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We couldn’t find a commercial jet (MH370). Both, while it was still flying in the air and after it was presumably lost in the ocean. They couldn’t track it in the air nor can they still find its remains after looking for it for so long. This problem is not trivial.

Mediterranean maybe (although I'm not sure), but it's actually very hard to find a ship, even as large as an aircraft carrier, in the ocean. The empty space is just too big. Satellites have hard time taking pictures of every square mile of a sea to find any ship, yet alone the one you need.

Yeah id be more impressed if he found a submarine using strava

Isn’t the point that if you can identify one naval vessel by this means you can probably identify many?

If they have ships in the area sure but picking it out of the ocean if you don't already know where it is on satellite data is a lot harder. Until the last decade or so satellite tracking of ships visually was essentially the domain of huge defense budgets like the US that had more continuous satellite coverage. It'd be interesting to see how well that could be done now with something like Planet and tracking it forwards in time from port visits or other known publicized pinpointing.

Maybe stupid question but how would Iran do it? They don’t have any ships in the area and also don’t have any satellites that could take pictures, right?

Or does getting told by Russia count?

> seriously doubt there is a country on earth which lacks the capability to detect an aircraft carrier

They probably lack the ability to figure out which specialists are on board.

If Charles de Gaulle turns off AIS, how does North Korea find it?

Are you aware of a policy that allows Strava when within sight of shore, but bans it when under more sensitive operation?

Or is this article perhaps better interpreted as an example of a dangerous behavior that could be happening also during those sensitive times (in which case, it is unlikely that French media would be even running a story with a map of the sensitive location)?

If you can guess what shape the runner was going in, you could infer a lot of information from that squiggly line in the picture. You could determine the ship's course and speed.

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.

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 headquarters is not for the weak or fainthearted.

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 are still some behaviors left to correct.

I would have thought so too but Naval Gazing has a short series [0] on why it's not as dire as one might think. An aircraft carrier's location being "secret" in this case is just one layer of the survivability onion [1] anyhow. (Caveat that as someone who takes a casual interest in this, I can't vouch for accurate this is at all.)

[0] https://www.navalgazing.net/Carrier-Doom-Part-1

[1] https://www.goonhammer.com/star-wars-armada-naval-academy-wa...

It's pretty hard to hide it from anything. Its surface is ~17000 m² (a tennis court is ~260 m²), and is 75 m high (~ 25 floors building - probably half of it under water, but still). And that's a mid-sized carrier according to Wikipedia.

It's not built for hiding at all, that's what submarines are for (and that's where our nukes are).

If I had to guess, which I do, I'd say that it's not a big deal that an adversary capable of threatening an aircraft carrier knows where it generally is. What is a big deal is knowing precisely where it is when an undetected projectile needs pinpoint accuracy moments before blowing a big hole in it.

It’s like trying to find someone you see in a street view image from a maps provider. The data will always be at least an hour old and that’s a hundred times as long as it takes for the person to be impossibly labor-intensive to find. Carriers are easier to find once you’re on the ocean in close proximity than someone in a city is, but then so are you — and the carrier has armed warplanes whose job is to prevent you from being within observational distance of the carrier in realtime.

It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work. Do they drop a buoy with a giant inflating stop sign on it? Fly Tholian-webs perpendicular to the sailing path?

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

Le Monde making use of what's actually available to them in real time—is the story here.

Satellite images are not always real time. Also satellites can be affected by things like cloud cover.

No need to make it easier though

True, but think about the reverse: being able to flag a strava user as being part of the french navy can be valuable too

Many of the threats to a carrier aren’t nation states with a constellation of satellites.

> 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 element of security for naval ships is hiding in the ocean. 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. And remember that to target them, you need a precise target and the ships tend to be moving.

With ML image recognition at least some of that security is lost. Also, the Mediterranean is smaller than the oceans, but the precision issue applies. And we might guess that countries keep critical areas under constant surveillance - e.g., I doubt anything sails near the Taiwan Strait without many countries having a live picture.

>> Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.

Clouds. (Radar sats can see through clouds but can also be jammed.)

But even on a clear day, most of the people looking to target a carrier these days (Iran/hamas etc) don't have their own satellites. But a real-time GPS position accurate to few meters? That could be tactically useful to anyone with a drone.

An active fitness tracker might also give away the ship's readiness state, under the assumption that people aren't going to be doing much jogging while at battle stations.

>Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret?

Precise location, yes. At least in the US Navy this is an important part of the carrier's protection. (Having destroyers between the carrier and potential threats is another.)

Sometimes there are things that you don't want publicly known even if they're not strictly secret.

Many countries do not have ready access to satellite imagery, much less realtime satellite imagery. Iran, for example.

I occasionally see civilians on Strava doing the same thing, running laps around the deck of a cruise ship. The speeds and distances look ridiculous.

His pace was 4:38 over 7.2km and his track seems to backtrack at times so either the carrier was doing weird maneuvers or he is running faster than they are carrier.

I imagine they are in no rush to get closer to Lebanon. So maybe they are running in circles

Reminds me of Fitbit using heartrate to approximately guess calories used.

I'm told with a lengthy night on uppers can you can get your 24/hr burn up to the 7000-10000.

GPS watches don't need service, they just need line of site to the GPS satellites. Uploading to Strava requires service, but that can be done any time after the activity.

Under wartime conditions they would but rules are looser out of combat so sailors can use personal devices for entertainment etc to keep morale up.

GPS tries to cover the whole globe, app uses GPS to get location. Ship probably has internet connection in the from of wifi or a cell tower with a starlink or other sattelite backbone link and app's traffic is encrypted so ships firewalls cannot easily block this

> This is the modern way to die of stupidity

With how bad the human experiment generally is, I rejoice in the fact that our own stupidity will be our undoing. Imagine if we did things correctly.

I don't know about Strava, but my Apple Watch will detect when I'm going on a walk or a bike ride and ask if I want to track it. I just instinctively say yes. Strava might do the same and so it could just be habit for the sailor and a dumb mistake.

Maybe it was fake. Someone with a water-borne drone and Starlink could spoof it, in order to throw those pesky Iranians off the scent. Unless you were on the aircraft carrier, had satellite imagery or could physically see it, it would be hard to prove that it was a fake. Any attempt at debunking would meet fierce resistance from Strava bros.

> I can assume Strava is GDPR compliant and would not publish this information without the sailors concent?

Historically there was a problem where user's data was aggregated into a global view. But these days you'd have to follow the user on Strava to get this sort of track.

I suspect that a journalist at Le Monde has a naval buddy on Strava and posted the story.