A Chinese company’s publication of AI-enhanced satellite images of US bases in the Middle East is helping Iranian forces identify targets, US intelligence believes.
The ABC has been briefed on the intelligence by a source inside US defence, who says the images are endangering lives.
Chinese geospatial artificial intelligence and software company MizarVision, which the Chinese government has a small ownership stake in, has been publishing detailed satellite images with tagging data of multiple US military sites in the lead-up to, and during, the Iran war.
The imagery showcases an AI tool that identifies and tags military forces across vast areas, a capability that once required the resources of a national intelligence agency.
Good to know that Russia isn’t helping its allies with their intelligence. In that case Trump would be very upset, if he could think.
Not surprised at all. Don’t fucking pretend China was not in game…
both russia and china specifically, they both have satellites.
common China W
Lemmy get this straight. The Trump admin was fine with satellite data being shared for all these years and then they commit a warcrime where the data is used to verify it indeed was a warcrime and now they want satellite data banned.
HMMMMMMMMMM
Horrors. China is doing something the USA thinks only they are allowed to do.
“Endangering lives”? Iran striking US bases will almost certainly lead to fewer lives lost.
HumanAmerican lifes.
Oh no! Anyway…
And? Who gives a fuck. I would expect China and Russia to help Iran. Why wouldn’t they?
I do give a fuck. I’m glad they do because the only way I see for long term stability in that region, which affects my and my family’s life in multiple ways, is for the US to lose the war as badly as possible.
Short term stability for sure, but I don’t think Russia has been able to provide any more long term stability to anyone better than the US can. China maybe, but we haven’t really seen this version of China show their true colors to a nation they don’t consider part of their original borders.
Oh I’m considering this from the perspective of the regional reason for instability which for a while now has been Israel. For long-term stability, Israel should face mutually-assured-destruction from Iran without the promise of unlimited weapons and interceptors from US. Israel should also face existential threat from Iran if they expand in to neighbouring countries, like they’re currently doing in Lebanon. If the US-Israel military command causes significant economic pain in the US, I think the US public opinion would force the US to break from Israel, which should usher the conditions I’m envisioning - of Israel facing Iran and the region alone, and perhaps even without unlimited US weapons. Def not the only possibility, but the one I think would make things a lot less explosive over the long haul.
E: I think China might push Iran to settle with the US in order to halt the economic destruction that would affect them too, possibly in exchange for greater economic China-Iran cooperation despite US sanctions.
I think were pretty screwed either way. If they ramp down, Iran sees them as an existential threat and ramps up nuke capability, but now with less sanctions and more money. Iran with nukes makes Israel more twitchy as they see it as an existential threat.
If USA ramps up, we’re in for a long protracted war and instability.
So we’re screwed either way.
I think middle east would be much much safer with iran having nukes
Lol, no. The world is safer with less nukes. Allowing Israel to get nukes was a failure of the international community.
Allowing Ukraine to face repurcussions for giving up their nukes was another failure.
No. Look at DPRK
Iran must have nukes for stability and safety of the region
I think Israel, without unlimited weapons backing of the US (a condition I think would occur if the US loses badly) would stop casual strikes against Iran. They would know they risk a barrage of missiles that they don’t have the interceptors for. And if Iran gets the nuke, then MAD would be in effect. Israel seeing Iran as an existential threat now, not in the future would sit tight and perhaps even open a dialogue. The problem today is they consider Iran a threat in the future. And mind you they don’t consider them a threat so much to Israel today than to their plans for expansion in Lebanon, West Bank, Syria and so on.
I think it’s that they realize peak oil is over. The middle east is a geopolitical strategic position for energy, as the world is now finding out via Iran closing the SoH.
Israel realised that that is on the wane. Along with the next generations attitude towards their relationshipnwith Israel. Israel is going hard in now as they have a larger support from the USA. I fully expect that to naturally wind down due to internal US political change and global moves away from carbon fuel.
