Sure, but the gif doesn’t show 50 knots. The gif doesn’t show any speed actually, so I really don’t know where the 50 number comes from. But on the tracker the speed was 8.1 knots. Fast for a tanker, but totally believable.

The gif shows no data (dimmed icon) from 08:49 UTC to 11:10 UTC so I had my maths wrong and it’s 2 hours 21 minutes, apologies. Still a lot more than 30 minutes. The AIS data also generally comes in less frequently than every minute so there’s some unreliability there.

As I said, according to the current data the ship definitely kept going back up towards the Strait since I posted, so what’s more likely, it kept going on its current course and spoofed its AIS for nearly 12 hours, or that it turned around?

My source is marinetraffic.com. Other AIS trackers also corroborate it.

From the sounds of it the OP and most other articles are based on similar armchair research looking at trackers so I think it’s about as reliable as we’re going to get.

I don’t know where you’re getting any of that from. It was travelling at 8 knots before and after the turnaround. The bit in the animation where it slows and drifts almost due south is actually marinetraffic not having AIS data for that period so it just interpolates between the two known positions. Maybe I should have made that clearer.

That turnaround period is also close to 3.5 (edit: 2.5) hours, not 30 minutes.

According to the same data the ship is now close to the Strait of Hormuz that it passed through yesterday; it seems pretty clear it did not get where it wanted to go.

Everyone is reporting on these ships making it through the strait which is still under Iranian control. Few seem to mention the part in the Gulf of Oman where the US is actually implementing its blockade. The poster child, Rich Starry, mentioned in the article, did this a few hours after clearing the strait, still far from the Arabian Sea:

That sure doesn’t look like a ship breaching a blockade without incident.

It’s too early to say how this will play out on a larger scale but for these specific ships a lot of reporting is really fucking misleading at the moment.

Thanks! Looks like that 180’s showing on my noob free tier now too. Pretty much the same thing Elpis did; through the strait itself no problems but then a sudden 180 in the Gulf right about the same place as Starry. Elpis came to a standstill almost immediately after but Starry is allegedly still doing 8.1 kn, strange.

IMO 9773301

Dunno about war, but the CENTCOM release is pretty clear-cut:

The blockade will be enforced impartially against vessels of all nations entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas

Many people seem to have this confused.

• The US blockade is on (as currently implemented) the Gulf of Oman, not the Strait of Hormuz.
• As far as I know, one tanker, Elpis, has transited the Strait, and then stopped – I have to assume was stopped, by somebody – a short way into the Gulf.
• Rich Starry has not yet passed the Gulf. It has not even reached the point where Elpis stopped, but it’s on track to do so pretty soon.
• Elpis departed an Iranian port. This directly defies the stated US blockade.
• Rich Starry departed the UAE, which does not actually violate the stated US blockade (which explicitly allows ships transiting “to and from non-Iranian ports”).
• Rich Starry is under US sanctions due to previously being determined as aiding Iran. It is also Chinese-owned. Unclear how these factors will play into things.

So in summary Rich Starry hasn’t passed the US blockade yet, and even if it does that says nothing about the effectiveness of the blockade, because by the blockade’s wording it should be allowed through anyway.

Source https://xcancel.com/DropSiteNews/status/2043921010311741860, CENTCOM, and AIS data.

Edit 10:30 UTC: https://www.marinetraffic.com/ shows no AIS updates from Starry in the last 2 hours, seems like it stopped sending data in a similar area to Elpis. AIS didn’t actually show the ship coming to a stop, just a lack of updates. The last update had it keeping course at a relatively fast 8.1 knots. I read that there may be GPS jamming and other stuff going on in the area, so not sure what this really means.

Edit 2 12:00 UTC: nope, they are outttta there. I’m guessing they’re not going to China today.

“[The] bad news is that we have not reached an agreement, and I think that’s bad news for Iran, much more than that, it’s bad news for the United States of America.”

(emphasis mine)

This is a pretty significant misquote. The actual quote is[1]:

The bad news is that we have not reached an agreement, and I think that’s bad news for Iran much more than it is bad news for the United States of America

With completely the opposite meaning.

Not convinced?

Below, what Perplexity Pro had to say.

If you think your own blog post is going to be less compelling than a screenshot of a fucking chatbot, why are you writing anything at all? This is pitiful.

I think this comment is based on an extremely optimistic – bordering on fantastical – outlook.

The complexity of dealing with such large amounts of information will keep increasing forever as the amount of information also grows

The capacity and capability to handle the data will grow too.

