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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

#321

Post by sandworm101 »

jjwiseman wrote: post #282
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…

Jamming is a good way to make sure everyone knows exactly where you are.

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...

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

#322

Post by wvbdmp »

JJMcJ wrote: post #108
jandrewrogers wrote: post #23

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 naïveté, 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.

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.

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.

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

#323

Post by loeg »

jmalicki wrote: post #264
TeMPOraL wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And a 777 is about 16x faster than a carrier. Surely that's missing a 0 or are carriers really that fast?

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.

16x, 20x -- it's about the right order of magnitude.

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

#324

Post by loeg »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #302
loeg wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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

#325

Post by embedding-shape »

wvbdmp wrote: post #322
JJMcJ wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#326

Post by fnord77 »

llsf wrote: post #320

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...

No, this is notoriously difficult. The earth is vast and a carrier is tiny in comparison.

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

#327

Post by saxonww »

paxys wrote: post #2

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

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.

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

#328

Post by mrguyorama »

ck2 wrote: post #120

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…

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.

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

#329

Post by robotresearcher »

torginus wrote: post #215
chistev wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the ocean is very very huge to find it still.

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.

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.

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