Please, delete all new places since the start of war 23th of February | Hacker News Reader

Please, delete all new places since the start of war 23th of February

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342 pointsukrwantpiece324 comments

http://web.archive.org/web/20220301173337/https://support.go...

That's why some countries have weird regulations about maps. South Korea does not allow exporting vector maps, so Google Maps rendering is vector based everywhere except in a region surrounding South Korea [1]. China applies a (not so) secret pseudorandom offset to all geographic coordinates in online maps, frequently resulting in mismatches between systems that apply corrections and those that don't. It seems silly during peacetime but when there's an actual war, you can see why people might want that kind of thing.

And militaries all over the globe do use Google Maps extensively, if not by policy then just by soldiers doing their own thing. Wrong borders in Google Maps have nearly led to international incidents when soldiers ended up on the wrong side of a border. And then there are the disputed borders that Google is forced to display differently in different countries. There is no globally accepted map and as a result the map Google shows you changes depending on where you're located.

[1] Actually I am out of date, it looks like the South Korea maps are vector based now. Maybe the law changed. It definitely used to be the case.

- "Wrong borders in Google Maps have nearly led to international incidents when soldiers ended up on the wrong side of a border"

Probably referring to this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1873285 ("Nicaragua Raids Costa Rica, Blames Google Maps")

> Actually I am out of date, it looks like the South Korea maps are vector based now. Maybe the law changed. It definitely used to be the case.

The South Korean mapping law allows for the domestic service (still subject to slight censorship), but Google didn't want to put any servers other than edge servers to South Korea so as a sort of protest it essentially froze the map for South Korea from November 2016 to December 2021, when Google finally gave up and established a new domestic data center.

Edit: as joatmon-snoo [1] pointed out, there were no new Google data center as opposed to new GCP regions in SK. I mistook my sources due to my dodgy reading. That said, I now have an even stronger suspicion; see my reply to joatmon-snoo for details.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521352

The law as I recall it a decade ago was a bit more specific: you could only store and process the data in South Korea. Thus, the whole planet's tiles were rendered in production on Borg, except for SK, whose tiles had to be rendered on a workstation under somebody's desk in the Seoul office. That meant no fancy mapreduces, let alone any rendering on the fly like the Maps API allows (selecting what details to show on the map, their look, etc.). Then, IIRC, the rendered bitmap tiles had to be pushed from the workstation to production. Vector maps, at the time, would have been heresy. Google asked for years to have the laws changed. Korean companies weren't affected, at least until they moved their own rendering to e.g. a cloud provider outside the country.

> Google asked for years to have the laws changed.

The laws Google asked for changes were not limited to the mapping laws but any law to require domestic data centers, which might trigger the domestic tax issue at any moment. Your explanation that Borg couldn't handle domestic clusters doesn't clearly explain that Google eventually established SK data centers and started supporting vector maps anyway---and given that South Korea is not the only country with such requests (e.g. EU), not being able to cope with such laws is just a Google's fault.

> doesn't clearly explain that Google eventually established SK data centers and started supporting vector maps anyway

Google data centers != Google cloud data centers

The two are logistically very different and consequently that means the types of workloads they host are also different. The latter is really for GCP usage only (both customers and Google-internal cloud infra necessary to host GCP). Compare https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/ with https://cloud.google.com/about/locations.

Oh, you are right. I'm aware of the difference, but I didn't realize that there were no new data centers as opposed to new GCP regions due to my dodgy reading. But then there are two possible scenarios:

1. SK vector maps were generated using domestic servers (but no Borg) as SK govt demanded.

2. Google "secretly" exported SK maps and generated vector maps using Borg anyway.

And both scenarios are problematic. The former would mean that the GP's claim that vector map generation requires Borg is not true or at least exaggerated (this scenario was what I had in mind when reading my sources, hence no verification). The latter would mean that... well, Google is in direct violation of SK law and not even trying to hide that.

I don't know the state of the Borg fleet or how Google Maps serves vector maps for SK today. That's why I said upfront that I was talking about the state a decade ago. Back then, what I heard was very specific, about restrictions on map source data. Not tiles, not realtime traffic, not Gmail, not account data, not search logs, not ads, etc. Even then, it was already an old issue.

Tax reasons might have arisen since, but maybe we're talking about different laws? I don't know. Do you?

The fact that there's no mention of Seoul at "Discover our data center locations" https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/ tells me that its GCP region is most likely rented space in someone else's buildings and there are no full-blown Borg clusters with their usual tenants. Choosing where to build was always a complex process. There have been cases where announcements were made and land was bought, but nothing ever got built.

My explanation that.. "Borg couldn't handle domestic clusters"? What does that even mean? You could probably bring up a toy single-master Borg cell on a workstation with the right 283 command line flags and a toy Chubby cluster, but that still won't give you any map tiles.

Back in the days before incremental map updates, the whole globe's data came from a pipeline of pipelines and mapreduces, stitched together by a number of teams (the project's codename started with O). It was tracked with advanced technology (Google sheets) by PMs that had a taste for suffering. The latency was measured in weeks and months. If you missed the build, your data or code changes would take who knows how long to go live. I think that sometimes builds might have been abandoned altogether. These were the days when mobile Maps, if they existed at all, lagged desktop tiles by weeks or months (there wasn't one set only...). Same with navigation. The amount of data has only increased since, but there's obviously a much more advanced process at work nowadays. I don't know what they changed or how.

Anyway, back then, to build the SK tiles with the same tools you would have needed Borg, yes, but also Bigtable, GFS and a wide assortment of ancillary services. How are they doing it now? Maybe they finally got a license. Maybe they got a sufficiently limited subset of the full feed. Maybe they did a major rewrite of the code, pipelines and even binaries to make it feasible for that chunk of the planet to be handled by a bunch of bare Linux machines on GCP or AWS in South Korea. You might be able to deduce something by comparing updates there vs the rest of the world, but that takes time and dedication.

We ended up using Open Street Maps for SK data over Google. It worked very well.

> And militaries all over the globe do use Google Maps extensively

ISIS and the other Islamist factions in the Syrian Civil War were also using it extensively when fighting the Syrian Government forces and when planning their suicide attacks, but because Assad was the bad guy no Google action was taken (like restricting GMaps access in the area).

When I think of the rank hypocrisy that is used to justify decisions like these, it makes me glad that I don't work on these teams.

>Wrong borders in Google Maps have nearly led to international incidents when soldiers ended up on the wrong side of a border.

Speaking of, if you go click on the Ukraine label right now on Google Maps, you won't get the red outline showing their border. Click on a neighboring country label for a comparison.

Belarus: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Belarus/@53.696013,25.7358...

Ukraine: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ukraine/@48.2486332,26.694...

If you go to the code, you will see it being deliberately set by data coming through AJAX.

Whomever did this...

It's the same in all countries with not-clear borders. Applies to eg Georgia, Serbia/Kosovo and India/Pakistan too.

Interesting, even Spain seems to not get a red outline (maybe because of Catalonia?)

It could be, but searching for Catalonia in Google maps explicitly indicates it's a part of Spain.

https://www.google.se/maps?q=catalunya

Another explanation would be the dispute with Morocco about Perejil Island:

https://www.google.se/maps?q=isla+perejil

Or even the dispute regarding Gibraltar with Britain.

Or the disputed border with Portugal at Olivença/Olivenza.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivenza

Just for curiosity: did you mean that soldiers do have smartphones with them while on duty? If I were an officer I never accept personal proprietary devices with computing and communication abilities, it's simply absurd and crazy imagining soldiers on duty tracked by private companies just because they have a macro-spay in their pocket...

There have been many cases of soldiers being tracked because of phones they were carrying. There was the widely publicized case of Strava revealing where some soldiers were stationed, and recently in Ukraine people noticed that Google Maps was showing "traffic jams" where Russian convoys were massing.

Militaries should probably prohibit personal smartphones completely. But I imagine such a prohibition would be a pretty big hit to morale and would also be very difficult to enforce, especially for non-combat areas where soldiers might not see the point.

We could also look into legislation where we finally make companies implement an easy private mode, where any data sharing is not permitted. Mobile apps behave far worse than desktop apps, although now that people notice they get away with it, the phenomenon also spreads on other systems.

IIRC they were explicitly banned from Iraq after that website emerged where soldiers were competing with the most gory and cruel pictures of casualties, and which disapeared when the more manageable abu graib story stole the show (anyone remember that website btw?)

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2004-05-23/rumsfeld-bans-camera-...

I know someone that works in federal systems in a secure area, and you cannot take anything into the secure facility other than your physical being and the clothes you are wearing. Not even a wind up Timex watch. They have lockers outside the secure area where you deposit all your personal effects before entering the secured area. Everything goes into the locker. So it is a little odd that deployed troops are allowed to carry connected devices, other than military issued.

In the case of China, are you sure the offset is due to regulation and not simply some mismatch of geodetic datum?

It has been in existence for years now. Tested with multiple devices. It looks deliberate. Foreign apps are affected.

Amap works as expected.

Refer to my other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30523751

Thanks

It's well known, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...

Right, if you look under the "GPS shift problem" section, it does mention that it is due to the difference between the GCJ-02 and WGS-84 datums.

