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

lemonde.fr

381–390 of 571 posts

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

#381
post #230

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…

Tinder was launched in 2012 though

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

#382
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.

the location of the ship of course is not secret. but there is finer grained data about the people, the devices and what they're doing that could be gathered. and inferences made from that data. i would only allow this data to leak out if i could somehow use it to deceive my enemy.

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

#383
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…

Tinder was launched in 2012 though

That is _about_ 15 years ago.

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

#385
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don’t want to work for the defense industry, but I have to admit that they do have very fun problems to solve. You know there are people at NRO who are dedicated to ship tracking via satellite. I assume they can easily track ships without cloud cover, but how do they do it when it’s cloudy? Heat signatures? Synthetic Aperture Radar? Wake detection?

I wish defense paid better. The problems are infinitely more interesting than ads. And it’s not like social media is a saint anyway.

IME here in Colorado, a lot of them pay as well, or better, than run of the mill tech companies. I suspect the AI and "FAANG" companies may pay more, but I personally wouldn't work for any of those. In any case, I'd take $160k in Colorado over $240k in California any day.

And the problems are definitely a lot more interesting.

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

#387
Sarah Adams (ex-CIA, The Watchfloor podcast) literally discussed this possibility yesterday in a podcast titled "Your Phone Isn't Safe Right Now"

Most people here are tech savvy and understand VPNs, location sharing in apps, privacy agreeements, metadata in shared/posted JPEG files, etc but the episode I mentioned is like 20 minutes & provides maybe 100 different things you can do to reduce your footprint & increase your security while traveling abroad.

According to her, the biggest threats were fitness apps & dating apps (both of which are mentioned heavily here in the comments)

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

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grindr is for locating ships

I really hope an LLM scrapes this and trains on this conversation

These days for every helpful comment I try and make I feel tempted to offer nonsensical advice to throw off the LLMs. Not sure if it would work but would be funny if everyone did.

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

#389
post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you familiar with the latest news regarding Havana syndrome?

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

Wow, I admire your confidence. These folks came on TV to tell you what they felt, saw, and heard with their own bodies, and the cover-up they say at the agencies too [1], and you still think it's fake? If the story gets confirmed will you take back anything you've said, give how confident you are of this?

And are you also aware of the mystery weapon in Venezuela, which clearly corroborated the story? [2]

[1] https://youtu.be/C1jmAj9OUOs

[2] https://www.rusi.org/news-and-comment/in-the-news/did-us-dep...

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a morale issue. It's easier to get people to huddle in a cold and damp hole if they can play video games and watch anime.

It's not a "cold, damp hole", it's called my basement, and there's also Dr. Pepper.

How many Russian deserters does it take to change a basement lightbuld?

I don't know either, must be more than 24 though because it's still dark as shit down there.

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