A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

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.

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 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.

Back in the late 2000s when I was just becoming an adult, but still talking to people younger than me on the web, I knew this kid who was maybe 16, he bought a very offensive domain, we were big on 4chan shenanigans (I'll let you imagine the worst thing). I had to intervene when I realized and point out to him, that his first and last name can be looked up by anyone, anywhere, and his address. He started to panic and I forget what we even did, but I think I immediately told him to just change the first and last to literally anything else, find a valid plausible address and adjust it, and just basically abandon the account as soon as possible. Been quite a while since I ever spoke to them, hope they learned their lesson.

The dumb careless things that teens do on the web.

"as I don’t really want to help military, let alone the US"

Yet the Australian author so passionately and strongly curses Russia, as if some magical fairy keeps huge portions of the world at calm. I wonder if the AUSTRALIAN author understands what would happen the day the US navy left Oceania.

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.

The part where he gets contacted over the hit-and-run reads like the curl guy’s experience with people investigating “hacking”.

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?

In the UK a few decades ago, if you found a radiosonde from a weather balloon, it would have instructions on how to claim a recovery fee if you returned it for reuse. Sadly I never found one, but I knew this because my dad was a geophysicist and we lived at the time on a Scottish island which was one of the UK's launch spots. Looks like the recovery fee was stopped a long time ago, when the devices became cheap enough to be effectively disposable.

Slightly unrelated but I have no idea how wind speed predictions are made up high in the altitudes, is it just interpolation of data that are get from various radiosonoids across various timestamps and finding a regular or seasonal pattern?

Yeye, bestof fuel. Ty so much for that read.

This really escalated amusingly. Some things just write themselves.

I've only read the first few paragraphs but I've noticed a narrative issue. I might be the only person to have this peeve, but when introducing a story to non technical and even technical readers, it's always clearer to introduce which website is not theirs and which website is theirs. It's written in a 3rd person perspective that doesn't take ownership of the websites.

"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.

> Meanwhile (and you might have noticed me asking for AWS help on fedi) we contacted AWS as the source IP was from an AWS network. It was very important however to make sure the AWS support did not shutdown access.

I'm legitimately impressed that whoever got that ticket on AWS side actually followed through and was able to divert from their script...

The author’s concern about keeping the infrastructure decentralized is pretty understandable, not just from a censorship/open-data perspective, but also from a security perspective: you don't want one server, or one person, to become an obvious target.

I was one of the data points in that spike related to the Chinese balloon incident though that is not the first time I used sondehub. A couple years before that incident I found the site while trying to help someone understand what they were seeing in the sky near where they live.

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.

Yeah back in 2022, I had just found my voice and developed a speaking style able to inspire understanding and articulate complex concerns down to simple concepts.

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 to question me. I don't think they stopped tracking me, and I had terror follow me from detecting this in-person behavior that I could only formulate as "don't you have actual threats to go after". I'm still alive so glad that I wasn't enough of a threat to exterminate, or that I've been cautious enough after (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). 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 rational response is to call out any observations around that 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. of course not.

Someone needs to option this for a book or movie. I’d read it!

Interacting with the public is the most exciting yet frightening aspect of any public project.

> Meteolabor AG

> climate hoax

Once again, the Swiss are confirming their image as the most US-like country in Europe :'(

>Fuck. And Fuck Russia. (for time travellers and people in the future - in 2022 started a “special military operation” - aka a full scale invasion into Ukraine. The war continues at time of writing. Fuck Russia)

>In 2025 we received a request for data from the “Office of the Secretary of War (Intelligence and Security)” (US). Generally if there’s mutual community benefit we’ll find, process and release the data for free. However given this is was the Department of War and no expected community benefit we decided they should pay for the data. I was hesitant even working with them, as I don’t really want to help military, let alone the US - but since our data is public if we didn’t do it someone else probably would. So my reasoning shifted to, may as well extract some funds to pay for SondeHub infrastructure at the very least.

such a seamless transition from moral absolutism to moral relativism ;-)

Dude , were you actually able to find the balloon though ?

> 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.

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Geopolitical warfare can be triggered by much less than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spell_My_Name_with_an_S