I enjoyed reading this. It has a "butterfly effect" kind of vibe how such a random trivial-sounding pursuit can lead to something consequential. It's also mind-opening to realize how many strange human activities are happening in the background.
A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare
101–110 of 194 posts
Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
The rights delineated in the American Constitution are understood to precede the government being held to account for them. Furthermore, they are held to be universal, natural rights.
Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare
#103"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
Small solar panel and a charge controller. Defeat physics with this one trick.
Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mo…
Ummmm.
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.
Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare
#105FlightAware (ADSB) and MarineTraffic (AIS) systems hide data upon request too. Which is why it's important that citizen scientists run there own receivers.
flightaware also got breached and tried to hide it from users. use adsbexchange, less filtered and outright better
Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare
#106I 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 really want to read this!
Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are Australian. Don't everyone is from the US just because they speak English.
The rights delineated in the American Constitution are understood to precede the government being held to account for them. Furthermore, they are held to be universal, natural rights.
...is that what Americans believe?
Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are Australian. Don't everyone is from the US just because they speak English.
The rights delineated in the American Constitution are understood to precede the government being held to account for them. Furthermore, they are held to be universal, natural rights.
Says who?
Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really see them saying fuck the US, even though they've bombed girls schools in Iran. Or saying fuck Israel because of their super well documented ongoing genocide. "You can disapprove of ... from many, many ethical perspectives without going near absolutism."
Did they find evidence of their service being used to bomb schools in Iran, like they found for Russia tracking launch sites in Ukraine? If not, then why would they go on such a tangent? Do you expect them to list every one of their personal geopolitical stances, regardless of the relevance to the article?
> like they found for Russia tracking launch sites in Ukraine
My understanding of that section was that Ukraine were using it to find launch sites in occupied parts of Ukraine - they go on to describe how they helped someone who had been doing the tracking:
[From article]
> We emailed back and forth and provided documentation on how to run the predictor locally.
Edit: my recollection of which parts of Ukraine are occcupied was wrong, leaving me rather confused about who they thought they were helping.
Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare
#110[flagged]
I don’t think the US DOD needs western ballon data for targeting purposes like Russia.