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

#351

Post by otikik » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 9:19 PM UTC

sa46 wrote: post #230

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.

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 h…

They could have used grindr too for more datapoints.

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

#352

Post by dataflow » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 9:23 PM UTC

jmyeet wrote: post #278

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.

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 Dis…

Are you familiar with the latest news regarding Havana syndrome?

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

#353

Post by mrguyorama » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 9:26 PM UTC

FridayoLeary wrote: post #27

rcxdude wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the international community is demonstrating to the US that they can't drop their military support for their allies and also expect that they still help to clean up their messes.

I kind of understand that, although of course i completely disagree with their line of thinking. Iran is everyones problem and open conflict like this would have been hard to avoid down the road. Point is they had months to anticipate this latest conflict, why did they do absolutely nothing to mitigate this? Why was the UK apparently completely unprepared? Europe's economy is suffering, more then America. Why do we e…

>Ukraine isn't part of NATO, and the US has been carrying 90% of NATO since forever.

This has always been the stupidest take.

Do you know how Europe always planned to pay their part of NATO?

Blood.

Go look at war plans if things ever got hot with the soviets. Germany would be gone. The plan was always hundreds of thousands of dead Europeans while the US geared up to come save the day. America's plan for NATO was the same as it's contribution to the first two world wars: Sell all the guns, ammo, fuel, and food required to keep Europe alive while their territory was wiped clean by war.

Compare US casualties in either World War with European casualties. That was always the plan.

Europe's contribution was the graveyards they would have to plow after the war.

Complaining about some budgeting is insane. That was always just a bonus kickback.

So, exactly how things go with Ukraine. They die, we profit, maybe their country survives after, US remains basically untouched, though that part is no longer reality.

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

#354

Post by drnick1 » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 9:27 PM UTC

unselect5917 wrote: post #188

drnick1 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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&...

> 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.

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

#355

Post by dkga » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 9:29 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #348

efitz wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every damn thing needs to be “social”.

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.

Yes, all of which can be purely personal and not shared beyond the device.

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

#356

Post by dkga » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 9:33 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #2

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

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.

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

#357

Post by alexfoo » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 9:38 PM UTC

dkga wrote: post #355

embedding-shape wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, all of which can be purely personal and not shared beyond the device.

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.

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

#358

Post by XorNot » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 9:43 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #30

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.

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…

The Russians are having problems with Telegram because their own military comms don't work.

Russian units have requested fire support via telegram.

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

#359

Post by xp84 » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 9:44 PM UTC

manquer wrote: post #347

efitz wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every damn thing needs to be “social”.

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 soc…

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.

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

#360

Post by filleduchaos » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 9:46 PM UTC

OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #196

filleduchaos wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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.

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 orde…

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.