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

Post by mxfh » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 12:05 AM UTC

usrusr wrote: post #370

mxfh wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Heh, establishing an "opsec failure guy" on the boat with software on his Garmin that can be activated on days with special secrecy demands to translate his runs to a plausible fake location? I like that idea. It would actually fit a one-off like the Charles de Gaulle quite nicely!

Post by lazide » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 12:09 AM UTC

matusp wrote: post #345

paganel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Another interesting development is the ridiculous amount of background bluring in photos. Turns out you can find surprisingly large number of garages, warehouses, treelines, etc based on a single photo.

Post by lazide » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 12:12 AM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #365

btown wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How cheap do you think a drone which can cover a large area of ocean actually is? And not just search it - you have to get it to the sector as well.

Post by ebergen » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 12:34 AM 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.

Post by paseante » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 12:43 AM UTC

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.