So it is not like the regulations are saying "you must shift the coordinates by this amount", which would be stupid. It's just that foreign map publishers have not obtained the license to use the correct datum for Mainland China, so they make do with another one.

The "correct datum" is actually WGS-84 but deliberately obfuscated with a nonlinear transform. Yes, the regulations are explicitly saying "you must shift the coordinates by this amount".

Wikipedia: "GCJ-02 (colloquially Mars Coordinates, officially Chinese: 地形图非线性保密处理算法; lit. 'Topographic map non-linear confidentiality algorithm') is a geodetic datum formulated by the Chinese State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping and based on WGS-84. It uses an obfuscation algorithm which adds apparently random offsets to both the latitude and longitude, with the alleged goal of improving national security."

Ah, ok. I missed that section. Now things start to make sense.

What I don't completely understand, for two reasons, is why foreign map publishers would allow this pseudorandom offset to exist on their mapping apps:

1. The obfuscation algorithm has basically been cracked.

2. I don't think the Chinese gov can do much about foreign companies, except maybe by proxy, by pressuring the national trade liaisons or some such.

Most multinational corporations have significant operations in China. Tech companies are essentially forced to unless they want to be locked out of the hardware side of the business.

Google famously left China, but still has offices there. It's impossible to ignore China if you want to develop the OS that runs on so many phones manufactured there (though I believe Google's own phones are built elsewhere). Apple obviously is completely reliant on China almost to a crazy degree. Microsoft caved to China on censorship to keep Bing from being blocked, they never left the way Google did. Facebook doesn't cooperate with China at all in their software products which are all banned, but they're increasingly getting into hardware and can't manufacture their hardware products without China.

It will be hard to delete all of these points if Google doesn't cooperate. Instead, Ukrainians should massively add thousands of fake and duplicate points. Got a cousin in the countryside who needs their field ploughed? Call in a Russian artillery strike by tagging it as a military camp on Google Maps.

Or tag the Russian convoys and bases as Ukrainian and see if the Russians shoot themselves.

https://maphub.net/Cen4infoRes/russian-ukraine-monitor

This seems like a supremely bad idea.

Explain?

Showing the Russian forces where Ukrainians have been building road blocks, etc?

Data poisoning like this won't help if russian forces are being sent to a specific map item.

Best they can do for now is report these geo markers to google as soon as possible for deletion. (And hopefully Google bans the users who are adding these fake locations)

Add items with duplicate names, then? If they had some digital way to coordinate targets, they'd just send the raw coordinates.

I find it hard to believe they're actually using Google maps like that though. I wonder if it's simply a DOS attack.

I almost can't believe the Russian army is so... trashy.

For the army of a state willing to be completely independent of the West to use an American web based service for military purposes, and to do it in a way other people can see it is sloppy to the point of tragedy.

Or maybe that's an elaborate attempt to do psychological warfare?

It's more like: "Why not?"

From their POV. I mean if the "sloppy" approach works (in this specific case) roughly as good as whatever military specific alternate approach they have(1), then it makes sense to use that, to not disclose the capabilities of alternate approaches to their enemy (the US).

(1): That is assuming they have one, if not ... I would be both quite surprised and somehow not really surprised like both at once.

The point is that they should have one. The fact that they are using services like these indicate that they do not, or that it is poorly implemented and not accessible to the right people on the ground invading Ukraine.

After seeing the relatively poor performance of the Russian military this past week I'm not surprised but I would have been surprised two weeks ago.

The Russian political apparatus really is digging a hole they won't be able to get out of, isn't it?

Such an expensive mess, especially for the Ukrainians, who are paying it with their lives, for reasons outside their control.

Sloppy approach is, well, callously sloppy, because the stakes are that high.

Not to Putin. He doesn't care if his troops live or die.

He likely cares about getting Mussolini'd if too many die.

Hitler picked this particular hill to die on, but yeah. I wonder what he does to save face if this invasion fails.

Citation needed. You sound like you've consumed a bit too much western propaganda. We should be smarter than this here.

Nancy Pelosi (I think... Some senior senator with access to extra intelligence info) says Putin's new puffy face look isn't plastic surgery, but instead side effects from cancer treatment.

Senior leadership thinks he went off half cocked because he's running out of time.

Propaganda? Sure. Even if it's true.

He apparently couldn't keep the ol' convoy up today either...

Some units have also been communicating in the clear on civilian bands. There seems to be a severe shortage of military electronics on the Russian side.

Or, just purely from a UX standpoint, you can use a military receiver with an interface like this https://media.sciencephoto.com/image/c0083836/800wm and then look up the coordinates by hand on a twenty year old paper map. Or you can drop a pin on gmaps and text it to Sergey at the artillery battery. If you don't care about opsec, which is easier?

The raw audio is beginning to be released: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30513438

All is fair in love and war”

People need to be a little less naive and skip conversations like this. There’s a 40 mile (65km) convoy heading for the capital of Ukraine. A lot of Ukrainians are about to die. Rather than complaining about how Russia is using 21st century technology from the West, perhaps discussing real solutions would be more beneficial?

What do you suggest people do? Get on the phone with their congressperson and have them send in a bomber squadron? As far as immediate impact, reporting this in the hopes that it gets taken down seems about as good as anything feasible at the moment.

i already made my suggestion and it wasn’t “throw up your hands and say there’s nothing more we can do”

“…perhaps discussing real solutions would be more beneficial?”

Maybe we come up with nothing but tens of thousands of lives could be saved if we think of something.

A week from now the world is going to wish it had done more.

"Discussing real solutions" sounds about as substantial a suggestion as "throw your hands up and say there's nothing more we can do". People are already talking. It's not suggesting anything more concrete than what's already being done in this conversation.

we turned this into a childish discussion on the internet.

Tens of thousands of Ukrainians will be dead within a week.

Who, exactly, do you think the “we” is in this scenario?

You’re the one that came in complaining about how nothing is being done and offering a suggestion of… talking, which is what is already happening.

When people rightfully pointed this out to you, you suddenly involved “we”. You’re the one that has instigated this meta-discussion, and you just don’t like that people called you out on it.

Nah, i’ve got a thick skin. I’ve been on the Internet for over three decades. I’ve been doing this since the Usenet days.

I’ll let you guys get back to saying how bad the Russians are for using Google maps. Forget I even brought up the brainstorming idea.

Quite honestly I should have know people would go with “you first”. But when I go with “me first” people spend the entire time talking about how it’s a bad idea, missing the point completely

A lot of people here probably don’t even remember the Cold War.

It’s all about to get pretty real.

Considering all the people who are going to die, I had to try.

"Trying" is actually brainstorming. Telling people that they're not helping and that they should brainstorm instead is not "trying".

At best, it's yelling from the sidelines that nothing is getting done and everyone should feel bad.

I mean this conversation could go somewhere. I'm sure someone here can get access to the maps backend and redirect a few missiles if the rumors are true. This crowd is probably 99th percentile in working out the details.

(That is to say, probably not competent at it, which is better than "definitely not")

Also, you can bet concrete actionable suggestions made here will bubble up to silicon valley execs by the morning.

So your suggestion is to just…. Talk about something else?

Cool, can’t wait to see the thread you start discussing these important things.

Your answer is to talk about. So, talk about it.

Or are you saying someone else should solve this for you?

Literally all you're doing is meta-complaining, you're not offering any solutions either. Now you've forced me to meta-meta-complain.

Fine, you start. What is your first idea for discussion?

The congress wants Ukranians to die fighting and weaken Russia by sending them lethal weapons. They don't want to involve themselves directly

The "congress", or rather the military and civilian executives (Congress hasn't really weighed in yet) don't want to be in a position of having two large nuclear forces in direct conflict. For very good reasons.

2 large nuclear forces are in conflict already. Ukraine is nuclear country.

Nothing nuclear happened during the war with soviets in Vietnam, Korea, etc., or with Russians in Syria. RF is much weaker than USSR.

> Ukraine is nuclear country.

It is not.

> Nothing nuclear happened during the war with soviets in Vietnam, Korea, etc., or with Russians in Syria. RF is much weaker than USSR.

You don’t need much power to fuck up the planet. A single thermonuclear bomb would suffice and Russia, however weak, has thousands of those.

Can you explain what you mean by "Ukraine is nuclear country"?

Ukraine had nuclear weapons. Ukraine has weapon grade nuclear reactors, which produces plutonium. Ukrainian engineers developed equipment and rockets to produce nuclear weapons for USSR. Tactics of using nuclear weapons was part of my education.

Ukraine does not have nuclear weapons. They inherited some when the USSR fell apart, but they returned them to Russia to be dismantled in return for guarantees from the west and Russia.

The Chinese did not have nuclear weapons when the US fought them in the Korean War. Neither the Chinese nor the Soviets were (officially) involved in the Vietnam War. The US and Russia have danced around very carefully in Syria; the only direct conflict I know of involved Russian "mercenaries". In none of those cases did the Soviets or the Russians signal that they would use nuclear weapons; likewise, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was given covert military support by the US, but there was no direct conflict.

NATO operations in Ukraine carry a very large risk of accidental escalation, in addition to Putin's threats.

