[HN Gopher] Jetnet Acquires ADS-B Exchange, a community-fed ADSB...
___________________________________________________________________
Jetnet Acquires ADS-B Exchange, a community-fed ADSB aggregator
Author : cobertos
Score : 188 points
Date : 2023-01-25 16:31 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jetnet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jetnet.com)
| prova_modena wrote:
| Well, dang. I have been maintaining a Twitter bot that uses the
| ADS-B Exchange API, but paused development after Musk started
| going after ElonJet aggressively and Twitter began to ban
| aircraft tracking accounts. I just restarted work this week to
| implement Mastodon support, but looks like I need to pause again
| to reassess what ADS-B data source(s) to support.
|
| I would really like to know the story behind this acquisition as
| my previous interactions with the ADS-B Exchange owner (edit:
| after checking back in on the discord maybe this person was not
| the owner, but one of the main team members) on discord were
| positive and they seemed like a very passionate and principled
| person. This was like more than 1 year ago now, though. My
| suspicion is that the loud, polarized public discourse around the
| ElonJet controversy, which led to ADS-B Exchange getting banned
| from Twitter, may have caused them to reassess their priorities.
| I hope they are not under any kind of legal threat from Musk.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Years ago compact disc metadata was really important. There was
| an open library for this called CDDB. At some point the owners of
| that started silently inserting an agreement by the user to
| assign ownership of the submissions to the company.
|
| That "open" database got sold off and became Gracenote [1].
|
| I'm not sure how many times we need to learn this lesson.
|
| [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote
| nocoiner wrote:
| I'm still not sure how Amazon pulled off that same move with
| IMDb. I remember it WAY back when (I think it had several
| mirrors, one of which was hosted at a URL like
| msstate.edu/~imdb, which gives you an idea of how long ago that
| would have been) and I can't imagine they had a valid
| assignment of copyright from all their contributors...
| voakbasda wrote:
| They might not have cared about getting necessary permission
| from every contributor. They only needed to get permission
| from anyone likely to sue and win in court. It's the standard
| play for companies the size of Amazon: why follow the law
| when it is cheaper to fight or pay the fine?
| wpietri wrote:
| Not to be cynical, but I doubt the lesson will ever get
| learned. These things start with big ideas, hope, and an
| ignorance of the practical details. Over time, practical
| realities, like paying for goods and services, crop up. In a
| capitalist society, most of the ready-made solutions to that
| look like businesses. And our current culture of capitalism
| then shifts toward short-term revenue-maximization, putting
| things in the hands of predators and sociopaths.
|
| I know people have made attempts to solve this, like B Corps
| and groups like the Apache Foundation. But I don't think we're
| there yet. One could try to create a foundation that
| specifically incubates projects that go beyond open source to
| open/collective services. But even if one solves funding for
| that, there's still the problem of finding the naive starters
| of things and crushing their dreams just enough to get them on
| a better course, but not so much that they quit.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Because profit motive is the usual problem, you can
| deliberately design that out if you're careful.
|
| England (where I live) had a lot of Building Societies -
| mutual institutions where some members are saving money, and
| those savings are lent to other members (borrowers) to buy
| homes to live in, the interest from which of course makes
| this a good deal for the savers done at scale (so as to
| smooth out inevitable losses when some borrowers default).
| This can be a very lucrative line of business during a
| housing boom, and many of these societies found themselves
| with a considerable cash positive position in the 1980s.
| Since the members _own_ the society, they can just change the
| rules of the society and "demutualize", extracting the cash
| for themselves. Of course this destroys the society, an
| important institution which has helped so many people to own
| somewhere to live - but hey, you've got some money and isn't
| that what's really important?
|
| My parents voted "Yes" to demutualize the society where
| they'd saved money and from which they had borrowed to buy
| the house I grew up in, I (as an idealistic teenager who had
| my own modest savings) voted "No", the "Yes" votes won and
| the resulting entity, now a bank, eventually was mired in
| scandal and no longer serves the purpose the proud building
| society had served before. But hey, they got their money.
