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

lemonde.fr

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

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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?

> So how did the carriers network not block Strava?

I'm sure someone in the tech team is getting questioned on this.

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

#302
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Surely the GPDR does not prevent users from consenting to share their data with a public audience.

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.

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

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm on the one hand murder, on the other hand ads

It would be fine if "defense" is what was meant, but they recently changed it back to a far more honest "department of war".

BigTech ought to renamed too. BigVice maybe?

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

#304
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/_…

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.

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

#305
post #221
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If de Gaulle is turning off AIS, it stands to reason that it's also turning off the transponders in the air wing.

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.

> 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).

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

#306
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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.

Subs produce a surface level displacement wake that can be detected by SAR.

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

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Iran does with Russia. It's been in the news a lot lately. I have no doubt they do with China as well.

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.

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

#308
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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…

> 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.

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

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> Currents then took parts as far as the Maldives/Sri Lanka, IIRC Some bits ended up on a beach of the Réunion 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.

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.
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