I find this report in NewScientist (3 July 2021) disturbing:
But last week, on 19 June, an international vessel-tracking system appeared to show HMS Defender and the Royal Netherlands Navy’s HNLMS Evertsen travel across the Black Sea to sail within a few kilometres of a Russian naval base at Sevastopol.
This would have been a provocative act, but the voyage never actually happened – both ships remained docked at Odessa, Ukraine, as confirmed by a live web cam feed. The tracking readings seem to have been faked, in a possible cyberattack.
The readings in question come from the Automatic Identification System (AIS), which is required on all ships by international law. It transmits position data from the vessels’ GPS along with an ID and other details at regular intervals. But GPS can be fooled by a transmitter imitating a GPS satellite and sending false information, which would in turn result in incorrect AIS tracks.
Sure, the title of the post is a bit of black humor, since military forces are forever looking for a step up on adversaries. But, at least in this article, the perpetrator – or bug – has not been identified, so we don’t really know if this is a military intrusion, or some agent of chaos trying to mess with the world for their own purposes.
All of which leaves us … where? To some extent, I’m in a black mood because of this Andrew Sullivan podcast, which basically suggests that we’re finished. Sullivan does tend to be emotional and forgets that not everyone has the information he has, so when psyops are deployed by the far-right, some folks will be mislead. And the podcast is from last December; how he reacted to the January 6 insurrection should be interesting.
But right at the moment, it seems like reality, like truth itself, is cracking up in the face of forces malicious.
