A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare(sprocketfox.io) |
A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare(sprocketfox.io) |
I used that to convey the idea that a certain spy agency was a terrorist group (by how they were operating) and were using accounts, with said very accounts visible in many of the instagram threads I was commenting in, being astro turf to sway certain opinions and do psyops on the American people. I got thousands of up votes and engagement.
Safe to say, I was naive, and it was terrifying to have them follow up and send investigators into private and public spaces. I had terror follow me from this time but I'm alive so glad that I wasn't enough of a threat to exterminate. Suppose I can thank either this was entirely made-up, or I was cautious enough after this incident (though I keep making the embarrassing mistake of sharing posts like this on hacker news and getting the occasional "You're crazy" accusation and ad hominem style credibility attacks). Who knows what really happened. I can't dismiss the possibility as 0%.
Edit: Thing is when you have an expert who's job it is to act sane and credible, operating to remain in stealth and hide their behavior, any accusation to call them out as so is met with a rational response to call out the veil-piercing observations as incredulous. And who's going to spy on the spy, would you look to gather evidence and record your interactions, send in a spy tape recorder, etc lol.
Also I only realized after finishing the article what a breath of fresh air it was to read something that came straight from another human's brain without LLM intermediation. Thank you to the author for that too.
I found it a little difficult to follow
That's because the author folded over and played nice. Imagine if he exercised his first amendment rights.
That is the brutal truth
I have a bunch of memorable experiences from it, including:
1. Under inflating the first balloon because our helium provider was closed, and instead buying lower pressure "party" balloon containers (and not realizing until too late that lower pressure meant more helium left in the containers)
2. Chasing down the balloon at night and trying to explain why you wanted to walk onto some guys field to check for a weather balloon
3. Later calling a gas station to ask if "some guy just arrived with a weather balloon in their truck" when trying to track down the balloon
If anyone has kids and wants a fun project, I highly recommend it. There are a few companies online that sell kits, and it's neat to watch the different layers of the atmosphere (temperature and wind), and try to "chase" after the balloon and find it afterwards.
About the lowest thing that could reasonably be called space is the Karmin line, and that's at 100km, or 330,000ft.
Some of the memorable experiences from it:
1) Purchasing equipment to do a Hydrogen launch because this was during a Helium shortage and the cost difference was significant. Arrived at store to pick up our Hydrogen tank where the guy working took a look at us knuckleheads and had serious reservations about selling us inexperienced dorks Hydrogen. Took pity on us and swapped out all of our fittings (hydrogen fittings are specific to prevent accidental use of hydrogen) and sold us the tank of Helium for a much cheaper price than what we were originally told.
2) Printing up stickers to attach to the payload box with "If Found" contact instructions only to realize one second after letting go of the payload that you forgot to attach said stickers.
3) The terror of realizing that when the balloon took off that it immediately headed west when the flight predictions you had been running for the previous days before all showed the balloon landed east.
4) Having to contact ATC to report the launch of the balloon, only to be told they needed further updates at every 10,000' feet.
5) The terror setting in deeper when the consumer GPS unit stopped responding after 30,000' altitude and then having ATC scold how unprofessional we were for using cheap devices. At least they told us they were still tracking it.
6) The shenanigans a group of knuckleheads got up to waiting the ~3 hours for the balloon to land.
7) The relief when the consumer GPS unit started pinging updates again on the way down and the laugh (with us not at us) from ATC that we could start reporting back again.
8) Using mobile Google Maps to attempt to find the GPS location. Wandering around fields in the middle of the night to find a strange circular pattern of out of place plants to realize it was from a deer feeder's throw. Then searching for the nearby camera trap to wave to leave some hunter with serious WTF.
9) Nearly giving up on the search until deciding to use the hotspot to look up the GPS coordinates not on a mobile device to see that the balloon was less than 300' from where we parked making the hours spent wandering really dumb.