AI struggles with conflicting information and mistakes, which happen a lot especially when humans are involved, so eventually you will have lots of “garbage in garbage out” issues causing problems

This is what data analysis is though. Extracting patterns from noisy data. Ignoring outliers. I don’t think anybody is suggesting they’ll just dump a CSV of your web history into ChatGPT and ask it if you’re probably going to a protest this weekend (although does it sound so far fetched that that might actually work?), it’ll be used in combination with existing and constantly improving data mining techniques.

The data one might be able to track will continuously be challenged or removed on legal/compliance bases over time, reducing its availability

Are you implying data protection laws will not only not be inexorably eroded year upon year by increasingly surveillance-hungry governments, but will actually get a significantly better than their current milquetoast state? I’ve gotta say, that’s seeming increasingly unlikely to me; right now we’re seeing mandatory identity verification being legislated on more and more things by more and more governments.

Yes the NSA might want our chatbot logs, but after enough people realize they might be/are getting them, people will stop feeding it as much, or introduce noise on purpose

This has to be a sarcastic reference to Snowden, right? The thing where the entire world found out about the how NSA absolutely is – not “might be” – monitoring your internet and conversation logs, and basically nobody did a fucking thing to change? That was 12 years ago.

And the sheer volume of information relative to the computing power necessary to process everything will also become a problem if they keep trying to process every single thing.

Good thing they’re not doing anything crazy to get more computing power, like buying up practically the entire global supply of RAM or building data centres at an exponentially increasing rate.

What? They’re just computer programs. Almost all computers have high quality entropy sources that can generate truly random numbers. LLMs’ whole thing is basically turning sequences of random numbers into sequences of less random stuff that makes sense. They have a built-in dial for nondeterminism, and it’s almost never at zero.

I feel like I’m missing your meaning because the literal interpretation is nonsense.

Maybe I’m just tired but this reads like a fucking riddle.

They want to block “app stores” that don’t block “AI apps” that don’t block “harmful content” from kids?

(And of course it’s left lovely and murky what any of those terms actually mean.)

Is it really not as easy for them as saying “hey btw don’t use this distro if you’re in California” and fully expecting nobody to comply? I’m not sure if Ubuntu is based in Cali in which case I can see it being more difficult.

Also this “age bracket” thing seems to have an obvious flaw in that any application that’s running semi-regularly can just poll the API every day and find out the user’s DOB by checking when they roll into the next bracket. It’s actually leaking more data about children than about adults in that case. Brilliant.

Thanks, honestly I had not actually read the bill before coming here to shitpost, and it seems like yeah it’s more well-intentioned than people are giving it credit for.

I still have serious reservations about the broadness, vagueness, and premise that mandatory age signals are a good idea at all – it’s a lateral move at best; weakly attempting to kerb the most overtly predatory parts of the whole “age verification” movement, without opposing the idea itself.

But you’re right, it’s not the blatant data-vacuuming law that I think some people imagine it to be.

My first answer is “WTF is RTK?”; my answer after consulting Wikipedia is “no, they’re separate things”.

RTK doesn’t sound like it broadcasts any data out but I barely understood what I just read. The Wikipedia coverage on this whole topic seems rather poor quality, I don’t think it’s just because I’m dumb.

I don’t but I roleplayed for the bit.

If it weren’t completely, stupidly unenforceable, I might still worry about this idea being exported to the rest of the world though.

What I want to know is: in my own haphazard note-to-self text file cribbed from ArchWiki, is it before or after the disk partitioning step that I’m supposed to add an instruction to “email anthraxx my date of birth”?

Or better yet: at what point in the development of my ad hoc tasking system for an ESP32 do I need to stop and go “shit, guess I’d better add a keypad so 12 year olds can self-report their age and safely be prevented from using the ‘romance’ setting on this lightbulb”?

It’s not as clear-cut as most people here are saying.

In short, GPS itself is just listening to satellites, and nothing is leaked that way, but most modern phones use “Assisted GPS” of some sort. The most common (I believe) AGPS is SUPL, which seems to be used by most phones. This involves sending your approximate location to an Internet server, which returns satellite data based on that approximate location.

To nobody’s surprise, in Android this is a Google server. I’m pretty sure most Android distros don’t give you any control over when it’s used, or which servers it uses. Anecdotally, my phone without Google Play services has a horrible time obtaining a GPS fix, so I suspect without GPlay it’s only using raw GPS, but I’ve not bothered to actually dig into it.

As I understand it, SUPL means even if you’re in aeroplane mode, if you have an Internet connection over WiFi you might still be leaking (approximate) location data when using GPS.

I learned about this from this excellent series of blog posts, which is a very thorough comparison of various Android ROMs’ privacy. It has a background section (search for “Assisted GPS”) in each of the ROM-specific posts which explains it better than I can.