Sure, oil shocks would still bite, but nowhere near to the same level. It’s why the other oil production states are desperately trying to pivot to other industries. Iran has screwed that by making them unsafe. America doesn’t realize that by not protecting their allies there, in the same way they protect Israel, that they will lose them. Edit:typos
Yeah… ok fair point
The USA already doesn’t have a win condition, but the only way for longterm stability would be something like Iran getting EU membership which isn’t on the table. The solution with the least harm would be for the USA and other NATO allies to help the Iranians overthrow the despots and cut ties with China. The worst possible outcome is like 40% of Iranians die, Israel claims land, and the IRGC stays in power, which is pretty close to your idea of the best outcome.
The solution with the least harm would be for the USA and other NATO allies to help the Iranians overthrow the despots and cut ties with China.
Disagree. A democratic Iran with 90 million population, and presumably no sanctions, is a growth powerhouse that produces loads of things, among which loads of weapons. For Israel’s security apparatus, that’s a country one “bad” election away from launching a lot more weapons at them. That’s something which Israel will not let stand. Which is also why they are so obviously not going for regime change but instead for inducing a failed state that’s ungovernable, can’t organize production, won’t have sanctions lifted, would perpetually have insurgency that can be bombed at will, or in technical terms mow the lawn.
There’s no outcome other than diminished US or Israeli power, or both, that would produce stability in the region given Israel’s ambitions and US interests in the region.
As for the Iranian people, their only hope for better life can come from internal struggle against their gov’t over time that would be made a whole lot easier if their economic situation is made better through lifting of sanctions, or if sanctions remain - through massively increased trade with China. (Cause the more resources people have, the more they have left to organize as change does not come through magic and spontaneous revolutions are a fantasy.) If the EU is smart, they would drop their sanctions against Iran. Which is actually plausible if more shit keeps hitting the fan and their oil supply does not resume, which could force them to break ranks with the US on this.
Apparently the mods don’t like me talking about male genitalia, so I’ll rephrase.
You can’t expect to be taken seriously while being an anti-democracy advocate.
Aaalright then. I think we’re done here.
Removed by mod
help the Iranians overthrow the despots
The time to do that was before bombing hundreds of Iranian children. And civilian infrastructure. Way too late now.
Are you expecting me to defend the Trump Admin? It’s never too late so long as the IRGC holds power, but yes he’s made it a lot harder for us to accomplish positive change.
No I’m just saying you might as well give up on that dream - the regime will have more support than ever, now.
We’re discussing hypothetical outcomes, I doubt any one of the suggestions in this thread will have any real world impact but remaining silent would be stupid.
The solution with the least harm would be for the USA and other NATO allies to help the Iranians overthrow the despots and cut ties with China.
Only if you don’t take into account harm for Iranians in your idea of “harm.” What you’re describing is basically what happened in Libya.
Iranians were starving and being shot to death in the streets even before the war, continuing the war until the USA admits defeat will also lead to undue suffering. The only system of representing Iranian citizens is a democracy which is the furthest from their current organization.
Are you not capable of learning from history? Again, you could’ve said the same thing about Libya. Does Libya in 2026 look like a thriving democracy to you? Then why do you want to do the same thing in Iran?
Revolution does not always result in democracy, but democracy is still the best system for protecting health and happiness of the majority of people.
Libya now is still better off than Libya under Gaddafi.
Libya now is still better off than Libya under Gaddafi.
What the actual fuck. Holy dear Jesus. That’s a wild take if I ever saw one.
What. The. Fuck? Libya under Gaddafi didn’t have fucking slave markets you can’t be fucking serious. Also foreign countries dropping bombs isn’t a “revolution” anymore than Soviet-backed regimes in Eastern Europe were revolutionary.
Wait until ABC finds out where all of Iran’s guns and munitions are made.
I don’t know how much they have left of what Ronald Reagan sold them, oops, sorry Oliver North
Wait until ABC finds out China sells a fuck ton of green tech like EVs, solar, and BESS.
Fuck China, threat to human life on earth
Found the fascist.
They don’t have to be a fascist to have a bad take.
No but generally the people that cry the hardest about communism and its threat to
profithumanity are indeed fascists.Chinese aren’t real communists, they’re red fascists. They’ve got a more powerful oligarchy ruling class than the USA ever has.
