "stay hydrated" notification over our system to the
| user.
| yread wrote:
| His pace was 4:38 over 7.2km and his track seems to backtrack
| at times so either the carrier was doing weird maneuvers or he
| is running faster than they are carrier.
|
| I imagine they are in no rush to get closer to Lebanon. So
| maybe they are running in circles
| nradov wrote:
| I occasionally see civilians on Strava doing the same thing,
| running laps around the deck of a cruise ship. The speeds and
| distances look ridiculous.
| nssnsjsjsjs wrote:
| 101 assumptions programmers make about running apps.
|
| 23: The ground beneath the runner's feet has stable lat/lon.
| abeppu wrote:
| So I'm actually confused that in the little image of his run in
| the article it seems he's often making absolute progress in the
| opposite direction the ship is going for part of each lap.
| Like, was the ship going unusually slowly?
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| Those LeMonde guys are pretty sharp, it was on Twitcher only
| yesterday ... https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/2034734061613129740
| francisofascii wrote:
| It would be cool if they actually wer just altering the GPS
| location data before uploading, so the location reported was
| false. GPX/TCX files are trivial to edit. "All warfare is based
| on deception"
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Many questions:
|
| I can assume Strava is GDPR compliant and would not publish this
| information without the sailors concent?
|
| Does the French military not stress in their training the dangers
| of these data disclosures?
|
| Why does the carriers network not have adequate measures against
| this sort of data exfiltration?
|
| Why is Le Monde tracking a french sailors location data?
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > I can assume Strava is GDPR compliant and would not publish
| this information without the sailors concent?
|
| Historically there was a problem where user's data was
| aggregated into a global view. But these days you'd have to
| follow the user on Strava to get this sort of track.
|
| I suspect that a journalist at Le Monde has a naval buddy on
| Strava and posted the story.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| So how did the carriers network not block Strava? I doubt the
| sailors watch was direct to satellite.
|
| And why would a Le Monde 'journalist' dox his 'buddy' and
| expose and thus endanger the ship? Anything for a click?
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > So how did the carriers network not block Strava?
|
| I'm sure someone in the tech team is getting questioned on
| this.
| loeg wrote:
| Surely the GPDR does not prevent users from consenting to
| share their data with a public audience.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| It doesn't, but the effect of gaining consent and being
| opt-in vastly reduced the data. Strava also made it (in
| 2019) so you'd need at least N samples for it to be visible
| rather than simply a single user.
| loeg wrote:
| Public sharing on Strava is opt-in for users outside of
| Europe, too. Yet many users choose to share publically.
|
| > Strava also made it (in 2019) so you'd need at least N
| samples for it to be visible
|
| Presumably you're talking about the Global Heatmap? This
| used to be updated only annually. Is it more real-time
| now?
| rozab wrote:
| All through this whole ghost fleet thing I've had this question
| as to how a large ship in the sea can possibly keep its movements
| secret. Large media organisations seem to be unable to say where
| large tankers have been if they turn their transponders off.
|
| Don't we have constellations of satellites constantly imaging the
| entire earth, both with visual and synthetic aperture radar, with
| many offering their data freely to the public? Wouldn't a large
| ship on the ocean stick out somewhat? And yet journalists seem
| lost without vesselfinder. Is this harder than I'm imagining, or
| are they just not paying the right orgs for the info?
| EGreg wrote:
| That's nothing, we also have this:
| https://github.com/BigBodyCobain/Shadowbroker
| Einenlum wrote:
| Some people here say an aircraft carrier can be seen from
| satellites so it's not a big deal. They miss a point (as I did
| too): this means you can identify individuals present on the
| carrier, so they become vulnerable to investigation and
| blackmail. Another country could threaten this individual's
| family to give some important information or worse (sabotage).
| largbae wrote:
| This is a repeating phenomenon, and probably worse on land.
| Fitness and run tracking apps also reveal troop locations and
| concentrations on land (location clusters reported by apps
| targeted at non-local-language audiences stick out like a sore
| thumb).
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| If I were china I would buy strata and offer all features free of
| charge
| qcautomation wrote:
| What's interesting here isn't that nation-states can track
| aircraft carriers - they've always been able to. It's that Le
| Monde did it with what's essentially a consumer API. The 2018
| Strava heatmap incident showed this data leaks passively; now
| we're seeing it used for active, targeted tracking by journalists
| with a story idea and some scripting. That gap closing is the
| actual news.
| ccmcarey wrote:
| AI slop
| cataflam wrote:
| Your AI powered comment is wrong. Le monde has been doing this
| for years. They have a series of articles about this. There is
| no "gap closing."
| yawpitch wrote:
| Merde!
| heyitsmedotjayb wrote:
| President Xi - my country yearns for freedom.
| nanoparticle wrote:
| About 3 years ago, a former russian submarine commander accused
| of a missile attack in Ukraine that killed 23 civilians, was shot
| and killed, apparently after his route was tracked via Strava
|
| https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/11/europe/russian-submarine-...
|
| https://gijn.org/stories/investigations-using-strava-fitness...
| llsf wrote:
| Tracking an aircraft carrier should not be difficult for any
| state (satellite images). The fact that civilians can do it too
| now is interesting.
|
| It would be another matter if that was tracking a nuclear
| submarine...
| fnord77 wrote:
| No, this is notoriously difficult. The earth is vast and a
| carrier is tiny in comparison.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Difficult 40 years ago maybe.
|
| I can't imagine with the satellite image and compute we have
| it would be difficult at all to know the real_time +- 30min
| location of any carrier by maybe the top 5-10 states, even at
| night.
| RiskScore wrote:
| I wonder if there is a way to stop these apps when they enter the
| vessel.
| Padriac wrote:
| That's the deception plan.
| todsopon wrote:
| wow amazing
| louthy wrote:
| Loose lips sinks ships. So does uncontrolled mobile phone access.
| It just doesn't rhyme as well.
| pokstad wrote:
| Seems like the phone was using some internet access point
| hosted on the ship? In which case, the French naval IT services
| should ban certain risky services to soldiers.
| dsjoerg wrote:
| it's mind boggling. personal mobile phones have potentially
| anyone's software running on them and that can connect to the
| internet means that literally anyone could be tracking and
| gathering who knows what data from your operation. it's an
| indication of the greatest unseriousness.
| dsjoerg wrote:
| the location of the ship of course is not secret. but there
| is finer grained data about the people, the devices and what
| they're doing that could be gathered. and inferences made
| from that data. i would only allow this data to leak out if i
| could somehow use it to deceive my enemy.
| igonvalue wrote:
| Tangential but related: Do these workout apps correct for the
| movement of the ship when tracking your runs? I imagine it's a
| borderline-common scenario that someone on a cruise ship goes for
| a jog on deck?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-03-20 23:00 UTC)