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

371–380 of 571 posts

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

#371

Post by inferniac »

otikik wrote: post #351
sa46 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Grindr is for locating ships

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

#372

Post by filleduchaos »

Someone wrote: post #165
filleduchaos wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you seriously think they were referring to commercial image providers when they mentioned nation-states being able to buy images/tracking?

Yes. https://www.satellitetoday.com/imagery-and-sensing/2025/05/1... : “BlackSky CEO Brian O’Toole echoed “strong momentum” from international government customers, saying these governments want to move faster with commercial capabilities. […] Motoyuki Arai, CEO of Japanese synthetic aperture radar (SAR) company Synspective said that he sees “huge demand” from the Japan Ministry of Defense […] Speaking to commercial…

I phrased that badly, what I meant is two things in one and I mashed them together:

- do you think nation-states have the same commercial relationship with the ultimate sources of their satellite imagery as the general public? To me that makes about as much sense as thinking that Facebook won't reveal your private messages to specific governments because they won't reveal them to some third-party advertiser.

- do you think nation-states that are your opponents would be getting their services from commercial image providers that are loyal to you? The American companies you list are far from the only ones on the planet that provide satellite imagery as a service.

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

#373

Post by soleveloper »

paxys wrote: post #2

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

An intelligence satellite - which is not a super common utility nations have - will locate where the aircraft _was_ X hours ago, or at least many minutes ago. A constantly updated missile with a rather simple GPS tracker would benefit A LOT from a live location of its target.

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

#376

Post by bigfatkitten »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #293
MengerSponge wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you've defined a harder problem! Once you've found it once it's much easier to find in the future: it can only go so fast, and it's constrained to stay in relatively deep water.

to be fair "relatively deep water" is 99% of seas and oceans...

And “only so fast” can be north of 30 knots. The vessel could today be 1000km in any direction from where it was when you found it yesterday.

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

#377

Post by jmyeet »

dataflow wrote: post #352
jmyeet wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes [1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341984

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

#378

Post by pokstad »

louthy wrote: post #375

Loose lips sinks ships. So does uncontrolled mobile phone access. It just doesn’t rhyme as well.

Seems like the phone was using some internet access point hosted on the ship? In which case, the French naval IT services should ban certain risky services to soldiers.

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

#379

Post by JackSlateur »

varenc wrote: post #332
toss1 wrote: post #102

Seems we need a new digital category for Darwin Awards. This is the modern way to die of stupidity — use your fitness watch app to log your miles on an online app instead of locally — so reveal your operational location. The US had one of its secret bases in Afghanistan fully mapped for anyone to see by its residents logging their on-base runs. Now, the French aircraft carrier is pinpointed en route to a war zone. Ye…

No amount of OPSEC lectures or packet inspection is going to sufficiently keep the carrier's private information private. There's thousands of sailors on these things. When details like its location and readiness level actually need to be secret, all regular internet access should just be cut off. Radio silence. I assume this person had internet access to use Strava because the carrier isn't yet in some higher level…

You are correct

Any system that is based on the perfection of humans is doom from the start ..

A jammer is easy and very effective, you can even use it at home to piss off your neighbor, so I guess the army can do it too;

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

#380

Post by dsjoerg »

louthy wrote: post #375

Loose lips sinks ships. So does uncontrolled mobile phone access. It just doesn’t rhyme as well.

it's mind boggling. personal mobile phones have potentially anyone's software running on them and that can connect to the internet means that literally anyone could be tracking and gathering who knows what data from your operation. it's an indication of the greatest unseriousness.
Post reply on HN