Ukraine had no nuclear weapons 8 years ago. Ukraine has all required equipment and nuclear materials (weapon grade Uranium, Plutonium) to create nuclear weapons at will. Are you sure that Ukraine has no will to defend itself?

> The US and Russia have danced around very carefully in Syria; the only direct conflict I know of involved Russian "mercenaries".

Turkey shot Russian airplane.

> NATO operations in Ukraine carry a very large risk of accidental escalation, in addition to Putin's threats.

I'm sorry to inform you, but war between two nuclear nations has much larger risk of escalation when NATO will play the role of coward.

According to what I've read and watched on YouTube (such as the interesting, if inevitably biased series "Russian Roulette" by ViceNews that I recommend you watch with your brain on and Wikipedia ready to look up every mentioned character), the Ukrainian army had such difficulties with basic supplies that I can't imagine them developing actionable weaponry at all, conventional or nuclear.

Even if some scientists could technically build a bomb, the hard part with nuclear arsenal is not the bomb itself but the launching device.

No, this _is_ people doing something. This is people reaching out in a chaotic way to attempt to interrupt/disrupt an apparently in-use insecure method of designating artillery targets. This method of disruption does seem legitimate, and appears that if successful in reaching someone at Google in a position to make a decision, a real difference could be made.

Meanwhile, you're suggesting "This does nothing" when in fact, it's a legitimate avenue because, to use your specific quote, "all is fair in love and war".

On reflection, I'm completely flummoxed why you would suggest this has no potential. In fact, it seems to be the exact opposite, and quite interesting that these pages are being taken down nearly as quickly as they're posted here. These things taken together suggest that this idea is perceived as dangerous to someone

In situations like these, I believe the best thing a distant westerner can do to weight against escalation is to keep cold headed, try our best not to fall prey to endoctrination, remind anyone involved to not burn bridges, to never consider others are fundamentally different, etc.

If we were in Kyiv right now it could be different, but maybe not. Actually, the Russian invasion has been very low intensity so far and to be frank, if not for the nonstop calls for more action from warmongers on the internet, I would still believe we are still well within the range of peace negociations.

I'm conscious how naive this sounds, but after all the Putins and the Bushs can only go to war when their people are filled with enough hatred, that's the first ammo that's ever manufactured.

It seems more like field officers and quartermasters have had every incentive to lie about readiness and equipment. Audits of the same have the same incentive to lie. So on paper a unit has tons of equipment in working order. In reality maintenance hasn't been performed, spares have been sold off under the table, and in general most of the paperwork is faked.

I was calling russian army a paper tiger for a long time, citing immense corruption and deterioration of all public institutions in Russia under Putin. Military isn't public, but that's just more opportunities for corruption and theft.

My opponents usually disagreed, pointing to a big military budget and some modern-ish new weapons shown here and there. No, they do look cool at a show or a parade, but does the personnel know how to use it? Are they built en masse? Is the quality good enough? (With all that corruption!)

Turns out, things are even worse then I imagined, but in the hindsight it shouldn't be surprising: this is far from the first time in history when decaying russian institutions and imperial hubris had led Russia to a disastrous war, which was planned as a 'small victorious' one: Crimean War (1853), Japan war (1905), Winter war with Finland (1940), Afghanistan war (1980), Chechena war (1994).

Now Putin has one of his own. I hope his regime will crumble in the fallout from a resounding defeat.

To be clear, are you saying the 65km convoy is going to fail to take Kyiv?

I just don't understand how that could happen unless they literally run out of fuel on the way, or if some serious airforce intervenes.

Length of this convoy is different every hour and it's been out there "ready to take Kyiv" for days now. If the soldiers are already out of food, it's as good as a heap of scrap. If you fancy thinking about "3D-chess mastermind military tactics", then how about the fact that Ukraine seemingly does not even bother to deal with the convoy, and they have working ballistic rockets, think about that.

Indeed, this convoy has made a variety of seemingly contradictory impressions on those reporting. The strongest possibility may be that the reports we're receiving aren't very accurate.

"Length of convoy" is such a weird metric for all the news agencies to use.

We don't they just count the vehicles, I would imagine even basic computer vision software could do that with reasonable accuracy.

If 100 vehicles are in a 10 mile long convoy and then they space out more and are now in a 20 mile long convoy, it's still 100 vehicles.

I do enjoy reading each day the different lengths and distances to Kyiv.

Do you know how many vehicles are in the convoy?

> unless they literally run out of fuel on the way

this seems to be happening quite a bit

65km convoy means, what, 6000 vehicles and 30k people ? How do you control with 30k soldiers a city of 3Mil that freely distributed guns to residents ?

It's going to be a slaughter, on both sides :(

This convoy might defeat itself in a few days because they'll run out of fuel, or food, or drinking water.

If anything, it is unthinkable for an advanced army to move in such disposition. They what, cosplay the Freedom Convoy?

> They what, cosplay the Freedom Convoy?

Putin did say his troops will be fighting for "Freedom" of Ukraine.

They're on roads. The ground is muddy.

Pop the leader with a Javelin. Pop a couple more vehicles that try to get around it. Presto, instant traffic jam and the Russians have repeatedly shown they clump up in traffic jams. Now you hit the vehicles in the rear, you're not likely to need sophisticated weapons to do that.

Now you have a huge mess that you can rain mortar fire on.

Finland did a lower-tech version of it to them long ago with trees rather than mud as the barrier.

> they literally run out of fuel on the way

surprise (not), but they literally ran out of fuel on the way [0]

that 65km convoy is just a 65km sitting duck of a traffic jam at the moment. without fuel and food

all of this war is a festival of glorious russian corruption and incompetency at its best. i, as a ukrainian, must thank them for that

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-move-kyiv-stall...

This isn't a videogame or binging the latest show on NetFlix. Not sure why so many are convinced a war should take a couple of hours in time to turn over to the sports highlights of the day. I'm seeing lots of "Putin thought this..." and "Putin thought that..." with absolutely no evidence of what Putin thought. It seems like wishful thinking on the part of people who have given themselves ADHD and get upset when a story doesn't wrap up quickly like on tv.

Most of USA war media, especially in the first several weeks of a new TV war, is best described as "wishful thinking".

Yeah, but let's face it. Their "elite" spetsnaz got captured during an operation. The fearsome Chechenians were on the way to capture the leaders, and then turned out the Ukrainians already drone striked them including the general.

And what did Putin lose in that country anyway? The entire population hates Russians and are willing to die for their freedom. Let's say he can capture it. They have no natural resources of interest or anything like that. Meanwhile his own economy, that was already as tiny as the Benelux, goes completely to the shitterhole.

He has nukes, yes, he has nukes.

> Yeah, but let's face it. Their "elite" spetsnaz got captured during an operation.

I highly doubt this, considering https://nikopol.nikopolnews.net/nikopol/uvaga-informaciya-pr... claims the image is of Ukrainian military. In addition to that, all the claims of them being Spetsnaz seem to originate from social media.

> The fearsome Chechenians were on the way to capture the leaders, and then turned out the Ukrainians already drone striked them including the general.

Once again, there is no solid source for this that doesn't circle back to some social media post.

I don't think there's currently way to confirm whether any of these claims are true or not, not until the conflict is over.

Seems like a touchy subject indeed, the Wikipedia page of Magomed Tushayev seems to be deleted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magomed_Tushayev

How much time did Americans spent to conquer Iraq? Russians are besieging Kiev in mere days and probably will finish the entire operation in few weeks. This is unprecedented efficiency against a huge ukrainian army fed by the entire West with weapons and instructors, which just had 8 years experience of constant war against donbass.

Russian army is amazing.

This is a bizarre perspective, especially because our lessons in Afghanistan and Iraq have taught us that the invasion itself occurs simply and uneventfully. Remolding the conquered land to become invader friendly is, on the other hand, an endeavor that both the US and Russia know is infeasible and a losing proposition.

Honestly, it seems like taking a lot longer on the invasion, and therefore killing a lot more of your enemy combatants might be a better strategy than dealing with them as insurgents after a swift take over.

Bombing cities and killing civilians is a great way to create insurgents. Every time a country blows up a person's home or kills their family members there is a chance that person picks up a gun and starts fighting back.

You are comparing an invasion to an invasion plus an occupation, which makes no sense.

Saddam had a very powerful army at the time, and the US military walked through it like it was nothing. Occupying Iraq and building a new regime went terribly, as almost all such projects do. Even if Russia manages to conquer Ukraine entirely, which is a massive if, I've seen absolutely nothing in the past 6 days to make me think that an occupation by them would be anything other than a horrid disaster.

Aside from pure propaganda, I have no idea what information you could be looking at to come to the conclusion that Russia is executing the invasion well at this point.

> Russian army is amazing.

Which part exactly?

The elite spetsnaz that got captured?

The Chechenian army that got drone striked including the general?

The failure of securing the airspace?

The total cluelessness of the soldiers?

The inability to defend the airfield once captured?

The failed logistics?

Yeah, great army, never seen anything like it!

I would agree that Russia and China bluff their strength but there are entire countries that run their militaries off of purely Russian/Chinese equipment. To trust your national security to something that is subpar seems like a recipe for having a bad time.

My theory is that Russia threw their D league to go fight so that no one could accuse them of them actually trying to take over.

