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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.


It was FitBit and they got banned all over govt services because of it.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/08/06/...


It was also Strava, and it showed "popular running routes"

Example post https://www.reddit.com/r/running/comments/7tnzxy/stravas_hea...


Quick note that at least since WW2 there has been a technique where you know that the enemy is recording the location of something. So you add an offset to the signal they receive. Then they know where the thing is, but actually they do not. This was done with V2 missiles where the navigation system had a tendency to drift slightly one way (forget if it was north or south). British reported V2 strikes as occurring where Germany would expect them to occur if that navigation drift hadn't happened. Result Germans never fixed their navigation system.


I think the navigation system was OK, we just said the impacts were further West than they actually were so the V2s fell on East London instead


To be pedantic: I think the actual story is about V1 drones. They did not have a navigation system as such, they were just aimed in a certain direction and with the right amount of fuel to fall out of the sky over the target.

The British noticed that V1s aimed at London tended to fall a little short. This would have been to the South and East of London since that's the direction they were coming from. They reported more hits on the North West of the city, expecting correctly that Nazi spies in Britain would let the Luftwaffe know about this.

So the range was decremented further, meaning even more hits on the southern and eastern suburbs, but statistically fewer people killed and buildings destroyed as the mean moved to less populated areas.


The CdG incident is a little more serious given that about 90% of attacking a ship is figuring out where it is. Land bases don't move around and tend to be known already.


TBF a carrier group cannot be hidden from near-peer adversaries. I remember seeing a project that used CV with open data sat providers that could find smaller boats than that. (iirc they used a wake classifier, as that was the most obvious tell, even if the boat was small enough to not have enough pixels for identification).


Pretty sure they'd light up on basic yacht radar too.


There was one in Antarctica too.


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.


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”.


Perhaps not, However Gamification of fitness is huge motivation for many people to keep exercising and maintaining the rhythm which in fitness is quite important.

Such social sharing + gamification systems are no different than Github contribution streak or StackOverflow awards for streaks etc. Those streak award only benefited the platform, while awarding us fake points and badges, the fitness streak rewards and social sharing benefits the users health so arguably has a stronger case for being gamified.

We can argue all day that people should want to do fitness to be healthy, not on how they look or other people see them or their fitness, but reality is that the social component of fitness is a big part for many people be it at the gym or in an app.


Logging is one thing, syncing it to the cloud is unnecessary and shouldn’t even be the default; making any of the location data available publicly is just terrible. If you want to share an individual workout map so you can say you circumnavigated Manhattan or whatever, fine! Share that one workout with your friends! (And ideally as a freaking screenshot rather than some database) Anything else is far too risky.


Risky for what? It's just a bit of fun. Most of us aren't being pursued by stalkers or assassins.


It doesn't need to be anything nearly that dramatic as assassins, because economies of scale both lower the bar and make most attacks impersonal. Consider how odd it would be for someone in 2025 to say: "Computer security?I haven't done anything to personally offend a genius hacker."

Imagine this data going to a burglar, who has a digital dashboard of nearby one-person properties and when the owner is likely to be out, able to act with confidence they can leave before the victim could return.

Sure, sophisticated international hitmen won't have any interest in catching you in ambush... but that doesn't make you safe from a local rapist of opportunity.


What a weird comment. The type of low-end criminal who commits home burglaries aren't sophisticated enough to do that level of research.


They are. A related example is criminal gangs tageting gun owners in France after the dataleak at the sport shooting federation. This one has been well covered. There have been a few hundred targeted robberies (on old people mostly) and one or two deaths (predictably).

In Western Europe there are also foreign burglar gangs that go on sprees for a few weeks. They're well organised but don't have time to do the stalking. They use publicly available data as much as they can.


do you have any evidence to back your claim? gangs employing teams of underage burglars assisted by risk averse adults with skills for entry and targeting are a thing. everyone has a mobile phone.


They'd buy access from someone on the dark web for $5 a day.


I'd recommend reading 'Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief' -- normal dude, just decides to spend a career stealing shit for fun.