| People like them were nicknamed "Carpetbaggers" in the UK as
| a result, by analogy to the US concept.
|
| Now, I mention this because as several larger societies were
| demutualised this way, the remainder realised that the same
| fate could be theirs, and many swallowed a "poison pill" to
| prevent it. They changed their rules so that all future
| members (savers, borrowers, whichever) signed away rights to
| the proceeds of any demutualisation (e.g. giving it to a
| charity). So you could vote to tear the society to pieces,
| but you would no longer make a penny from doing so, and
| suddenly that's not very attractive.
|
| It worked.
| nocoiner wrote:
| That was an absolutely fascinating story, thank you for
| sharing. Very redolent of "there's no such thing as
| society."
|
| Although my politics aren't theirs, I don't hate the Reagan
| and Thatcher types. I don't think they were bad people per
| se (or at least not any worse than anyone else who is
| capable of ascending to the apex of political power). But I
| do think they changed some things in their respective
| cultures for the worse, and those are things that we're
| still grappling with today.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Most if not all big investment banks are now corporations,
| usually listed on the stock exchange. It wasn't always this
| way.
|
| Prior to the 1970s investment banks couldn't be listed on
| the NYSE. Goldman Sachs (etc) weren't corporations. They
| were partnerships, basically like a law firm. This is a key
| difference because a partnership has unlimited liability.
| This tends to make such organizations very conservative
| with risk management, for obvious reasons.
|
| But when this changed, all these partnerships incorporated
| instead and listed on the stock exchange. Incorporation
| shields the leaddership from the downside of their bad
| decisions. As we've seen, the governmen thas stepped in to
| assume that risk for really no good reason at all ("too big
| to fail").
|
| Interestingly, I'm not sure there's a legal barrier
| preventing law firms from listing on the stock exchange but
| they don't, which is interesting.
|
| So in your case these mutual societies and community banks
| existed for the benefit of their members and they
| (including the members) took the (one time) bag and was
| shielded from accountability. I see investment banks as
| falling into this same trap.
| nocoiner wrote:
| For law firms, there is a barrier (in the United States,
| at least): law firms must be owned by lawyers. Other
| common law jurisdictions, such as Australia, have
| eliminated this requirement and have publicly traded law
| firms. I assume soon, you'll start seeing what's
| happening here with medical and other professional
| service practices that have similar ownership
| restrictions where ownership, services and revenues are
| theoretically decoupled through creative contracting
| arrangements, but I don't know of that having happened
| yet with a law firm.
|
| Most law firms in the United States are now organized as
| LLPs (a limited liability partnership, which segregates
| liability among the partners), but notably the most
| profitable law firm measured in a per capita basis,
| Wachtell, is still organized as a general partnership
| with unlimited partner liability. They deliver their
| clients one-line invoices, containing numbers with many,
| many more zeroes, for "services rendered."
| upofadown wrote:
| I guess the interesting and significant difference here is that
| value of the previous location of aircraft fades fairly
| quickly. So just setting up a different server and switching to
| that is an effective solution. The value here is not retained
| in the data but instead the network that collects the data.
| rhacker wrote:
| This isn't going to go over well. I hope everyone shuts down
| their feed.
