North Korea says its new spy satellite photographed White House, Pentagon

DolphinMath@slrpnk.net to World News@lemmy.world – 95 points – North Korea says its new spy satellite photographed White House, Pentagon
reuters.com

After decades of satellite surveillance by foreign governments and analysts, North Korea has sent its first spy satellite on a global orbit with a message to the world: we can watch you too.

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Yo Kim you can get that shit on Google maps

Here look this is a north Korea concentration camp

https://maps.app.goo.gl/3dKoAwC1Kp26M7Xf9

Google even posts the hours that the camp is open

And mentions that it has no reviews yet

They really should beef up their social media presence. Get some influencers posting reviews.

It's fucking surreal to see not only this, but the amount that Google knows about Pyongyang. I did try to get directions to the concentration camp lol

It even knows it has a wheelchair accessible entrance!

Why the hell is there a villa just south of there called Residenza presidenziale Simone e Vincenzo

After investigation, it was discovered that their top hackers had simply shown Kim maps.google.com

No it was much more than that, they embedded it in a NK government web page. It took a while to figure out how to get the Google Maps API key working.

"I'm sorry sir, it's... Slightly different than it was last time, but the support pages haven't been updated."

So basically the new North Korean spy satellite can pull pictures from google earth?

Yes Kim... Yes... Very good. Congratulations on achieving what every other country could do for the past 30 or more years. I'm sure he's feeling very accomplished...

And like he wasn't already getting pictures from the Chinese and the Soviets, lol.

This is impressive if they didn't get help from Russia or China.

Most of these technologies are not easy to create for nation without education and resources.

NK is saying they are progressing and that I find better than being dependent on other countries.

They're known to just kidnap useful people, you don't need much to do that.

NK is saying they are progressing and that I find better than being dependent on other countries.

In what universe would this be a good thing?

I mean, they weren’t even trying until pretty recently.

I feel like most people have no clue most of the history of NK. They pretty much fell out of most peoples heads after the Korean War. They didn’t even start trying to build nukes until after Bush essentially threatened to invade them with his axis of evil speech. They were significantly more developed than the south until either the 80s or 90s, and if we hadn’t threatened them to where they feel the need for constant Sabre-rattling, it’s unlikely that they would have ever attempted to get up a spy satellite, because prior to our efforts, they were focused primarily on development, not military or espionage.

I know others are commenting that the same views can be seen on publicly available satellite imagery, but that's missing the point.

The concern is that NK has reached a milestone in orbital rocketry and while a basic so-called spy satellite has taken beginner level photos, they have figured out how to put a payload into a solid orbit. That information works for ICBMs as much as it works for tinker toy payloads.

ICBM are both an easier and harder task than putting satellites into orbit.

Easier in that the math and fuel requirements are a lot easier if you don't need a stable orbit so much as a trajectory.

Harder in that your payload is likely considerably heavier if you want to make the ICBM worth the cost.

To use video game terminology: the two are different branches of the same tech tree with a potential join for an endgame super weapon (rods from god)

It's still a lot of the same math. A successful launch like this is a lot learned for all applications.

If the game goes to k3 you eventually get rkms and instant death mode where your enemies martydom with a vacuum decay

It's over guys, the enemy found out the position of the white house. With their secret technology they could find out that the color of the white house is indeed white.

we should fuck with them and paint it something else. Like maybe Tye-Dye.

we should shoot it down just for the funny

We could probably even nag it intact to the ground, that way you don't create a lot of space debris.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

On Tuesday North Korean state media said leader Kim Jong Un had reviewed spy satellite photos of the White House, Pentagon and U.S. aircraft carriers at the naval base of Norfolk.

North Korea last week successfully launched its first reconnaissance satellite, which it has said was designed to monitor U.S. and South Korean military movements.

Since then state media has reported the satellite photographed cities and military bases in South Korea, Guam, and Italy, in addition to the U.S. capital.

Chad O'Carroll, founder of the North Korea-focused website NK News, said of the KCNA reports in a post on X.

Jeffrey Lewis, another researcher at CNS, said a state media photo of Kim examining the satellite images with his daughter suggest they may be panchromatic, a type of black-and-white photography that is sensitive to all wavelengths of visible light.

The United States and South Korea have condemned the satellite launch as a violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions banning any use of ballistic technology.

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I don't know for sure, but can't you find pictures of the White House with Google? Seems a lot cheaper...