> To trust your national security to something that is subpar seems like a recipe for having a bad time.

I'd rather trust my national security on equipment that's subpar but reliable and predictable, instead of trying to make my own and failing. Kind of like home security: I'd rather buy a lock for my front door that may be not perfect rather than trying to machine my own better version, even if I technically know how it works and could maybe make a working prototype. Military development is really, really expensive and extremely hard to do right when your state is still developing and running low on qualified engineers, physicists and mathematicians.

In any case, having recent russian weapons is more than enough when your neighbours are equipped with leftovers from the fifties.

Their enemies have the same equipment, so it balances out.

Right now Ukrainians seem to have the javlins and stingers. Plus, I'm pretty sure they know everything US intelligence knows.

> there are entire countries that run their militaries off of purely Russian/Chinese equipment.

I don't know about China, but Russian exports are mostly soviet-era models, and they are known to have huge maintenance issues. Also note this: in the USSR they knew how to build things, but modern Russia can't. We have no electronics industry, no machine industry, we can't really make commercial airplanes, and we can't build a decent car. How would country with such capabilities make state of the art military equipment?!

I have long figured their nuclear forces would prove to be barely function if called upon, but I didn't realize how deep the rot was on the conventional side. Those get used in exercises.

Of course it's trashy. Everything is. Many readers of HN are well aware that most of software is shit. It's not surprising that this extends to military equipment too.

As an example from the other side, the British BOWMAN comms system used to be understood as Better Off With Maps And Nokia.

https://immortaltoday.com/battlefield-digitisation/

This is a pattern I've been seeing again and again ... from the outside everything looks neat and nice, but under closer inspection, it's trash and wired together with duct tape and hopes... from software to military to medical to... you name it

I believe the name for this thing is "the devil in the details" - reality has a surprising level of detail, and the more you go into detail, more murky and shitty things appear to be.

In fact I am amazed that complex things, like, say, the internet, work at all !

you have no idea how much my job have scarred me, I'm in love with all things mechanical.

The internet itself is really, stupidly simple. There is a fair amount of complexity in managing it, and that bites back fairly frequently, but the vast majority of the complexity and crazy stuff is above the level of basic connectivity.

As we saw with the Facebook outage on October 4th, there's an insane amount of hidden complexity at the lower levels that end users never ever see. For home consumer uses its simple enough, but those methods aren't good enough for industry usage? AWS isn't buying off the shelf gear and plugging in cat-5 ( or 6) cables like a consumer-level user would.

There's nothing really complex about BGP. The management system Facebook uses, as I said, bites back occasionally. AWS does a lot of fancy things, but from the actual networking perspective it's not any different than plugging in cables.

As I said, the crazy complexity is above the network level.

Exactly, you need to work in tech to understand the sheer unprecedented achievement that the JWST is, for instance. To be frank, I quite don't believe it yet, and I hope they will one day publish a postmortem (postvivem?) on how they did it.

This is the absolute worst in the intersection of the public and private sector (hence military and medical being prime examples). The private sector can afford to invest in quality and when the public sector is given the funding to have in-house experts working full-time, the results are excellent. But as soon as there's an open tender, quality takes a dump. Every corner than can be cut, will be cut, and what's worse, even competent contractors are incentivised to produce broken and rigid systems in pursuit of lucrative maintenance contracts.

Don't forget the internet explorer app that you need to field F35s.

Or Boeing.

Russia has roughly the same GDP as Texas.

I feel like the US military would have to be completely incompetent to not be able to easily dismantle them at this point considering the size of their budget.

I can't help but think they are planned opposition at this point, whether willing or unwilling.

> I feel like the US military would have to be completely incompetent to not be able to easily dismantle them at this point considering the size of their budget.

Or, you know, unwilling to start a nuclear war.

Which dismantling the 50%+ of Russia's conventional military committed to Ukraine would very possibly lead to.

If defensive operations create too much risk of near, then Putin can slow walk all the way to Portugal without resistance.

Appeasement will only insure larger conflict

I don't think what the EU and US are doing in Ukraine can be termed appeasement. Punishing sanctions, rumblings of NATO and EU expansions, open and extensive weapons transfers, and full-throated support of the Ukrainian government is hardly what we did in Czechoslovakia.

The "we will go to open war with you" line is the borders of NATO and the EU, which haven't currently been violated. It's not an unreasonable line to draw, given the potential consequences of nuclear armed states doing battle.

Russia has 6000 nuclear warheads and enough capabilities to deliver them wherever they want in the world.

That will keep the US military far away from their battlefield.

It's unlikely that they will engage nuclear weapon if the west intervene in Ukraine.

You really want to test that out?

When Russians will take Ukrainian nuclear reactor, this war will be nuclear regardless of what you want.

uhm, what do you mean by that?

When we talk about the risk of a nuclear escalation we talk about the risk of this or that country launching nuclear armed missiles at an other country.

How would the posession of nuclear reactors factor into that?

Ukraine is the post-nuclear country. Ukraine has 4 working weapons grade nuclear stations.

If Russian will capture nuclear reactor, they can convert it to nuclear landmine, because reactor uses enriched Uranium, to create equivalent of 10k Chornobyl's.

Ukraine has know-how and nuclear materials (Plutonium) to create nuclear weapons at will. The only thing that stopped us is USA, Britain, France, and Germany, which used Budapest memorandum as leverage against Ukraine to prevent that.

I'll be the first to admit I don't know a lot about nuclear power, but I'm pretty sure you're talking nonsense. To say that a nuclear power reactor uses weapons-grade uranium is akin to saying that a car works by lighting its gas tank on fire. For nuclear power you want a carefully controlled reaction, while for an explosion you want to release as much energy as possible as quickly as possible.

Now, maybe if Russia captures a reactor they could send a scientist down to repurpose its parts to make an improvised nuke, but if that's the goal, what would be the point? It's not like Russia doesn't have nukes already.

Just having plutonium and knowledge is not enough to build a nuclear weapon. No country has ever developed nukes while its main territory was being invaded. For one, even if you can build a device, you'd need to test it at least once. What would you do if you had nukes and you detected that the non-nuclear-capable country you're invading has just run a nuclear test?

You are talking nonsense. I will write it again just for you: Ukraine has 4 nuclear stations with 15 weapon grade nuclear reactors which are producing Plutonium and use enriched Uranium.

The point is to use the nuclear reactor like a nuclear landmine, to blow up at retreat, to do maximum amount of damage. It's called «scorched earth tactics».

Ukraine, as part of USSR, developed nukes decades ago. Ukraine is the fist post-nuclear country in the world.

Oh, so you mean "weapons-grade" in the sense that it can produce plutonium. Maybe, but so what? Also, all nuclear reactors use enriched uranium.

Nuclear reactors can't produce nuclear explosions, for the reasons I said previously. Even the Chernobyl incident wasn't a nuclear explosion, it was a steam explosion. It's no more possible to turn a nuclear reactor into a nuclear bomb, than to turn a gas generator into a molotov cocktail. I don't know where you heard this absurd notion of a "nuclear landmine", but anyone who talks about exploding nuclear reactors is just spreading sensationalism.

Yes, Ukraine had nuclear weapons. Had. It has since dismantled all of them and doesn't have the infrastructure to make new ones. As such, it would have to develop them again. They have to build the machines to build the weapons and then they have to test the weapons to make sure the machines are building them correctly. Then they need some delivery system, which is a problem entirely separate from merely making a device that can produce a nuclear explosion. Good luck doing all that while infrastructure is disrupted by an invasion.

It is very, very likely. Russian leadership see Ukraine as a Russian province, and the heart of the russian motherland, and they will treat western armies there as invaders - they are prepared to risk everything to keep that from happening.

It's FUD. Russians don't want to see as their families dies in flames.

It doesn't matter what Russians think, it matters what Dughin's fanboys holed up under Altai Mountains think.

Go back to 1986, and imagine what the Soviet response would be if NATO would have breached the Iron Courtain and would have fighter planes and tanks in Kiev. This is what we're dealing with here.

They probably think that being czar-for-a-week of a nuclear wasteland is something that's only attractive when literally all other options are exhausted.

NATO doesn't need to field armies, just aircraft. The Ukranians seem to do pretty well on the ground.

"A shame your tanks exploded. Perhaps their car warranty expired?"

For all we know, this is already happening.

“Which aircraft? Oh, this one? It’s not a military operation, just our pilots doing some sightseeing. Just like your lads did in Crimea in 2014, you remember?”

You're right, it is unlikely. But it's not unlikely enough. Even a 1% chance of nuclear war is too high.

> It's unlikely that they will engage nuclear weapon if the west intervene in Ukraine.

2 weeks ago it was "unlikely" Russia launches a full scale war on Ukraine. Putin is crazy and will use nukes if he deems it necessary.

It was not unlikely two weeks ago that Russia launches a full scale war on Ukraine. I don’t know how or why this false assertion spreads the way it does.

"Putin is crazy." 8 years of warning that he will do a thing if a red line is crossed and he does it? The jingoism permeating the west is the crazy thing. People are swallowing propaganda whole and blindly repeating talking points designed to create animus against a foreign power. No mention of the war crimes conducted by literal nazis of azov battalion in the Donbas that we begged outing to intervene over for 8 years...