For people who don’t know, china doesn’t have satellite imagery with the same spatial resolution as the private companies like planet labs (the one recently prohibited to publish imagery from the war region) do , but they have been investing a lot into super-resolution technology to compensate. This is much more interesting than it can look at a first glance.
Super-resolution as using generative models to “enhance” subresolution images with enough of the right training data?
Oh, that kind of super-resolution has been gaining media attention, but there’s much more beyond the “ai”. There are several mathematical methods, based on inverting a point-spread-function, statistical methods, super-resolution based on extracting subpixel information from a sequence of low resolution images, and several other methods and approaches, including the use of machine learning, but not in the generative way. It’s a very diverse and complex field of research
super-resolution based on extracting subpixel information from a sequence of low resolution images
So basically DLSS for spy satellites. Kinda neat.
DLSS is essentially an advanced interpolation algorithm, it makes a guess of what should be in between two know pixel values. This can be very useful for human operators who need to look at the data. It also has the advantage that you only need a trained model and one image frame at a time. Some ‘superresolution’ methods essentially do this, but ideally you don’t use this until after you’ve applied mathematically correct techniques.
Superresolution methods exist in many forms. Basically all of them require either some prior knowlegde (or assumption) of what you’re looking at or it takes a lot of data. But once you have this, you can go beyond the optical resolution of your system in a mathematically correct way, you don’t have to guess!
Some examples:
- Lens correction: it’s possible to determine how imperfections in your lens affect the image, then correct for this. With this prior lens knowledge your images will be nearly as good as those from a theoretical perfect lens. However, you’re still limited by the (diffraction limit) laws of physics, regardless of how (im)perfect your lens is.
- Deconvolution: from physics it’s known how light diffracts (bends) and how this leads to optical limitations. Through deconvolution you can undo this. This takes a lot of guess work to find the correct solution, but once you have the solution, you can check that it’s mathematically correct (it’s a bunch of fancy integrals).
- Using information of multiple pixels v1: if an object in your image consists or more than one pixel, you have more information to determine where exactly this object is. If you know the shape of the object (e.g. a circle) you can make a fit to it and determine some properties extremely accurately (e.g. the circle center of a 1 μm particle can routinely be determined to a 10 nm resolution by a microscope that has an optical resolution of 200 nm). This method requires prior knowledge of the shape! Planes and oil storage tanks have known shapes…
- Using information of multiple pixels v2: theoretically you just need more information to go beyond the optical resolution. This can be done by taking many images (from slightly different positions?) of the same field of view. I don’t know how this works, but I have no doubt that there are people doing this.
No, not exactly. More like how astrophotographers will stack images to compensate for imaging defects. After all, the Hubble was a variant of an NSA spy satellite.
US is learning the hard way what “soft power” means, and what it means to lose it.
They’re close to the “learning” part but, if the news is any indicator, they’re still a ways off.
Something about horses and water.
Tbf the US never had that much power, soft or otherwise, over China. The US is (very fortunately) hemorrhaging soft power, but even if they weren’t China would be jumping at this opportunity.
I don’t think it’s so much about US having soft power over China. I agree they have always been highly resistant to it. The important bit is that Chinas soft power is growing faster than probably any nation’s has since post WW2 US while US hemorrhages what little they have left in the coffers.
I don’t present this as a good thing uniformly, because China is certainly capable of becoming fascist in a single generation too. I think this sort of power in general is problematic.
Russia and China watch US pull a Ukraine and now have an extremely cost-effective way of harming or outright destroying US assets similar to US dumping its spare power into the Ukraine conflict.
They’d be fools not to take advantage of the opportunity, but not nearly as foolish as we were for entering this pointless war in the first place.
The ABC has been briefed on the intelligence by a source inside US defence, who says the images are endangering lives.
I see. The images are endangering lives. Not the moronic decision to start a war, no no.
“Only we can kill!”
Well thats too bad.
Everyone had a nice easter? I hope you guys have monday off as well. I’m eating some crisps and watching DankPods
Based comment, have an upvote good Sir and a splendid easter!
Breaking news: Iran’s allies help them against an invading force.
