Sure, but the gif doesn’t show 50 knots. The gif doesn’t show any speed actually, so I really don’t know where the 50 number comes from. But on the tracker the speed was 8.1 knots. Fast for a tanker, but totally believable.

The gif shows no data (dimmed icon) from 08:49 UTC to 11:10 UTC so I had my maths wrong and it’s 2 hours 21 minutes, apologies. Still a lot more than 30 minutes. The AIS data also generally comes in less frequently than every minute so there’s some unreliability there.

As I said, according to the current data the ship definitely kept going back up towards the Strait since I posted, so what’s more likely, it kept going on its current course and spoofed its AIS for nearly 12 hours, or that it turned around?

My source is marinetraffic.com. Other AIS trackers also corroborate it.

From the sounds of it the OP and most other articles are based on similar armchair research looking at trackers so I think it’s about as reliable as we’re going to get.

I don’t know where you’re getting any of that from. It was travelling at 8 knots before and after the turnaround. The bit in the animation where it slows and drifts almost due south is actually marinetraffic not having AIS data for that period so it just interpolates between the two known positions. Maybe I should have made that clearer.

That turnaround period is also close to 3.5 (edit: 2.5) hours, not 30 minutes.

According to the same data the ship is now close to the Strait of Hormuz that it passed through yesterday; it seems pretty clear it did not get where it wanted to go.

Everyone is reporting on these ships making it through the strait which is still under Iranian control. Few seem to mention the part in the Gulf of Oman where the US is actually implementing its blockade. The poster child, Rich Starry, mentioned in the article, did this a few hours after clearing the strait, still far from the Arabian Sea:

That sure doesn’t look like a ship breaching a blockade without incident.

It’s too early to say how this will play out on a larger scale but for these specific ships a lot of reporting is really fucking misleading at the moment.

The system is designed to work for most phones released since 2019.

So most phones since 2019 have builtin functionality to blare alarms, show messages on the home screen, and… fuck knows what else… at the sole discretion of the telco?

Curious if anyone here knows more about the mechanism that allows this, presumably it’s some kind of standard? Will custom ROMs work with it or is this another in a long series of fuck yous to anyone daring not to patronise the Bay Area Douche Nexus?

Edit: I see, it’s Cell Broadcast, part of 3G, 4G, 5G, etc. standards. I still wonder about the “un-opt-outable” part; is it just that most phone OSes don’t provide an opt out or is it implemented in firmware somehow? Warning tones I can imagine being wired straight to the drivers, but a visual message seems like it’d have to have OS cooperation.

This definition of social media is new to me as well, thanks for sharing it. This sort of clarifies a term I really dislike, and which you’ve used: “the algorithm”. It’s always seemed a little murky to me which algorithms it refers to. It’s like saying “don’t eat food with chemicals in it”.

Lemmy does have “an algorithm”, it’s just a relatively simple one based on communities one is subscribed to plus some vote/comment data for the various sort orderings.

Lemmy also absolutely implements a social graph – the data about who has interacted with whom is all stored by the system. It’s not explicitly stored as a graph structure, but then we’re arguing database schemas.

As I understand it, however, you’re saying “social media” arises when the “social graph” data structure is used as an input to “the algorithm”. That seems like a pretty robust definition to me.

One bit of pedantry: user blocks on Lemmy are, by a general definition, a form of social graph, and they do affect what content people see. So Lemmy could technically qualify as social media by the definition I’ve written here. I’m not sure what a more precise definition could be that avoids this technicality.