[H8crilA]

The real question is why there isn't any official API that details the nature of the danger. You shouldn't have to scrape Telegram to figure out the type/speed of the air assault weapon, and the likely time on target.

BTW, also check out Kropyva, it's like Uber for artillery strikes. Very helpful with deleting Russians.

[INTPenis]

Any single API for this would be constantly attacked.

They're distributing the attack surface by using other services.

[H8crilA]

Let's not exaggerate. There are APIs that distribute the list of oblasts (regions) that are deemed to be under attack (for example https://alerts.com.ua/). The only problem is that you don't know if the attack is expected in 10 minutes, or 6 hours, and this is something that the military intelligence has, and could share with a small amount of effort. They effectively already share it via people running those channels.

Also, nothing stops you from redistributing the structured messages through multiple channels.

[withinboredom]

The problem is that you let the enemy know the detail of your intel. Using compartmentalization, they can locate leaks and determine how you are getting the intel.

As a military, you never want to give that away. Looking at WWII, the UK/US were able to decrypt messages daily from the Germans (thanks to Turing!), but they pretended they couldn't so the Germans wouldn't change their encryption scheme.

[H8crilA]

But they already share it, just in a messy format. No need to philosophise.

[withinboredom]

I'm not philosophising, this was literally my job in the military and worked with a number of analysts who worked on this sort of thing.

[H8crilA]

I see, but this military does share this very information.

[sidewndr46]

This is a significant mistelling of the history of the German "Enigma" device. Significant usage of Enigma was done during the war in a manner that was secure enough to prohibit interception.

Turing's methods are brilliant as are the contributions of numerous other cryptographers. They relied on numerous operational failures of some branches of the military to be possible. So it was not from "the Germans", but from specific branches of the military that failed to follow already established best practices

[withinboredom]

I'm not sure what you mean. They used daily weather reports to decrypt the enigma for that day, so I'm not sure how that is an operational failure. If you know part of the cleartext, it's possible to brute-force any encryption given enough time.

https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/how-british-cryp... gives a pretty decent summary.

[Two4]

Sure, but those known text attacks were made significantly easier by German operators using (and reusing) non-random and easily guessable encryption parameters. Once the keyspace became small enough to search, they were able to brute force the encryption.

[sidewndr46]

You're mentioning one technique as if it was the comprehensive method of compromising the Enigma. It was not. The example you give would only work for the Kriegsmarine transmissions for example. The Luftwaffe had its own system with its own operational failings.

[dewey]

Not sure outsourcing it to a Russia affiliated messaging app is the best choice then.

[kwhitefoot]

What would you choose?

[dewey]

Not an easy questions as it depends what's popular in the local market, you need to be where the users are even if you don't like it in cases like this. Telegram also has a great bot API, which makes it a harder sell to use alternatives (Signal, WhatsApp) or open technology like Matrix, where it's only useful for people that like to play around with technology and not regular people.

[skjoldr]

The chief reason is decentralization.

Journalists who are updating these channels have their own sources in the Ukrainian air defense network as well as OSINTers who, for example, monitor Russian radio traffic using SDR, or even sometimes have people on the ground observing the take-off of planes in Russia and Belarus (horrifically dangerous, but there are ways to send this information somewhat safely; planes tend to be loud). If one of the journalists goes down for any reason, there will be other people writing updates. Each oblast also has their own channels where they announce attacks, some of them owned by the local administration, some by the emergency services. The air defenders themselves are a bit too busy to monitor and write this stuff; often, the best they can do is to write some short messages into a group chat or a Telegram bot before things go down, and even then, all parties involved have to balance providing an appropriate warning window with not letting the timing of this information to reveal the capabilities and locations of different kinds of Ukrainian observation stations. And this whole system has to be simple, since not every trained air defender is tech-savvy in general. Many don't know what an API even is. Many Ukrainians, too, wouldn't understand how to work with an API, but they can read the warnings in Telegram.

Also don't forget that the journalists who curate monitoring channels often also accept reports about the flight paths of missiles and drones from the general public, and while there are a couple of apps for that as well that send data from the phone's GPS and compass while the user is pointing the phone at the object, again, it's a matter of having several information channels that non-technical people can easily use. Even just writing to one of them that you just heard a cruise missile fly by, specifying your rough location, can be helpful, since radar coverage is not 100%. These messages then get relayed back to the people in the Ukrainian AA who are trying to intercept these things in real time.

Then there are the obvious security concerns, personal communications and group chat access can be vetted and it's hard to break the anonymity of Telegram channels from the outside to even be able to target the authors' devices with cyberattacks. While an API must be open to the world, and thus it immediately becomes a target.

It's a messy system but it works.

Kropyva is not available to the general public and it's very far from the capabilities of similar NATO systems, its strength lies in the fact that it's an Android app that can be used on cheap tablets, so it doesn't rely on the military-industrial complex provided hardware, which is safer and more robust, but far more expensive.

[ta1243]

> it's like Uber for artillery strikes

...