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Comment by playpause | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know if this is true. But to everyone dismissing the idea that a military would ever use Google Maps to co-ordinate, you may have missed some news stories about what a shitshow the first few days of the Russian invasion has been. Major breakdown of their digital systems and lots of improvisation.

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> what a shitshow the first few days of the Russian invasion has been. Major breakdown of their digital systems and lots of improvisation.

can we corroborate this with chinese and/or non-western media? it’s hard for me to believe anything at all during a war.

I'm extremely sceptical too - but it's pretty much well known by now that they intended to do a 'special operation' - lasting 2-3 days and hoping for Ukraine to surrender. Didn't really happened that way.

Also, Chinese media don't show any images of war as far as I know (just reading Global Times from time to time to have an opinion from 'the other side')

Western media this time is pretty much on point. It doesn't mean that the media has become better. It is just that their standard narrative of bad Russia has this time really matched and even got exceeded by the reality as Russia is actually waging criminally atrocious and completely unprovoked and unjustified war while the Ukrainians are really fighting it tooth and nail. The Ukrainians' current most important victory is the failure of the Russian Blitzkrieg. While Russians are pressing and bringing a lot of hardware it is very clear that they don't get even one tenth of the expected bang for the buck while Ukrainians' resistance is growing.

For people with Ukrainian and/or Russian language the raw sources like Telegram work nice. I initially used the sources very actively to cross-reference Ukrainian TV, and it was checking fine for me, so i mostly settled on the Ukrainian TV. Russian TV is even not in the ballpark of the truth, it is even not on the same planet.

> Western media this time is pretty much on point.

how do you know this?

> so i mostly settled on the Ukrainian TV

these the same guys that said the ghost of kiev is a real thing (it’s not)? or that the soldiers of snake island died (they didn’t)?

Ukrainian state media did publish that Snake island defenders may be alive soon after Russian claims.

I think it is fair to hold media to high standards, but shouldn't we cut them just a little slack if their country is literally being invaded right now?

For the record, I personally know I can trust that last part because I have friends and relatives living in the east of Ukraine (none of whom are particularly politically biased either way, they have kids and want the attacks to end). I cannot report any wild rampage and killing of innocent civilians, but I can definitely confirm the invasion, the soldiers and military equipment, the inability to leave the city, blown up bridges and train tracks, people hiding in basements for days, explosions, etc.

They never said they died. I remember reading something on the line of "we had no communications since and assume they are probably dead".

I never claimed Ukrainian media said they died.

After your comment I checked Wikipedia sources and it turns out they did report something along those lines[0]. But again, cut them some slack.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20220225021042/https://www.pravd...

this is why you do cross-check, and need to understand the limits on the precision of realtime war info. A lot of info has significant fuzziness and consumption of it is an active process. For the snake island there was information that communication got lost at some point during the battle, and they stated that most probably all the guys died. It wasn't intentional disinformation, and that is the key difference from Russian TV. For the ghost of Kiev - the planes got shot down, while who shot down - was it the same guy or not - is very hard to find out until military gives you that, and i wouldn't hold it against the TV people who built this legend without waiting for full confirmation or denial - again you need to understand there they can get carried away and why.

For contrast, to illustrate what disinformation is - Russian TV continue to claim non-attacking of civilians while you can easily find huge number of videos (which you can easily cross-check/geolocate/etc.) of civilian targets being attacked.

> i wouldn't hold it against the TV people who built this legend without waiting for full confirmation or denial - again you need to understand there they can get carried away and why.

I think it’s entirely reasonable to hold journalists to some standards that include “not making shit up and then reporting on it”.

I can be (and am) simultaneously sympathetic to their side but not to their journalistic actions in this case.

Sorry if this sound sharp, but let's discuss this after you spend some quality time performing journalistic or editorial duties while your country is being invaded in real time.

have some empathy, man. Imagine you're being bombed and then a Mig-29 of your AirForce comes and shoots down the attackers. And then bombing terror starts again and the Mig-29 comes and saves you again, and then the bombing terror starts again ... In such situation most people wouldn't be able to preserve any coherency to their thoughts and words at all, while those journalists still lead those war information TV marathons for hours.

Chinese? For real? Why the fuck would they be impartial?

who said anything about impartial?

Its a rather simple situation, they would never publish this if true, and wouldn't publish this if false. Period. Nothing to "ask for sources about". Simply choose which you belief or don't make a choice.

But please don't suggest lack of Chinese sources is a relevant data point.

There are no impartial media.

This is a cheap argument because it builds on a false premise. Because there are also no impartial humans. It makes it sound like the onus is 100% on the media to always proof it's correctness which is a fallacy. You need several things

1) best intention from the media to be unbiased

2) minimum level of intelligence to spot bias and question the motivation by the reader

3) trust from the reader in the media that they're not willfully misled

4) trust from the media to the reader that they put things into the correct context within their own belief system

even one has (hypothetically) all of those, the audience will still be bitten by not sharing the same historic data and personal experience to put things into identical context as was available to when the info was produced. then there is the time-lag from when it gets written/published/read that distorts.

The point is to have both sides of the story, I for one have been tu ing in to Russia Today knowing is their propaganda but its damn interesting.

China is a close ally of Russia and does not have much media freedom.

I do not know why you think it would be worth listening to anything they claim.

african media then? or maybe middle east?

What exactly are you looking for? Your comments make it sound as if you are shopping for a different truth.

Japan's media doesn't seem to have a very different perspective:

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/

South Africa; similar stories and conclusions as most of the world:

https://www.netwerk24.com/beeld/aktueel

This Lebanese newspaper has an interesting take on how the Western media coverage is using double standards (perhaps a valid point), but nowhere do they dispute the current event:

https://lebanonews.net/En/2022/02/27/double-standards-wester...

