361–370 of 571 posts
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.
Faking GPX tracks can be done in a text editor.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine. At one time I guessed that too, but I've heard navy people explain that it's actually pretty effective. Imagine saying 'pretty hard to hide in North America from a satellite' - it's actually not hard because the area is so large; there aren't live images of the entire area and someone needs to examine them. Oceans are an order of magnitude larger. A significant elem…
>US aircraft carrier planes have a ~500 mi effective radius without refueling; even if you see a plane, all you know is that the ship might be in a ~3,142 square mile area. pi*(500 miles)^2 = 785,400 sq. miles.
That explains the downvotes!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is important to note the Naval Gazing article is specifically talking about the difficulties of actually targeting a ship for a successful kill rather than just tracking it. It's in response to the idea that satellites plus missiles would mean carriers could be instantly destroyed in a first round of hostilities with a sufficiently prepared opponent. Tracking is a lot easier to do than getting data fresh and preci…
It also seems worth considering that the article's view that "spending a lot of time searching for the carrier is a good way to get killed by defending fighters" is a distinctly pre-drone-ubiquity assumption. Can a carrier group's point defense weapons and fighters reliably counter a swarm of hundreds of cheap drones, flying lower than cloud cover, that are programmed to look for carriers over a wide area, confirm th…
And not just search it - you have to get it to the sector as well.
Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not every damn thing needs to be “social”.
I have the family exercise group on mute, lol
Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.
I'd guess it also risks exposing a specific account as a crew member, making them trackable back on shore; particularly if you're uploading the same routes
Finding people who serve on carriers shouldn't be difficult. That kind of information can be plastered anywhere over FB or similar. Many of their friends will also be active in similar roles.
Then find associated Strava accounts. Find more friends that way.
The information you can gather is useful on many fronts. Someone does a few runs a week on shore and then suddenly stops? Could be injury, could be that carrier has sailed. Have many of their "friends" who also serve there also stopped logging things on dry land? Do any of them accidentally log a run out in the open ocean? This kind of patchy unreliable information is the mainstay for old-school style espionage.
Strava Labs beta "Flybys" site used to be a great source for stalkers. You could upload a GPS track (which can easily be faked in terms of both location and timestamps) and see who was running/riding/etc nearby around that same time. The outcry was enough that it was switched to being opt-in (in 2020 I think) but for a while all of the data was laid bare for people to trawl and misuse.
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 rev…
but once you start using the Strava app the point is socializing activity, otherwise why bother?
Strava privacy zones actually work, well as long as the location isn't physically moving by itself, lol
hope the sailor didn't get into too much trouble if it was innocent enough
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.