We have a lot to hate about putting,but it comes from his inaction to solve a genocide on his very border. Instead, he only acted when russia was threatened. Sounds logical to me.

> It's unlikely that they will engage nuclear weapon if the west intervene in Ukraine.

My understanding is that Putin has repeatedly made it painfully clear that that is exactly what he would do if anyone interferes.

People say stuff. I agree it would be risky to call his bluff, but I'd say it's more like a 10% risk than a 50% risk.

Of course, a 10% chance of destroying the world is beyond my tolerance.

Except, you completely made up that probability

They were pretty clear it was their personal estimate.

What probability of global thermonuclear war would you accept? 10%? 1%? 0.1%?

Yeah, I mean even Putin doesn't know the real odds.

It probably depends a lot on the exact circumstances/timing. And in the war, circumstances change all the time.

Putin wants us to believe it's a Dr. Strangelove situation, where no humans make a choice and therefore nuclear annihalation is a guarantee if we cross a line. But that's false.

Any line Putin draws can be tested and shifted along various axes: who crosses it, how bad it is for Russia, how egregious the violation is, how well it can be argued that it's not a violation, how long it takes to confirm that a violation has taken place, how certain he is that a violation has taken place, who authorized it, how long it takes to confirm who authorized it, etc.

And we don't know for sure that Putin can unilaterally initiate a world-ending strike without anyone in the chain second-guessing him.

They also had like 12 000 tanks but 50% of them can't even move. Same with warheads.

Oh yeah and they can't deliver them anywhere. Then can deliver only a few. Others are short range or should be dropped from old planes that can't even fly.

Even if 95% of their ~1,100 ICBMs are non-functional, they can hit every EU capital and quite a few major US cities.

And they can probably convince North Korea to start shelling Seoul for good measure.

>50% of them can't even move. Same with warheads.

Wikipedia says as part of START[1], russia has 1457 warheads. Suppose 50% are broken. That's 728 warheads. Even one warhead landing in each of the top 50 cities in the US[2] would be devastating.

>Oh yeah and they can't deliver them anywhere. Then can deliver only a few. Others are short range or should be dropped from old planes that can't even fly.

Source? As of 2009 they have 383 ICBMs. Keep in mind each ICBM can hold multiple warheads because of MIRV. Presumably there's less now because of START, but the ones they decommissioned are the old/unreliable ones, so it's fairly reasonable to assume most of their warheads can be delivered.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_START

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

Seems like they have been pretty good lately at making rockets go.

> Oh yeah and they can't deliver them anywhere. Then can deliver only a few.

Are you willing to bet the future of human civilization on this?

Ukraine isn't their battlefield though.

These 6000 nuclear warheads are expired. They need maintenance, which only Ukraine can do.

As a person living in Europe, I sure don't want to find out whether they work or not.

In conventional warfare, likely yes.

Russia also has enough nuclear weapons, in unknown places (likely off the US coast), to do a lot of damage to the US. They will almost certainly use them in the face of an existential threat (like being at war with NATO directly), so NATO will do everything possible to avoid that contingency.

It's FUD. Russians don't wand to die with their families. They know that USA already used nuclear bombs in war and will use them again when necessary.

War promoters need to decide whether Putin is crazy or super-rational. He probably isn't both of those things.

Putin would not have invaded if he were not desperately at risk of losing power.

Nobody is super-rational all the time. If he does get ousted he will certainly be killed. His replacement is, by reversion to the mean, very likely to be less rational.

He is also fighting for his final spot in history. He's not gonna live forever.

We've seen how the US military faired in Afghanistan one of the poorer country on the planet... Attacking Russia would result in a nuclear war that would wipe mankind out earth.

Defending Ukraine is not attacking anyone. It is defending.

Abandoning defense gives away the game before it starts

Ukraine became the aggressor when it tried to join a hostile military alliance that Russia is not allowed to join right on russias border. That people attempt to justify this as Ukraines unassailable right shows you the sheer power of western propaganda. Imagine if Mexico played host to Chinese and Russian missile launchers pointed at our major cities jn the same way Poland does.

To prove just how unreasonable it is for Ukraine to think they would need a military alliance oriented against Russia, Russia invades Ukraine?

>Imagine if Mexico played host to Chinese and Russian missile launchers pointed at our major cities jn the same way Poland does.

The fact that Mexico doesn't probably says something. I'm sure there's a lot of money in hosting Chinese military assets.

All this is to say nothing about the incongruities between your explanation and the many and varied lies about why the invasion that was happening both wasn't an invasion and wasn't happening...

> Imagine if Mexico played host to Chinese and Russian missile launchers pointed at our major cities jn the same way Poland does.

By the same argument that this justifies attacking Ukraine, you must think the US would be justified in attacking Canada if Mexico hosted the Chinese and Russian missiles you describe.

"...never attribute to malice..."

Maybe you’re joking? Your quote is generally intended for biasing in favor of preserving relationships, but is less relevant when someone is sending missiles and armor columns to blow up your country. You can assume malice here — no problem if you’re wrong.

It could also be they are attempting to force google to remove the service entirely for Ukraine.

Shouldn’t it be down already? It’s a US asset, it’s expected to be down in war zones. Was it available all along in Iraq?

Locals know the directions, not having maps is a handicap for everybody but mostly the attacker.

Besides, GMaps could require login for Ukraine, and only be allowed for people with a track record of being in Ukraine. Since Google follows you everywhere.

>Locals know the directions, not having maps is a handicap for everybody but mostly the attacker.

I suspect the locals only know the directions for routes they commonly travel (eg. for work/groceries/school). If you're fleeing, you'll need it just as much the invaders does.

This would be trivial to bypass with a VPN?

Not if its blocked for the whole world.

It's a US asset that tips the balance of military power towards individuals.

Someone can use Google Maps to plan a peaceful protest or a Molotov cocktail strike more easily than a missile strike. Why would you expect them to take that capability away from people they've publicly sided with?

They even register domains with Soviet Union extension ".su" and actively and openly publish their propaganda on these websites. https://www.idyllum.com/explore/?query=tld%3A%22.su%22

These people actually think they are freedom fighters and want to restore "good" empire.

The first web site from that link is some beauty salon.

Could be but this is even worse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union

Why would anyone register a domain with such extension is beyond me unless they are completely brainwashed by the regime.

Here is example of a typical "news" site from that list: sevastopol.su

You can use Google Translate to understand the skewed picture that is being tried to shown to the local people.

> Why would anyone register a domain with such extension is beyond me

Plenty of anti-Russian Ukrainians use .su

I find it hard to believe, proof?

> Why would anyone register a domain with such extension is beyond me

Because it's fun? Most sites where probably registered before the war and aren't necessary serious. You can have a good time with a soviet styled website or even community, all with matching url and flags and stuff.

Unless it is joke or some sort of museum or history website, using Soviet symbols is extremely frowned upon in the countries that used to belong to the union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bans_on_communist_symbols

I'm sure that is true and sister reply rightfully pointed out the parallels to the nazi dictatorship. I personally find both rather distasteful, but I think that ironic usage would very well fall in the "joke" territory.

The Soviet Union lasted for some 70 years, not everything was bad. For instance I quite like their cinema and science fiction children shows. My point being, someone raised under the Soviet Union would still be able to find a few things to look back with nostalgia.

I can understand this yeah, but why would you register your new legimate business under such extension. Sure everything was probably not bad but do they have Soviet Union hairstyle salon or what :)

Maybe this sort of thing will convince people that "military grade" probably shouldn't be considered a selling point :)

Seeing the videos of destroyed Russian equipment I am a bit surprised how familiar it looks to what it was when I was forcefully drafted into soviet military some 30+ years ago. There are maybe few new types of personnel carrier vehicles which I do not recognize but everything else is decades old, and even back then in 80s it was not any high tech (except for T-80 maybe). As an example, to coordinate artillery fire we used paper maps and mechanical rulers to convert target coordinates into azimuth and elevation angles. Officers would carry secret reference table books with them which were used to apply a ton of corrections: ambient temperature, wind direction, mass of the charge and the projectile and drift due to rotation of the projectile etc. All that was manual, calculated on paper, slow and error prone. I remember myself back then wondering why we couldn't use simple calculators to do this math quickly. The dead reckoning equipment (which was based on mechanical gyroscope) had such high error that after few tries we decided to never turn it on again - after few kilometers of drive it would place us some 500m off the actual position. Sure, maybe some electronics are upgraded nowadays, it is hard to tell from those videos. But the stories of Russians being lost on their way, it rather looks that nothing much has changed.

Maybe they're prepared for post-EMP warfare? ;)

You are more right than you know. Western observers mocked Soviet fighters using vacuum tubes, until it was pointed out that they are immune to EMP.

To be fair, I believe being able to compute ballistic parameters with pen and paper give you an advantage in a total war where every communication is jammed, network is hacked and energy supply is sparse.

There's an anecdote I've heard from at least 2 people now about an international military exercise here in Europe where they were working with some kind of big artillery and lost either comms or power so their computers were offline. Everyone just shrugged and pulled out their maps and rulers while the Americans sat there completely lost and didn't shoot even once for the rest of the day. It seems insane to me to not have at least two people on each team who can do the math on paper if necessary!