Ah yes, the CoCom export control limits so you can't use it to build an ICBM. Legally they're supposed to stop working above 60,000 ft and 1,200 mph, but some manufacturers interpret that as an "or". The rumor was that some really cheap chips out of China failed to implement either, so if you'd bought a crappier gps module, you might have been fine!
That's an awesome story tho!
[0] https://www.highaltitudescience.com/products/eagle-pro-near-...
I should really do a write-up sometime.
Among other things. And this was the most sane part of Meteolabor's email
I wonder how often this happens outside of software? Do fence manufacturers get emails asking to identify the culprit when someone crashes through a fence?
I'm legitimately impressed that whoever got that ticket on AWS side actually followed through and was able to divert from their script...
The company I work at got one of these emails from AWS. We had a bug which caused us to hit a 3rd party API much more than we should have, and the service provider reported us to AWS for attempted DDoS. AWS just asked us to give our side of the story. I'm sure that being a large (but not enterprise) customer gives us some leeway, but I've also heard similar things from hobbyists.
There are exceptions if you are a fairly new account, or if you operate in certain low reputation regions. Specifically I have heard regions in Africa tend to get the "shoot first ask questions later" treatment from AWS Support.
However, all of this was before 2026 (when AWS Support seems to have 100% turned over to AI). For all I know their actions might look completely different now.
The dumb careless things that teens do on the web.
(per section 1.6 of USPS DMM 133 at https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/133.htm)
>We are aware of the so-called waste problem.
>Personal comment: I would personally like to draw attention to military activities, particularly in the Middle East, which result in significantly (exponentially) more waste and toxic substances being released into the atmosphere and left lying around in the environment – or entering the food and water cycles
>In addition to military operations, countless “missions” are currently being flown over Europe with the aim of leaving “contrails” in the sky [rather “chemtrails”]. I know their purpose; I know what NetZero is supposed to achieve, and what decarbonization and CO2 reduction are intended to accomplish. I am well-informed about the climate hoax.
>Start there! The people to talk to are politicians, NGOs, and very wealthy old white men.
I wonder who at the company wrote that? Paul Klöti? Rolf Maag? Elisabeth Ruppert-Bolliger? Walter Büchler? Andreas Kräuchi?
Some interesting links:
https://www.hisutton.com/US-Navy-CIA-Submarine-Launched-Spy-...
https://www.hisutton.com/Chinese-Navy-High-Altitude-Spy-Ball...
The numerical predictions of weather models often have many vertical components as well, so solving it for ground level also requires extending the forecast to the air, depending on the model.
There are of course several different global weather models that predict the behavior of the atmosphere, and it is a lot more complicated than just interpolating past data. But they all do rely on radiosonde data for daily calibration of actual atmospheric conditions.
> we decided to start proxying radiosonde ingestion data through SondeHub
Redirecting to the habhub UI doesn't seem like it would also let them intercept people uploading their data to habhub.
An old dopehead, friend-of-a-friend was paranoid that they were being surveilled by aliens in UFOs, something they could assure you had been happening since the 1970's. Not coincidentally I'm sure, that's when they were a young dopehead. While outwardly funny to most of us, it was a serious issue for them. To help them understand all the shiny things in the sky at night I assembled a list of tools that could help them rule out various terrestrial sources for the shiny things. Stellaris or Celestia could help them identify stars and constellations, even showing them what the sky should look like at their exact location so they could compare in real time. They could also use their digital camera (after instructions on how to take low light photos that show stars) to take photos and later compare those photos to stars and planets that would've been visible when the photo was taken. I pointed them at Flightradar24 and FlightAware for air traffic and recommended they get a license instead of the free version so they could track more things better. They weren't close to an active military base but using either or both of those could help rule out military air traffic when the pilots were flying and broadcasting ADS-B.