Taiwan then?

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2022/03/02/2...

yes, shopping for confirmation from non-western media.

thanks for the links.

South China Morning Post has its biases but it's good reading. Recent articles on the war and Chinese opinion:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3168998/ho...

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3169021/china-told-u...

thank you, i used to read SCMP in the past, forgot about it.

it's a fact that Russia uses COTS equipment for comms. Nothing to corroborate when this info is all over and from different independent sources.

edit: toned down the rantiness & add sources:

https://twitter.com/mil_in_ua/status/1497961913292001283

https://twitter.com/sbreakintl/status/1498619303717142529

thanks for toning it down and the sources

The rest of the world is using twitter & tiktok to get real time intelligence so why not. One could, for example, tell those sympathetic to you to use "hastag military installation blow it up" and tag it on social media and within a few hours the circling bomber get the coordinates and boom.

Same, I don't know if it's true that they are marks for Russian air strikes. But I've just tried and it does look weird (farms in the middle of the city).

beside the large painted marks on the roofs/etc., on Ukranian TV 10 minutes ago they shown some marks which are kind of plastic stick-on 1 inch square with the same cross-in-circle image. The stick-on are reflective and have numbers. Some people think it is a mark of the houses with police, military residents, etc...

Those plastic reflective stickers are supposedly local tools for land measurement.

Do you mean survey markers/targets? Theyre used in civil construction etc to track changes relative to an established datum https://www.berntsen.com/Surveying/Smart-Targets-Datums-Refl...

looks like it. There had some time ago been warning that some civil markers may be mistaken for suspicious one, and looks like that is what happening in this case. Sent them email about these ones.

It would be very suprising if those are marks for air raids. Most likely it is a troll doing it (proper troll, for "fun"). Or official psyops ofcourse to mess with peoples heads.

Spotters might very well use Google map to get coordinates but to communicate that via Google Maps itself would be strange. I don't see how fire control would not want to know what they are marking for prioritisation.

While I don't have more information and sources apart from an insta story from a smart girl from Dnipro, I don't see the appearance of 10 closed farms in the industrial city beliavable.

I requested more info, but she is likely sleeping.

Check my other, more detailed comment - farm's address is rarely in a place where farm is actually located. Farm land is just an asset of a company, which is registered elsewhere. If this is a small, family owned business, it makes sense that they register it in their home (to simplify paperwork), while their farm land is somewhere outside of town.

Checking the points I get on gmaps (following your instructions) and then googling these farms, they seem to be real businesses, and the address matches what gmaps give me. First point I get can be checked on [1].

[1] https://youcontrol-com-ua.translate.goog/catalog/company_det...

Today I ran across a tweet from before the war about corruption in Russian comms procurement: https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1184964805565792257

Arsalov arrested: https://warsawinstitute.org/deputy-chief-russias-general-sta...

It seems likely that corruption has left them with a non-working system. It happens often enough even in Western procurement.

The BBC got access to a lost tablet used by some Wagner group mercenaries in Libya and the map they use doesn't seem to be Google maps : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/8iaz6xit26/the-lost-tablet-...

https://twitter.com/sbreakintl/status/1498619303717142529

apparently some of Russian forces are using unencrypted civilian analog radio

Since SE079 (cellphone) is was very common in swiss army when I was in service, I would not be surpriced, if they don't use google services and so on today too.

C.f. the US military removing the degradation of the civilian GPS during the first gulf war due to a lack of military receivers.

Actually, I have been trying to find some good in-depth sources. If you can share, I'd be much obliged.

Here why they are using civilian walkie talkies:

https://twitter.com/sbreakintl/status/1498619303717142529?t=...

If those comms are cleartext, that also means its possible to start sending disinformation.

Start talking about hold-ups at cross-roads that are clear. Tell them about shortcuts that actually lead through marshes. Tell them "the attack we discussed earlier will actually happen 43 minutes earlier". Tell them, "hey we have run out of food here". Tell them, I heard that 10 miles back they are serving hot food, damn I wish I was there.

Just fuck with their comms, making them either make wrong decisions, demoralize them, or make them abandon these comms for something even worse.

Well, the word was already out before I posted this ofc.

But I would have hoped that this was kept a secret and that I didn't knew about this.

> If those comms are cleartext, that also means its possible to start sending disinformation.

This is a classic confusion of authentication and encryption. We can hear what they're saying (which is useful), but that doesn't mean we can pretend to be them.

The comms have neither authentication nor encryption. So at least on a technology level it is very possible to transmit.

I doubt they have robust enough authentication to determine whether you really are supposed to be speaking. Likely they won't believe you, but they will also start doubting, in general, messages sent over the channel. That means being less sure the actual authentic messages are to be believed.

It's more about disrupting their faith in the comm system, rather than about having them believe your falsehoods.

I’ve put some thoughts in edit on this. What do you think?

You're probably right about undercover saboteurs; they don't want to be caught with military/unusual equipment, so the use of normal phones/tablets and related apps makes sense. In doubt, the harm done by deleting those and similar marks if they're innocuous is nothing compared to the benefits if they're really made by saboteurs. Better they remove them ASAP and keep the attention for other that might surface. I'd also alert other maps service providers. If Ukraine still has enough control over the cellular network data, and Google degraded connections to their maps service in the area to plain http (so no port 443), deep packet inspection from the Ukrainian govt could reveal if someone is adding marks and near which tower.

> In doubt, the harm done by deleting those and similar marks if they're innocuous is nothing compared to the benefits if they're really made by saboteurs.

You waste energy and time.

There is an insane amount of paranoia in Ukraine (for good reasons ...) and it would not suprise me if the blue-on-blue events are a bigger problem than civilian sabouteurs themselves.

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