"Quantity has a quality all its own" - Stalin.

Russian armies historically do very badly at first, then improve markedly after being banged around a bit. That's normal for armies of conscripts who don't undergo expensive, realistic training.

The USSR lost 20 million people in WWII, about half soldiers. 13% of the population. The US lost only about 400,000, about 0.13% of the population. France and UK, about 1%. The USSR still won.

Both Ukraine and Russia were part of the USSR. Ukraine also lost millions. I am not sure which point you are trying to make. Russia losing millions of people over Ukraine really would be something.

Russia killed (starved, mostly) millions of Ukrainians before WWII, and sent myriads to the GULag before, during, and after.

That Russians also sent millions of Russians to the GULag -- including most POWs repatriated at war's end -- does not make it less bad.

The Russian army does not use conscripts in forces used in Ukraine.

U.S. News and World Report says they do.[1]

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/u-s-sees-evidence-of-mo...

Of course they say so, it's the same people who talk about "fairly slow and stodgy progress": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30516996#30522179

I haven't seen a single reliable message in Russian social media from conscript's mothers and, believe me, they would not have been quite. And no, you can not hide use of conscripts from relatives on such scale.

"‘I’m panicking — where is my child?’ Conscript soldiers are being sent to fight against Ukraine, their relatives say. Here’s what their families told Meduza."[1]

That's a Latvian source. May be propaganda. Other sources saying the same thing track back to that one.

The Russian army has "contract soldiers", who signed up, and "conscripts", who are drafted to serve for one year. I've been looking for good counts. Most conscripts are in the army; The navy, air force, and strategic rocket force are mostly (entirely?) contract soldiers.

[1] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/02/26/i-m-panicking-where-...

Eh, it’s only trashy because they’re not on our side. If it was our allies doing it, it would be considered scrappy, ingenious, clever, resourceful, etc.

Some positive adjective that denotes using a resource in a way no one expected.

Do you have such opinion because in less than a week the Russian army with the directive to minimize civilian casualties and damage to infrastructure has not occupied the second largest country in Europe with difficult terrain (a lot of cities, rivers, and forests) and huge army generously supplied for 8 years with modern western weapons? Do you remember how much time it took the US to win the Iraq War? And Iraq is a smaller country, with much denser distribution of population centers, simpler terrain, and smaller technically outdated army. Also the US clearly used air bombardment much more frivolously, which has resulted in a huge number of civilian deaths.

But my guess is that you simply get your information from clearly biased media.

Well, the US didn't run out of gas and food (or water), and laid the pipelines for its armor convoy a heck of a lot faster than 20 miles a day!

> Do you have such opinion because in less than a week the Russian army with the directive to minimize civilian casualties and damage to infrastructure

You've got to be kidding me. Maybe you've missed the indiscriminate artillery and rocket attacks on population centers such as Kharkiv?

And the Russian army hasn't failed at occupation. It's miserably failing at capturing anything of note, properly conducting sieges ( Kharkiv was resupplied multiple times), basic logistics, basic air operations.

> But my guess is that you simply get your information from clearly biased media.

If you're going to accuse people of using biased sources, it would be good for you to include some examples of clearly unbiased media, so that they can compare and learn.

> Do you remember how much time it took the US to win the Iraq War?

Russia already lost more soldiers in this war than the US in the entire Iraq War.

Anyone can edit/place google maps markers, is there any concrete evidence that this is actually being used by the Russian army instead of some trolls?

I know everyone wants to paint the Russians as buffoons so hard right now, but do you really think they would organize and target air strikes with public Google Maps markers?

Before the war? No.

Given the other indicators of disorganization we've had in the last week? It's pretty plausible, especially given reports of them broadcasting in the clear and using text messages for comms.

Are you aware of the concept of fog of war? We don't have any reasonable visibility into their operations. We have a scattered mix of social media reports that are just as reliable as the reports of Chinese people falling flat on their face on the street after Covid broke out in Wuhan.

You have a bag of misinformation. That's all.

https://twitter.com/sbreakintl/status/1498619309618503680

There's a lot of recorded communication.

How is that a reliable source at all, it's just a piece of text backed by a company that wants to sell military communication equipment.

Maybe you missed the actual recordings...

> just as reliable as the reports of Chinese people falling flat on their face on the street after Covid broke out in Wuhan

“Reliable enough for me to stock up successfully weeks before lockdown”, you mean?

Russian troops have resorted to using unencrypted comms because the encrypted ones were too unreliable, so we actually do have some visibility now.

We have SDR and the ability to actively tap into their communication, while at the same time not seeing digital communication.

This leads to two options:

1. They don't have any communications at all and the analog we capture is 'fake'

2. They are using the analog unencrypted channels we can all listen to

In fantasyland there is a third option: they have wireless communication that isn't detectable at all and doesn't use devices we can take photos of.

I know nothing of this stuff but potentially:

- Extreme wide spectrum frequency hopping. Hard to distinguish from the noise floor.

- Steganographic encrypted channel over fake unencrypted channel.

If course when in doubt, assuming stupidity is the safe bet.

While I haven't dug deep in to the black arts that is RF and MW, it would indeed hide it better (the hopping), but because the noise floor would have 'more energy' during an active transmitter they would either always have to be transmitting or be so close to each other that they can keep the energy low. I think the analysis appliances are capable of finding hopping transmissions, even in the lower range (still expensive) spectrum analysers. It does of course depend on how fast they can scan the whole range and how wide the range is.

But Hanlon's razor applies, and indeed, it is more likely incompetence.

The reports of disarray from Russia have absolutely nothing to do with SDR comms or top secret military interceptions from the Pentagon. They're all based on social media videos that are mixing old events with current events, and some outright fabrications such as the Ghost of Kiev that a sitting U.S. congressperson fell for.

Instead we have a clown show media that has already spent the last decade or two, disgracing itself repeatedly, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria to Libya to China to Russia unable to make any trustworthy context of current events.

Even if our own military was making this claim, that is not automatically trustworthy either. It's likely propaganda, just as the WMDs were. You really do not know.

So when you hear reports of a feckless Russian military completely unable to tell which way is North or unable to drop bombs without Google Maps access, and your first response is not skepticism, you aren't paying attention.

Meanwhile, even if you had direct feeds of their comms, do you know which comms are headfakes and which ones are real? Don't be foolish. Russia is one of the most successful nations in military history. We probably would not have won World War 2 without them. You probably do not have them figured out from your Twitter or TikTok feed.

TBF to the 'sitting US congressperson', the Ukraine Ministry of Defense twitter also retweeted the Ghost of Kiev story.

That's what makes it worse: they added an animation knowing full well it wasn't real. I have been disgusted with the level of propaganda coming out of Ukraine that people are blindly accepting. We have been told for years to expect this from Russia, but instead "Baghdad bob" is on our side.

Disgusted? Ukraine are at a very disadvantageous position, being attacked from all directions by a superior ( on paper) military force. Their only hope of winning ( or at least making the Russians lose) is to keep morale high, and have the majority of the population fight and resist actively the invasion. Purely militarily they're screwed, but if their population resists, the Russians have no chance of establishing control. Morale is vital. That's why Zelensky is staying in Kyiv, with grave risk for his life, to keep the spirits up.

With all that in mind, Ukraine needs every possible win it can get on the PR front. Kindergarten bombed? Kharkiv city center shelled indiscriminately? Video of random civilians on a road being obliterated by a missile? They need to tell everyone all of that, so that Ukrainians keep on fighting, and so the world keeps supporting them so there's weapons to fight with. National legends, feel good stories about superhuman successes by legendary men better than us is classic. If they exaggerate or invent some feel good/positive things, it doesn't matter. They're at a war they cannot win on military terms. The ends ( surviving) justifies the means.

What do Twitter or TickTock or any other things you mentioned to do with anything I wrote?

You either have wireless communication or you don't, and you can detect the presence and absence of it using a software defined radio.

Perhaps you were responding to someone else.

>Given the other indicators of disorganization we've had in the last week

What indicators are you referring to?

1) _constantly_ letting armour columns run ahead of the logistical support, so they run out of fuel/food.

2) Some evidence of using clear radio communications because officers are too far away to be contacted

3) no coordination between air and ground

4) Allowing the column advancing to kiev to bunch up like that.

Presumably these?

> reports of them broadcasting in the clear and using text messages for comms.

More details, including recordings, in this thread (I don't speak Russian, so I can't confirm...)

https://twitter.com/sbreakintl/status/1498619309618503680

Some of them are using civilian analog radios with no encryption cause they lack equipment and have problems with long-range communication.

So - yeah.

> but do you really think they would organize and target air strikes with public Google Maps markers?

Troops probably not, but undercover saboteurs couldn't risk to be caught with encrypted devices, radios etc. A tablet with a browser would raise a lot less warnings.

I guess. Or they could use a tablet with a browser and yandex mail or even a popular one I didn't just invent.

We were helping Russian mod organize strikes against isis in Syria by geolocating terrorist photos with Google maps: they were at least using that for interface with civilian spotters.