Since many UFOs in the historical record were blamed on weather balloons I looked around for a way to find weather balloons visible in your area and that is when I found sondehub. The ability to see the balloon track was especially useful since I explained how objects at high altitudes could be visible even if they are hundreds of miles distant when you have a clear line of sight so the balloon doesn't need to be between them and the horizon. It only needed to be visible above the horizon and using the tools they could rule out quite a few things. Around the same time people were posting great photos of sprites associated with powerful thunderstorms well over the horizon so this helped them understand that shiny things in the sky are not necessarily close to them. I also used HeavensAbove to help them track known satellites and the ISS. Having them see the ISS cross the sky at their location a little after dark helped them understand why a bright light crossing the sky can quickly disappear once the concept of the earth's shadow was clear. It was nice and bright while sunlit and winked out as soon as it passed into shadow. I gave them links to astronomy sites so they could know when to expect meteor showers and other celestial phenomena.
All in all, they got a nice collection of tools, freely available, that they could use to understand why there were sparkly, shiny things in their sky. I haven't yet had confirmation that any of those sparkly, shiny things could not be explained using those tools.
Thanks for this link.
That is, should it be "A joke domain purchase turned into geopolitical warfare"
Anyway, fascinating reading.
"Only Melbourne and Adelaide radiosondes (the transmitter on weather balloons) were being tracked on a website called Habhub - high altitude ballooning hub."
Ok, I can infer that habhub probably isn't the speaker's website.
"A query parameter could be added to the URL to remove the filter and on 12th of May 2018 sondehub.org registered with a single purpose - a URL redirect to Habhub with a radiosonde specific filter."
Ok, I can infer sondehub was set up by a jokey duo or group of weather balloon hobbyists.
But it's really annoying reading and doubting this because I'm not 100% sure that the speaker is actually the domain creator of sondehub.
You can say "we registered sondehub" or "I registered sondehub.org." Poor journalists use this passive voice sometimes. "Something happened. A source said..." Unless you're protecting a source, you can say who said what, and what caused something to happen.
So I stopped reading, and wrote this comment.
> climate hoax
Once again, the Swiss are confirming their image as the most US-like country in Europe :'(
You know. I came to that conclusion when they started shootings rockets at a civilian airplane in 2014, killing 298 civilians of which 196 people that I share citizenship with.
And fuck Germany for still buying Russian gas.
A person like that sending inquiries to website/API operators demanding data, ignore it. Always. Continue to ignore it until a process server actually shows up on your doorstep and serves you, in which case you know they're at least moderately serious, and then you need to engage your own counsel to deal with it.
You have to be kind of lost to contact Daniel about it, but I think it's ok behaviour for junior sysadmins that are just starting out, everyone was starting out sometime, and curl is like a lightning catcher for the world's daily lucky thousand.
Insurance. This is about insurance.
See, in my country, you could not use a car's dashcam recording as evidence in a small claims court. But I could 100% use it with insurance. They don't abide by the same rules of what counts as evidence.
Photo series like that allowed me to help them understand the changes in a star or planet as viewed from a single location. For example Sirius, the Dog Star in Canis Major has a high rotation rate. It rapidly flashes and really draws the eye as one of the brightest objects when it is visible. As it nears the horizon and the effects of the light passing through an increasingly thicker layer of shitty air act on the light it is seen to flash through the spectrum - red, green, yellow, blue, white, etc very rapidly. By having them spend the time at one location observing one known sparkly thing as it slowly moved toward the horizon they were able to learn things they had never thought about. I helped them understand how to measure time at night when all you have are shiny things in the sky or the moon. We had an opportunity to really cover a lot of ground.
The person was and still is paranoid. That is a side effect of early use and a lifetime use of pot and the whole environment that was in place at the time - war on drugs, etc. Back then, dopeheads were paranoid about anyone they didn't know potentially being a narc. Trust of the unknown was near zero with that group.
Though this person was paranoid they were not stupid. They're very bright but life had taken them on a path around a university education so a lot of the science-related things that are common knowledge to most were outside anything they had ever thought about.
