France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app • Hacker News Board

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#121

Post by mxfh » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

dgrin91 wrote: post #5

paxys wrote: post #2

Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.

Satellite images are not always real time. Also satellites can be affected by things like cloud cover.

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.

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#122

Post by barrucadu » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

GJim wrote: post #105

throwaway27448 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

anime?

A style of animated TV show from Japan

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#123

Post by estearum » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

SteveNuts wrote: post #118

matkoniecz wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This capability is available only to few countries on planet. Not all of them.

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?

As described above the issue would be continuous observation, not how to follow it assuming you never lose sight of it.

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#124

Post by gherkinnn » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

joe_mamba wrote: post #115

post-it wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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 th…

It is dangerous to believe a problem goes only as deep as one's understanding of it.

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#125

Post by chias » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

SteveNuts wrote: post #118

matkoniecz wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This capability is available only to few countries on planet. Not all of them.

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?

What would you track them with? Follow them with helicopters and/or boats?

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#126

Post by adolph » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

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...

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#127

Post by joe_mamba » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 5:48 PM UTC

gherkinnn wrote: post #124

joe_mamba wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 th…

It is dangerous to believe a problem goes only as deep as one's understanding of it.

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.

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#128

Post by cbsks » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

deepsun wrote: post #89

elif wrote: post #77

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.

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.

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?

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#129

Post by rtkwe » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

estearum wrote: post #123

SteveNuts wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As described above the issue would be continuous observation, not how to follow it assuming you never lose sight of it.

Commercial operations like Planet Labs currently cover most of the Earth multiple times a day.

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#130

Post by filleduchaos » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

chias wrote: post #125

SteveNuts wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What would you track them with? Follow them with helicopters and/or boats?

...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.