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This video is about bricks.
Now, when it comes to producing bricks, there are three main methods: molding, dry-pressing,
and extruding, each of which has its own benefits and drawbacks that should be carefully considered
as you select the right bricks for your personal brick-laying projects.
Now, extruded bricks are, without a doubt, the workhouse brick.
They’re formed by forcing a clay mixture through a special piece of equipment called
a die, resulting in bricks that are strong, light, and relatively cheap—but, and here’s
the big but—that have rough faces that need to be covered up.
If you’re looking for a show brick, dry-pressed is the way to go, because… ok there’s
no way the feds would sit through all that.
We’re safe now.
Today we’ll be spilling some government secrets, or should I say, we’ll be talking
about someone else who spilled government secrets.
So we’re not so much doing spilling, as we are taking the spill and… um… pouring
that spill into your… cup… of knowledge.
This is a good metaphor, right?
Anyways, this is Strava: it’s fitness app that tracks and shares your runs, bikes, swims,
skis, kayaks, ice skates, and even kitesurfing sessions, in case you want to show off.
And this is the Strava Heat Map, a big, beautiful, and only somewhat terrifying map that shows
where Strava’s tens of millions of users across the world have been going on their
bikes and runs and walks and kite-surfs.
And this is a secret military base in Yemen that I am definitely not supposed to know
about.
And if you’re wondering if the giant movement-tracking map and the me knowing about a secret military
base are correlated: congratulations, you’re officially smarter than the entire development
team at Strava who apparently didn’t consider that possibility at all before they released
the map to the public in 2018.
You see, it turns out military officers like working out, and they like using Strava to
track those workouts, and they also apparently really like forgetting to turn off the public
data sharing option on Strava, which allows the app to track those workouts and then publish
them to a giant publicly-available global map.
The problem started to gain media attention in January of 2018, about two months after
the map was published, when a 20-year-old Australian college student started posting
on twitter that he’d managed to find the locations of secret military bases across
the world, which seems like a great way to get new followers—both on twitter and in
real life.
Turned out, identifying the bases was pretty simple: the patterns would nearly always look
like this—a ton of activity all happening in the same little loop in the middle of an
otherwise deserted area which either meant that there were farmers who really loved going
into the middle of the desert to do a workout where they run around the same jagged half-mile
loop a few dozen times, or that there were soldiers stationed there who were running
within the confines of a base.
As much as farmers do love running desert laps, that second suspicion seemed more likely
once people started cross-referencing the heat map with previous reporting and were
able to confirm that, in fact, you could see the movements of soldiers at supposedly secret
military bases like this Italian base in Djibouti, or this US base in Syria, or this US base
in Syria, or even this other US base in Syria.
Now, this was all bad for a few reasons.
First of all, obviously, it was a problem for secret bases because they’re supposed
to be, you know… secret.
A secret base that people know about is like a Wendover video without planes—it’s completely
pointless—but even at known bases, the Heat Map was a huge security breach, because it
showed soliders’ patrol routes and common transportation paths between bases, which
is exactly the type of place you would want to stage an attack if you were the attack-staging
type.
The problem got even worse with the realization that Strava displays the top 10 runners or
bikers for each route by age and gender group, giving military adversaries the opportunity
to not only compete with their enemies for the fastest times, but also to discover their
names.
But here’s where things get really scary: with some coding ability, it was even possible
to scrape the site’s data and potentially track the same user across routes.
One guy on twitter claimed that he had managed to track a single French solider from deployment
overseas all the way to his home in France, which would, in theory, allow someone to send
that solider mail—like a present.
Or, you know, like… the opposite of a present.
Now, things weren’t as bad as they could have been—the maps didn’t show any sort
of real-time data, nor did it show when runs were done, and everything on the map was an
aggregate of data from the past 2 years.
Also, to be fair to Strava, there was an option to opt out of publicly sharing data, which
soldiers apparently forgot to select.
In response to the Strava scandal, the US military said they would re-examine their
policies on what types of personal fitness trackers soldiers were permitted to use, with
an eye towards fitness technology that doesn’t use the internet—which is bad news for Strava,
but great news for Wii Fit Yoga.
Now, if you’re thinking about setting up a giant fitness tracking map that doesn’t
reveal sensitive national security information, you’ll need to host it on a cool URL—maybe
something like mapthatwontgetyoukilledbycia.com, which you could buy on hover.com.
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