As it is today, I haven't heard from them in a good while. I'm pretty sure they have the tools and skills now to help them answer those questions for themselves in a satisfying way. I think they have less distrust of science than before so that is a big plus for me. Knowledge is power.
> We poke their website to see - sure enough they are - an angry email to them.
In general it was easy enough to understand the stories, though
I checked the habhub website and found this blurb: "habhub is the home of high altitude ballooning tools developed by UKHAS, and the SondeHub team. The habitat database was retired in 2022, replaced by the SondeHub database and tracker."
This intro was also quite helpful, which I found on the Sondehub github page:
https://github.com/projecthorus/sondehub-amateur-tracker/wik...
"SondeHub started out in 2019 as a database and mapping system for tracking meteorological radiosondes. It's hosted in Amazon Web Services, so it is scalable and reliable (though does cost more to run...). SondeHub is run by a small team lead by x, y and is currently funded through Patreon Sponsors and a grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications. SondeHub handles many millions of radiosonde telemetry packets a day, with telemetry contributed by over 700 unique receiver stations."
I didn't include the names because it wasn't the purpose of the comment, just a nice way to introduce the story.
I understand that the habhhub shutdown is part of the story that they later reveal, and now folded into/adapted into Sondehub:
"HabHub, the Habitat database, and associated utilities have been hosted on a server donated by Nevis (name) since 2011. However, due to ongoing issues with server maintenance and rising power prices, continued hosting has become untenable. In addition to this, the software behind the Habitat servers has become extremely difficult to maintain, and a very large amount of work would be required to port it to a more modern operating system."
Instead the implied mode of operation is that they shut down after 10 hours, but sometimes they dont and after 12 hours the battery is empty. Or maybe it's another trigger (location?) that is not always active or does not always trigger
If meeting the court's (or court parties') demands costs you something you are generally entitled to charge them for it, within reason and with justification.
As a hobbyist therefore putting a service offering page together with your preferred rate probably helps establish the nature and parameters of any such service.
Bill rates / piece rates, especially, and setting up bounds of what is reasonable to expect, in proportion to your gig and your intended effort level.
Quantity and price tiers, turnaround times, what will be included in the deliverable, how it will be delivered, SLAs, etc.
Whatever defines your service, esp as it relates to the types of requests you end up getting.
This is not a hobby, it’s a job.
This is why all my hobbies are dark web projects, these days.
Merely listing prices (without an associated automated payment form which could imply a contract was en force upon successful payment) doesn't actually force you to do business with anyone. It would however 1) deter requests for unpaid work by giving them an idea of what it would cost to get what they're looking for and 2) give you an idea of the demand for said services and could give you a warm lead which you can then choose to pursue formally by getting the necessary business structure, legal/business advice, etc.
Any country with the knowhow to make an ICBM can source or build a gps receive without said restriction. Just saying.
That's like putting a sign "no burglary permitted" and leaving the door wide open.
Well indirectly about how they work and to counter them.
You can also refer to Merriam Webster.
You'll need to clarify what your question means for more detail than that.
In some cases it could. If you want to say "we categorically don't do X for ethical reasons", that can sometimes be more easily defensible in a way that "we have a standard price for doing this, but we don't want to do it for you in particular" may be harder to defend. (Even though I think both should always be possible.)
(thus shedding light on the government's interest in the matter, since anything not illegal is legal by default)
"the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"
(thus confirming the right of people - which includes crazed yahoos, and excludes some but not all criminals - not the government, to have weapons)
This is the current understanding within American jurisprudence. People are of course free to disagree with it, but when it comes to laws, the government's understanding of what the law means takes precedence both de jure and de facto.
The Bill of Rights does not enumerate what a citizen is and is not allowed to do, but rather lays out a number of cases in a non-exhaustive manner in which it restricts the government from infringing on liberties that are understood to have pre-existed it.
Only rights you’re willing to kill to protect.
Or to force someone else to kill to protect for you.