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Cake day: February 6th, 2026

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  • apparia@discuss.tchncs.detoPrivacy@lemmy.mlIs GPS private?
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    20 days ago

    My first answer is “WTF is RTK?”; my answer after consulting Wikipedia is “no, they’re separate things”.

    RTK doesn’t sound like it broadcasts any data out but I barely understood what I just read. The Wikipedia coverage on this whole topic seems rather poor quality, I don’t think it’s just because I’m dumb.


  • apparia@discuss.tchncs.detoPrivacy@lemmy.mlIs GPS private?
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    20 days ago

    It’s not as clear-cut as most people here are saying.

    In short, GPS itself is just listening to satellites, and nothing is leaked that way, but most modern phones use “Assisted GPS” of some sort. The most common (I believe) AGPS is SUPL, which seems to be used by most phones. This involves sending your approximate location to an Internet server, which returns satellite data based on that approximate location.

    To nobody’s surprise, in Android this is a Google server. I’m pretty sure most Android distros don’t give you any control over when it’s used, or which servers it uses. Anecdotally, my phone without Google Play services has a horrible time obtaining a GPS fix, so I suspect without GPlay it’s only using raw GPS, but I’ve not bothered to actually dig into it.

    As I understand it, SUPL means even if you’re in aeroplane mode, if you have an Internet connection over WiFi you might still be leaking (approximate) location data when using GPS.

    I learned about this from this excellent series of blog posts, which is a very thorough comparison of various Android ROMs’ privacy. It has a background section (search for “Assisted GPS”) in each of the ROM-specific posts which explains it better than I can.


  • It’s the wall on the right – in the wide version (from felesteen.news) it’s all the same blue colour, and a corner, whereas in the Reddit version it’s a white concrete pillar with no corner.

    At the very least, someone’s done some infilling on one of them. My most charitable guess was that someone at the news site decided to “punch up” the image for an article header, but the third version and its timing make me think Occam’s razor is the way to go here.



  • apparia@discuss.tchncs.detopics@lemmy.worldnothing is out of the ordinary, citizen
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    21 days ago

    Nice find, kind of damning. That version has a totally different wall on the right side to the version posted here, it also seems to be from a slightly different angle. This screams AI manipulation – if not outright fabrication – of at least one of those images. Doesn’t necessarily mean they’re both fake, but a pretty big red flag.

    Comparison


  • I was gonna say it on the last thread but, before we start appropriating this image as a political symbol as you’ve done here, should someone… maybe… source it slightly better than “Reddit”? There’s plenty of evidence that the school was blown up, but this specific image – conveniently well-framed and poignant – cropped up very quickly on a few random social media accounts, with no photographer attributed, and as far as I know hasn’t actually been verified at all.