Using PostgreSQL for military geoanalytics tasks | Hacker News Reader

Using PostgreSQL for military geoanalytics tasks

klioba.com

183 pointsPaulHoule14 comments

Out of the selected topic, the technical context is amazingly well written and the analysis is strong.

PostGIS usage and optimizations are well detailed and I really liked the various options exploration and index explanation and implementation by samples.

Thanks a lot for sharing.

I wonder what the Russian military has to say about publicly available map data while they are at war. Like, I wonder if it's hard to keep the data set accurate if there are military interests to have that exact type of data hidden especially for instance near the border with Ukraine. OSM allows community editing right, so how does OSM deal with that too?

I don't think this is anything novel about the ukraine conflict. Any conflict within the last decade or so would have dealt with the same issues.

Military assets are so large and populated, it seems incredibly challenging to not leak this level of information.

There was a story[0] about a military base that was revealed because soldiers would track their runs/workouts with GPS watches. Which is completely ignoring the resources available to nation states (satellites, hacked telecom infrastructure, or just bribes for data).

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

To clarify a bit. The worry was not so much it was showing where a military base was as it was reveling details interior to a base that are intentionally not on a map and leaking details on where people moved and concentrated. Honestly, like the parent said, probably harmless info for the most part. But it is an additional set of data points that could be useful to an attacker.

I don't think it's indeed possible to hide a military base in the modern world anymore. Even a sufficiently motivated citizen can track them with the various public channels so for nation states it's even easier.

On the subject of Russia, it's such a studied country that I'm convinced there's intelligence actors which have a better view on the exact state of their own military than themselves.

Since you're not calling Russia a nation state, does it mean it can't track various public channels?

They can but I doubt it's any useful when the almighty dictator won't ever listen any bad news on the state of their own army. Getting the data isn't the issue here, we're on a dictatorship paradox.

Anybody involved with OSM? Just the other day I was wondering if there were any deceptive information campaigns targeting the map. It would make a good article if there were.

Is there some legal or moral significance of underlining that the occupation is _temporary_ ? Is _permanent_ occupation somewhat more justified or what?

Military matters often have additional considerations to the legal and moral ones that preoccupy your mind. Hence there is, obviously, much significance.

It’s temporary because the occupiers are going to be sent home in bags if they don’t leave of their own accord.

Calling a place permanently occupied is pretty much the same as giving up on it.

https://archive.is/RQlHH

This is the craziest post I have read in a while

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