Yeah, after reading a guide on how places are added to google[1], I'm suspicious. Based on the screenshots there, it looks like it doesn't show up immediately. The guide says "You should receive an email regarding whether or not your submission was accepted within two weeks". Given that the delay could be hours to weeks, why would you bother with public POIs? Why not use my maps[2], which is private and shows up instantly?

[1] https://www.wikihow.com/Add-Places-to-Google-Maps

[2] https://www.google.ca/maps/about/mymaps/

In my experience that "within two weeks" is sort of optimistic anyway. Back before I sort of gave up on improving Google Maps quality, it was very common for changes to either never get approved or to get approved and then reverted immediately or within hours. No explanation was ever provided and it was very hard to tell whether or not a given change was accepted. Things sometimes seemed to take months to get approved. Often corrections to things that were very obvious errors (e.g. marking an empty lot as a medical clinic) were repeatedly accepted and then reverted, probably by some automation running and overwriting POIs again.

Maybe things have radically changed over the last couple of years but I have a really hard time imagining relying on public Google Maps submissions for any purpose at all.

Yeah, I have had very inconsistent approval times, anywhere between 30 minutes and months. Which I found especially annoying when I try to update holiday hours for a shop and got a approval message weeks after the holidays.

I have seen results in minutes, but I've only ever entered updates way out in the country. Perhaps the threshold is lower for lower-traffic areas?

It's fairly standard practice in the military to use Google Earth for air/ground coordination. I would have no doubt that Russia's military uses these same procedures.

If you need evidence that Google Earth is used by militaries then download Google Earth Pro and look in settings. There is a setting for, "Enable MGRS".

Sure, they could use private tags. But it's absolutely not standard practice to use public tags (that also need to be approved, and can be changed, by other google maps users).

Ah, I didn't realize that's what they're doing. That is incredibly stupid opsec.

They probably are not doing that. As others have pointed out, there are major hurdles to doing that.

>>>It's fairly standard practice in the military to use Google Earth for air/ground coordination.

The US doesn't use Google Earth for fire support coordination, especially with combined arms assets (artillery, air, naval fires). We have dedicated software for that.

https://asc.army.mil/web/portfolio-item/advanced-field-artil...

https://dzone.com/articles/war-fighter-netbeans-platform

https://www.raytheon.com/capabilities/products/joint-automat...

This is relatively new then. In 2011, in the Marines, we were using Google Earth.

AFATDS and JADOCS were mature platforms when I learned them, also in 2011! Agile Client is newer to the Corps but has been used by the other services for a while. The problem with open-source geographic information systems is I don't think they are trusted/certified for accurate target mensuration. I don't have a good resource that explains exactly why/what the impacts could be, but I had a guy in the Fires Cell explain it that way once...

Here too: https://support.google.com/maps/thread/152809911/terrorists-...

Somewhat related (note that Google did respond within 3 days):

https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgd7dd/google-maps-live-traf... ("Google Maps Live Traffic Showed the Russian Invasion of Ukraine") (2/24)

https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-temporarily-disabl... ("Google temporarily disables Google Maps live traffic data in Ukraine") (2/27)

Some people might wonder why would Russia use public Google maps to tag places for air strikes. I agree that it is trashy but I have some arguments why it can be real: 1) Many talegram chats has sprang up recently asking the pro-Russian population to physically tag places/do some tasks for money 2) Yandex is not accessible from ukrainian Internet 3) It might be pro Russian volunteers hoping that it will help the Russian army 4) I believe that despite being one of the most powerful army on planet Earth they are quite dumb and inefficient(so does other countries' bureaucratic military, perhaps in a lesser extent). Due to their incompetency they may do strange stuff but it can still harm us and the world

We did this for russia for the Syrian defense from isis by geolocating terrorists based on the pictures they'd release. Still proud of my contributions.

Anyway, I agree with the assessment.

I wonder if it's a violation of Google's ToS to use their services to commit war crimes?

Certainly isn't for facebook

original post was deleted

https://support.google.com/maps/thread/152809911/terrorists-...

https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/t4copf/they_are_us...

Someone with a line to the Maps team should contact them immediately

Done! I hope they can act fast.

There has been a response in another ticket that they're harmless markers that have been around for a while, but it's hard to tell if they actually went through the data to confirm it.

https://support.google.com/maps/thread/152846276?hl=en

That’s not an official response and, honestly, I doubt they went through every single data point to check whether they existed before this week or not.

If I were an idiot planning to use a public product for classified opsec activities, the least I would do is try and make them blend in with existing data to reduce the chances of it being removed for just this purpose.

Heh, "deleted" from the Internet: https://web.archive.org/web/20220301173337/https://support.g...

but either way, I do hope the traditional "Google support via HN frontpage" actually helps in this circumstance, too

I have reports of new pins from (already-shellshocked) locals, and would like to get them removed ASAP.

Is there a contact at google (twitter handles are great) that these suspected locations can be sent to? They cannot be posted publically for obvious reasons.

I have sent a legal request to Google which may be read, but not in time, as Kharkiv is actively being bombarded.

Email in profile, or give instructions below. Thank you.

Wouldn't it suck if it was a false flag complaint and ukrainians were using it to coordinate? I don't envy the google employee that has to make a decision on this.

Reminds me that "military grade x.y.z" is usually vastly inferior to what you get from tech company for the general public.

This is not always the case.

Military grade means things like “works for outside air temperatures between -40 and 120 F” and “will still work being vibrated to hell for decades”.

On the other hand modern tech is like “my cat knocked my Apple Watch on the floor and shattered the screen” and things are generally extremely fragile.

They’re also old. You want things that work for decades, not UIs that change every few months.

This is what people don't get - military grade is not James Bond spy gear that can do a million things in a small package - military grade is something that still has a semblance of working after being beat to shit in storage for twenty years, manhandled by a bunch of gorillas who don't give a damn about it, and blown up and shot at.

A lot of what makes military grade what it is boils down to “we specified every goddamn thing down to how you dot your i’s so soldiers won’t get screwed over by the lowest bidder cutting corners”.

Yes, there is a military specification for (generic) pop tarts which covers how much filling, what’s in it, and how much frosting is applied.

Those specifications come in very important when suddenly you have everyone making pop tarts - or IBM making machine guns.

Or crashed into an underwater mountain without any interruption to the nuclear power plant.

God I would love to be able to buy consumer tech that has a stable UI and can survive the impact of a light breeze. Unfortunately I suspect military purchase prices are a wee bit outside of my price range.

That means the only consumer electronics that can honestly be called military grade are the Nokia cellphone and the Nintendo GameBoy.

One of my favorite TV tropes is hearing "they're using military grade encryption!!!"

I'm still waiting for the movie where the computer character exclaims "Oh no, they appear to have employed a crypto nerd and given him free reign for the last decade! Their systems are so hardened we couldn't get in even if they where to help us!"

I once read a comment chain on this website that went like

> I generally feel like military equipment is of higher quality and will last longer

> I've been involved in military contracts for a long time and the stuff they buy is generally consumer grade, but they have some standard and forced manufacturer for every tiny screw used on the vehicle, driving cost up tenfold without any gain. I don't see the appeal

> so you're telling me there is a standard

And that day I understood why overstock military stuff is so attractive to many buyers: It doesn't change. If you read good receptions about a military backpack or some kind of tooling, you can be dead sure that if you decide to get it, it will be just as nice as the thing in the reports. Because they make sure every pice will be exactly the same, no surprises.

Yup. Military ammo cans on many of the nearby peaks--they hold the logbooks and survive the conditions. One peak that doesn't have an ammo can--every time I've been up there I've found the logbook in a different container.

Military grade = beefy. It doesn't mean high tech.

Post is gone now, but that sounds pretty far fetched. What was the evidence?

In another forum I've seen pictures of so-called Russian 'saboteurs' and their belongings. Lots of SIM cards and ways to get connected. If Google record the IP address, or even the MAC address, of whomever adds to Maps then perhaps they can share that with ISPs so these devices can be monitored or blacklisted.

Google cannot see end device MAC addresses.

And they pretty much use VPNs or burner phones so that's probably a dead end anyway.

Google shouldn't be picking sides in international conflicts like that.

Why not?

They used to explicitly have a "do no evil" slogan. It'd be good if it survives somewhere in their culture for times like these.

>"do no evil"

iirc "don't be"

>used to

they have

Why not? Because if they were to side with the "good", then they should stop serving their own US administration.

The US doesn't have the best track record either(read the worst), but I'd rather them have a "we will not support any belligerent at war" instead of picking a side policy.

I fully expect them to be on the side of the US, always. Why would you think otherwise?

Generally speaking, the current generation of large infra/content providers do not appreciate countries taking advantage of their services to harm their customers and will intervene to negate or deter such actions.

I'd describe that as being aggressively neutral, not picking sides.

https://support.google.com/maps/thread/152809911/terrorists-...

original post was deleted

True or not, it would be sane to send a heads up to other map services (OSM, Apple, etc) so they can be alerted before any misuse.

Eh, the Russians having sloppy opsec on US services is fine with me.

FYI these reports are being escalated very quickly.

> The page you've requested isn't currently available in your language. You can instantly translate any webpage into a language of your choice, using Google Chrome's built-in translation feature.

> This page is no longer available

> Try searching or browse recent questions.