Low-end criminals fish based on data leaks all the time. More data, especially cross-referencable data, will make this ever easier.


With the new crop of agentic coding tools, you can whip up such an app in a few hours for all burglar buddies to use.


> Most of us aren't being pursued by stalkers or assassins.

Most of us, but for those that are...

However, in the world we live in today, the various LEOs are using this type of data to find people they do not like. It's getting to the point that I pine for the days of good ol' 1985 where you could just be another anonymous person in public with no tracking of your every move.


No but every damn thing seems to be that way by default, so we are expecting everybody to opt out rather than opt in most of the time


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.


For me it's both. I compare my runs on routes and segments going back years. The social part is nice to share info about trail conditions and see when my friends hit a big effort or PR.


Yes, all of which can be purely personal and not shared beyond the device.


Sure, but many people want to use Strava for more than one purpose.

a) Analysis and tracking of your own personal goals. (Some of the tools are better than the stuff available on the device itself.)

b) Sharing and socialising some other activities.

You can be careful and only allow certain activities to be public but you'll make mistakes and eventually many people will just think "whatever, I'll just default to public and remember to hide the ones I don't want to be public" and then it's even easier to make mistakes.

Defaulting to "opt-in" is all well and good until a human makes a mistake.


imho with unusually sensitive things like precise location data it could just not let you opt-in to making it all public, and make it much easier to share with a specific named friends than to share on a public directory


I really don't understand these criticisms of Strava, it has excellent privacy controls so you can share as little or as much as you want. You can already choose to share your activities with only your friends (followers). Or keep your activities private or hide the location data.


It does but my point is that your settings are applied to all activities.

Here's a few examples that might help demonstrate my point:

I used to do parkrun regularly. I had no problem sharing my Strava activities for parkrun because me doing it wasn't a secret, nor was the location secret, nor was my time secret. All of these things could be found from the parkrun website once the results had come up. John Doe was at this location at 9am and ran this route with 400 others in a time of 26 minutes or whatever.

I was also part of a cycling club that did a regular "club run" on a Sunday. 5-15 of us all doing the same route. It was good for club morale for us all to upload our rides to help show how popular it was and encourage other club members to come along. They could see that we weren't going at a silly pace and that we stopped regularly to regroup as we had riders of all abilities and speeds riding with us.

But then I also helped out with my kids running club at school, taking a bunch of 7-11 year old's on a 20 minute jog/run (depending on how quick they were) around the local area. This absolutely should not appear on Strava (public or not). The running club wasn't a secret (everyone at the school knew since they had the option of letting their kid do it) but that's a whole world of difference from having it public on Strava showing the usual start time, the various routes we used to take, where we stopped, etc. Privacy zones can help hide the start/end but that wouldn't help hide everything.

We just made sure that all of the parents who helped out knew that we shouldn't even record it with their smartwatch. I just used to create a manual entry of "Morning run" with approximate distance and time. That was good enough for my training stats.

There's no one privacy setting that handles all of this. Whatever setting you use relies on me to manually adjust the activities that don't fit that setting. The problem is that humans are fallible, so remembering to make it private or hide the location data isn't entirely reliable. You're also at the mercy of Strava (or whatever) not doing something stupid and accidentally making private data visible due to some bug, glitch or leak.


Right, requiring human intervention to share a run (other than maybe with eg a specific small circle of mutual friends) seems like it solves all those problems, other than perhaps being annoyed that you forgot to manually share a run.

But at least that's a failure you can fix once you notice, as opposed to making something public that shouldn't have been. Letting people opt in to automatically sharing runs to the public just seems like something designed to get people to share stuff without thinking about it.


You can already do that with Strava if you want to. Just make activities private by default, or don't sync it to Garmin and upload the files manually.


I'm saying something a bit different: that even letting people opt in to sharing every run they track publicly is just asking for trouble. It's setting people up for their information to be made public when they forget to turn it off or that they turned it on in the first place.

Maybe "automatically share everything to the globe" should just not be an option for sensitive data like this.


