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A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

sprocketfox.io

71–80 of 194 posts

Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

#71

I am part of the team which runs the OpenStreetMap.org infrastructure, we also get a lot of weird and wonderful requests / emails. .mil, .gov, .edu and GeoTLD variants. I should really do a write-up sometime.

I remember being in Tel Aviv for work, and pulling up maps to plot out a bike route from the hotel to the office. Only to find that the entire route is blurred out online. Turns out our office was a few 100 meters from something important to the IDF, so no map/route data available. Too far to reasonably walk, and didn't want to try a bike without knowing there was a reasonable route...

Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

#72

"Our transmitters shut down after a certain period of time, at the latest when the battery capacity is exhausted. This is due, among other things, to strategic considerations." Among other things. And this was the most sane part of Meteolabor's email

If the transmitters continued to operate after battery exhaustion, then I may begin to question the laws of physics, as well as my life choices

Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

#73
> Official response from Meteolabor AG: For strategic reasons, we do not provide any data or sample devices. Our transmitters shut down after a certain period of time, at the latest when the battery capacity is exhausted. This is due, among other things, to strategic considerations.

>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?

Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

#75
post #69

This was fascinating, thank you. I expected to read about legal threats against the folks collecting this data and am glad that those didn't materialize. 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 expected to read about legal threats against the folks collecting this data and am glad that those didn't materialize. That's because the author folded over and played nice. Imagine if he exercised his first amendment rights.

They are Australian. Don't everyone is from the US just because they speak English.

Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

#77
post #40

> Fuck Russia 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 US govt never apologized.

Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

#80
post #21

It's fun to see habhub in an article. ~10 years ago a group of friends and I launched 2 weather balloons for fun with a GPS logger, APRS transmitter, and a few sensors, and then retrieved it afterwards. 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…

We did a similar thing, only we intentionally made it more difficult on ourselves by launching at sunset because we were hoping to grab the view of city lights at night with the GoPros. Also, we did not have any licensed radio operators in our group, so no fun equipment like that. We instead depended on a consumer GPS tracker that updated once ever 5 minutes. We also had an Arduino with various sensors attached, but…

> The terror setting in deeper when the consumer GPS unit stopped responding after 30,000' altitude

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!

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