Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

lemonde.fr

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 571 posts

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

#181

Post by cwillu »

tokai wrote: post #117
sandworm101 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

Iran has their own satellites. They are also allied with Russia that has satellites and launch capabilities.

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.

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

#182

Post by jyoung8607 »

matkoniecz wrote: post #156
rtkwe wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

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)

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.

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

#184

Post by the8472 »

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.

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...

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

#185

Post by PeterStuer »

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?

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

#186

Post by alphawhisky »

altairprime wrote: post #151
paxys wrote: post #2

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

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…

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.

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

#187

Post by blitzar »

matkoniecz wrote: post #150
fxtentacle wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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)

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...

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

#188

Post by unselect5917 »

drnick1 wrote: post #132
tokai wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iran has their own satellites. They are also allied with Russia that has satellites and launch capabilities.

> Iran has their own satellites. It's probably safe to say they have been destroyed, jammed, or spoofed since the war started.

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&...

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

#189

Post by BobaFloutist »

fiftyacorn wrote: post #110
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.

Yeah id be more impressed if he found a submarine using strava

Especially considering the limited jogging/biking space on a sub.

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

#190

Post by losvedir »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #79
paganel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

In my day, playing video games and watching anime didn't imply a network connection.
Post reply on HN