Strava has had a lot of privacy issues over the years, particularly with stuff like flybys.


> and more because of the analysis, dashboards and stuff like that

Which is weird, because if they bought a Garmin device, they already have all that built in.


Which if you've ever had a Garmin device + tried Strava, you'd realize that perhaps Strava provides additional insights on top of what Garmin provides?


Genuinely not sure what insights they provide that you don’t get out of the box from Garmin.

The social stuff is nice though.


> Genuinely not sure what insights they provide that you don’t get out of the box from Garmin.

Genuinely weird to make statements like "they already have all that built in" if you don't even know what Strava provides, don't you think?


I’ve been using both for ~7 years so I’m pretty familiar with them…


I agree with you ... but gotdamned if I don't see another unasked-for shared workout stat.

I have the family exercise group on mute, lol


Ships often have welfare networks, basically vanilla internet access for people to use to keep in touch with their families etc while deployed.


Some universities, especially in Latin America, use the term "autonomous". Is that the same thing is "free" in this context?


Yes. Absence of direct control by the government. The VU was founded for religious reasons, so the main goal was to be able to teach theology according to the particular type of protestant Christianity that the founders of the VU believed in.


RMS calls it Linux, not GNU/Linux in the second quote.


Consider what it costs to lift material to orbit. How can it possibly make sense except as a science fair project?


You mean, not very much? Everything about space-based anything is dependent in the short to medium term on Starship making mass to LEO cost about as much as air freight.

Starship, at least as a rapidly reusable second stage, may fail, rockets are hard. But you aren’t really engaging with people’s dreams if you start from “we don’t have access to the technologies that appear to represent a one to two order of magnitude cost shift”.


It's like remodeling. The drywall comes down. Do you just put up a new sheet or do you need to reframe one wall of the house?


Anyway you've already got Apostol - if it's just calculus as such get an older edition. Modern ones have extra goodies like linear algebra but have modern text book pricing (cries softly in $150/volume).


Getting an old enough edition of Apostol's "Calculus" to not include linear algebra might be a bit challenging. Linear algebra was added to both volumes in their second editions, which came out in 1967 for volume 1 and 1969 for volume 2.

The second editions are still the current edition, so no worry that you might be missing out on something if you go with used copies. If you do want new copies (maybe you can't find used copies or they are in bad shape) take a look at international editions.

A new copy of the international edition for India from a seller in India on AbeBooks is around $15 per volume plus around $19 shipping to the US. Same contents as the US edition but paperback instead of hardback, smaller pages, and rougher paper. (International editions also often replace color with grayscale but that's not relevant in this case because Apostol does not use color)).

You can also find US sellers on AbeBooks that has imported an international edition. That will be around $34 but usually with free shipping.


Indian editions sometimes have different question sets to prevent students from using them in other countries' coursework.

They also have a hologram sticker alongside a printed warning that they are not for sale or export outside of India, Nepal and a couple of other countries.


I think those restrictions apply only to retail sellers in those countries, not to purchasers or used stores.


I know where my confusion comes from.

I studied from a first edition of volume one before there was a volume two, so it wasn't marked as Vol I.

Friend dug it up from his old books, since I seemed to be quick learner.


Thanks for the info on cheaper editions, not important to me but to others in USA it might be a big help.


i bought a compilers book that was an Indian edition. The paper and print quality was so bad (like smudgy) that I could not read it and I didn’t think I was particularly picky about this. Not sure if I just got unlucky or if this is generally true?


Spivak's book is still good too.


Also if it oscillates does it oscillate at the frequency you want?


The ten dollar bill has a somewhat different color than the other currency, somewhat yellowish.


The last time a coin was dropped was the half penny in the late 1850s, when I think it was worth about 25 cents today, so there is a precedent for what you are suggesting.


CCP Grey has a nice video and discusses the precedent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5UT04p5f7U


The student-elected body is often called the Student Council.

Sometimes each grade level will have a class president.

Varies from school to school for the details.


Can't edit so I'll reply: This is in the United States.


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