I would probably go back further than 23rd if this is in anyway real.

I suspect that this is an attempt to hide attacks on civilians and/or other protected classes under the Geneva conventions. If you get a attack/bomb/missile destruction photo from a location that's GPS tagged in the photo, a media person verifying the site on Google Maps will get the latest description. If that's a fake farm photo, what would they believe? The photo or GMaps? Unless you have your own boots on the ground, I'd guess GMaps.

Just pointing this out since the violent war criminal running Ukraine is giving out guns to men women and children now (and even prisoners), you don't qualify as a civilian if you shoot back. The only reason Ukraine hasn't already been flattened by Russian bombers and artillery is because of the incredible restraint they are practicing. This isn't some line I heard from Russia today or sputnik or whatever: you can look at their actual war zone and those cities are still standing. Compare that with the Donbas which was turned into a scrap yard within days by Ukrainian shelling 8 years ago.

Hmm... It could be someone warning citizens, but if it's actually used in targeting then maybe place a few on the large convoy?

Airstrikes as a service, it's a new billion dollar idea only from silicon valley. Throw in croudsourced real time satelite identification and I can see a collaberation between Spacex, Google and Facebook really disrupting the face of modern warfare /s

You’re joking but if you send satellites, then ground stations are expensive, and you can rent AWS Ground Station as a service.

And war knows no limit to the business…

Given the number of different factions involved and the apparent use of mercenaries / undercover type operatives i dont think this so far from a possibility in some ways.

Related:I hate to think about it but i have lots of micro controllers, gps receivers, rc receivers and transmitter. Plenty of control system software adapable to many vehicle types. pressure, acceleration, ir, radar sensors..

I think if there is serious prolonged war in modern countries it wont look anything like history.. its as much about what tech is on the go when war breaks out, its what evolves during it.

Confusing, conflicting seemingly too obvious information is all just noise that floods the senses and overloads them.. but doesnt mean to say there isnt a signal in the noise.

i dont know whats going on here, but i think that we are at a stange time in history.

Edit: i am not saying i have any plans or anything, full on pacifist here. i just like rc drones etc. But lots of people have this stuff and its in tons of kids toys too.

Wait, they are using Google Maps not just as an alternative to state-maintaned maps, they use it for communication?

It's cheap, convenient, secure, and (if you have working Internet) Google spends billions on making it reliable.

It's also a major opsec error, if your threat model suggests Google is compromisable by the enemy. What we're observing here suggests either the Russian army doesn't think that's the case or the Russian boots-on-the-ground don't care what the brass thinks about opsec (remember, the Enigma machine was nearly uncrackable state-of-the-art cryptographic hardware in World War II... unless you set the encryption cylinders to HIT and the decryption to LER, of course...)

Re Enigma, I thought the problem was that they ended every message with “Heil Hitler”, not anything about the cylinders.

Not quite, but apparently the first thing they did after switching to new rotor settings each morning was to send a neatly structured weather report.

> unless you set the encryption cylinders to HIT and the decryption to LER, of course...

That doesn't align with my understanding of Enigma's operation or how it was broken.

Enigma is a substitution cipher. There are no "encryption" and "decryption" cylinders. There are just rotors. The rotors start in a known configuration according to a calendar distributed out-of-band. Decrypting a message is the same as encrypting it, but both the encrypting and decrypting machine have to start in the same state.

Enigma was broken in part using frequency analysis (captured machines and codebooks helped). Weather reports had a similar structure and (some?) messages ended with "HH". I don't believe operators in the field got lazy with rotor settings, since that would require coordinated laziness.

Enigma was state-of-the-art but still flawed. Substitution ciphers are fundamentally susceptible to frequency analysis. It would have been broken even without capturing machines and codebooks and even if the Germans had minimized structure in their messages.

I did that from memory, and you're right; I got a lot of the details wrong.

The story I was trying to relate was that hypothetically, the army should have been using a protocol for setting up the cylinders to minimize the breakability of sent messages. In practice in the field, they got sloppy; where radio operators had liberty to choose settings "at random," the randomness started to break down. If the Allied decoders determined, for example, that a message had been sent with initial cylinder config HIT, the next message was almost certainly sent with LER. Same for LON (DON), MAD (RID), BER (LIN), and TOM (MIX).

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2615decoding.html

In contrast, the German navy (particularly the U-boats) worked from a code-book and were nearly unbreakable consistently because the code-book had been generated with pure physical random methods. The books were water-soluble and kept in the captain's quarters; in the event of capture, the captain was to destroy the book. The big break for the naval codes was that the Allies managed to successfully force a U-boat to the surface and during the fighting, the captain was injured and couldn't execute on the destruction protocol; the Allies retrieved the book. The navy was so impressed with itself regarding its code-book solution that when they discovered their codes were consistently broken, they were utterly incredulous that a book could have been acquired and began an internal espionage inquisition.

TIL. My understanding is based on the Navy procedures. I didn't realize the Army's procedures were so different. I thought the only difference between Navy and Army Enigma was the plugboard and number of available rotors but that procedures were the same.

Thanks for the great resource.

E: Reading this transcript I see:

> Since they knew the Enigma would never duplicate a letter in the original, if any pairs of letters did match, the phrase must be in the wrong position. They slid the crib along the message until they found a point where none of the letters were the same. This could be where the phrase was located. If successful, they could then work out the Enigma settings for the next 24 hours.

I wonder if Enigma could have been cracked based on this frequency analysis alone. Presumably the Navy replaced the codebooks after they were compromised, but AFAIK Bletchley Park was able to decipher messages through the end of the war.

In the case of the navy, the beauty of their randomized code book solution was the Achilles heel. Once the code book was compromised, there wasn't any easy way to replace it that didn't involve recalling every ship at sea. A one-time pad is completely worthless if the enemy has the pad, and the code book was essentially a sequence of one time pad entries (sort of; technically, just a sequence of random seeds for an algorithmic encryptor... Point is, if you're compromise would break a one-time pad it will break everything else too).

But hilariously, I'm pretty sure the main thing that dragged out the length of time that the navy codes were broken was the fact that the German admiralty spent more time executing high ranking officers suspected of espionage after the codes were broken than coming up with an actual solution ;)

For some reason I thought the codebooks had a limited life. Something like a month. And that there was a mechanism for distributing these books along with supplies like food and fuel. But I also thought the Army was using them.

The Friedmans in the US routinely decrypted Enigma messages (mostly from South America) without assistance from any bombes or Colossus. Just good old fashioned cryptanalysis.

They even don't use encryption in 2022. Looks awful. https://www.businesstoday.in/latest/trends/story/twitter-pos...

Posted on the official channel of vice PM of Ukraine (the same person who talked with Musk about Starlink), likely related:

>disabled certain Google Maps features in Ukraine to ensure safety of our citizens

https://t.me/zedigital/1202

Is there a chance this is actually Ukrainian volunteers adding these as part of defence setups?

The roof/walls of some buildings in Ukraine have been getting marked with what looks like targeting/geobinding signs - haircross of 3-6ft. I wonder how it correlates with those new Google places.

Why not tag everything programmatically, to throw them off? Just curious..

Note that multiple border crossing points including the ones in Poland shows red or orange in the traffic data. I assume that many people are still trying to reach the neighbouring countries.

Doesn't Russia have their own maps service offered by Yandex?

Google has shown a lot of initiative already in disabling Maps features to prevent their abuse. [1] I have no doubt that the Maps team and its execs will respond to this quickly.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/28/22954426/google-disables-...

Can someone translate "фермерське господарство"?

Farm household. Just Ukrainian official name for a "farm".

is it better to delete the tags and have them move off to alternative methods, or allow them to use the tags so people know where they will strike next?

Third option: quietly adjust the tags.

The people located at the adjusted location might complain about that?

Sure, so pick a) empty fields or b) Russian positions.

Meanwhile, Apple has already taken their steps..

Well, Kiev in the Ukraine will have Russian tanks rolling through any day now, but at least they got OpenStreetMap to throw out its on-the-ground rules and say the Crimea was still part of the Ukraine. The honorary tae-kwon-do black belt Putin got was stripped too.

The Ukrainians were really played as a bunch of saps for the US/UK, and its encouragement of belligerence in the Donbass and in the Ukraine's application to NATO. And the Ukrainians are and will be paying the price for their belligerence and gullibility.

It turns out that virtue signaling only has value in the west. In places with actual fighting going on, the laws if physics win out over wishful thoughts and empty platitudes.

Pretty much this: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ukraines-de...

anyone can confirm that the request has been fulfilled? the link is 404d now

wtf, google? "The page you've requested isn't currently available in your language. You can instantly translate any webpage into a language of your choice, using Google Chrome's built-in translation feature." Like, lol? Just serve it in english or watever language it is in.

I have a feeling, based on the presentation of the errors, that it is no longer available in any languages.

EDIT: mirror -- https://web.archive.org/web/20220301173337/https://support.g...

"><img src=x onerror=confirm (8)>

<h1>satya</h1>

<h1>satya</>

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if they are going to coordinate attacks somehow anyway, isn't it actually better for them to use Google Maps tags so that the public knows where is being targeted next and evacuate?

Why downvotes with not even commenting? I though HN community was more humane.

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