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| Most likely the goal.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I don't know, now that they own it they can just start
| censoring it like the others.
|
| And I'm sure at least one alternative will pop up
| femboy wrote:
| The Discord link on ADSBExchange points to a server called
| "Airframes.io Enthusiasts" - going to the website shows:
|
| > Airframes is an aircraft-related aggregation service that
| receives ACARS, VDL, HFDL, and SATCOM data from volunteers around
| the world.
|
| > It is under very active development and you will notice changes
| from day to day. Also, issues are expected.
|
| > Contributing your feed allows us to make ground developing new
| decoders and make important statistical observations. It also
| benefits users of the service so that they can see more about
| flights as they traverse covered territories.
|
| Perhaps the original founders' work will continue here?
|
| EDIT: It does not seem like the original founders has
| collaborated with the community on this, and the people there are
| just as lost as anyone else.
| cobertos wrote:
| The discord was originally the ADSBExchange discord, but, I
| believe a mod has taken control, banned the person who
| owned/sold ADSBExchange (Dan Streufert) and made a bunch of
| announcements. The mod used to have Outlook email access on the
| original domain, so it seems like there's kind of a shakeup
| going on as well
|
| It's kind of chaos currently. I only joined this Discord in
| December and it was very different then. It seemed to be pretty
| community oriented, with images for RaspPi and scripts to help
| setup feeding and the developers of these tools were in there
| chatting. Not company employed people to my knowledge.
| [deleted]
| plantain wrote:
| Good. ADS-B Exchange's API is horribly broken and they never even
| replied to my support/refund requests so I had to chargeback. A
| shakeup might help.
| nocoiner wrote:
| I don't mind feeding FlightAware and Flightradar24 - they're for-
| profit companies, and are clear about the terms of exchange
| something of (dubious) value for the data they receive.
|
| This feels a lot more skeezy. Oh well, fool me once, and all
| that. I do look forward to shutting down my feed once I'm back in
| front of a computer.
|
| Something something, why we can't have nice things.
| metadaemon wrote:
| These were already very skeezy guys if you interacted with them
| on Discord.
| nocoiner wrote:
| I think I'm on their server, but I don't think I ever really
| interacted with them. In retrospect, I suppose I should have
| and gotten a better sense of their character (which is why
| I'm being a bit more careful in evaluating whether I start
| feeding anyone new).
|
| Too bad that every TOS out there basically boils down to "we
| own your data to the maximum extent that doesn't create any
| liability for us (but if it does, you'll indemnify us) and we
| can change these terms at any time." Makes it hard to do a
| proper assessment of what exactly you're stepping into.
| metadaemon wrote:
| In my experience they were weirdly hostile about a question
| about supporting live WebSocket feeds of incoming data.
| SoylentADSB had developed one of those trivial chat
| applications you do when learning about WebSockets and
| flamed me for even asking.
|
| When I questioned him about it he got very defensive and
| started resorting to personal attacks. By the end the the
| discussion he had deleted all of the pertaining chat
| messages from Discord, which I found childish. If you read
| past logs of his conversations, he's notorious for acting
| like that with people asking legitimate questions.
|
| In my opinion, that's the exact opposite type of person
| that you want running this sort of thing that is
| essentially propped up by the community. It's a skeevy
| model today because they actually profit off of what the
| community provides. Ideally, this would all be open sourced
| and run by some governance board just like any successful
| open sourced venture.
| james_pm wrote:
| Same. I get value back from FR24 in the form of a Business
| subscription which gives me a TON of data and access I wouldn't
| be able to afford. I fed ADS-B Exchange for nothing because it
| seemed like a nice thing to do to benefit the wider tracking
| community. To have the founder cash out and sell OUR data
| without even talking to the community first? That really rubbed
| me the wrong way. I stopped feeding about an hour ago.
| Havoc wrote:
| Also doing same re FR24 and biz sub. Curious what data you
| use from it though? I haven't had much use for it frankly
| robbiet480 wrote:
| Already seeing a lot of people in ADS-B Discords saying they are
| cutting off their feeds because they feel sold out.
| myself248 wrote:
| Is the codebase open / is anyone spinning up an alternative
| yet?
| notahacker wrote:
| Not sure how it matches feature for feature, but
| https://opensky-network.org has been crowdsourcing unfiltered
| ADSB data for longer, provides tools to view the data and
| supplies full API access to the raw data to academics and
| non-profits at no charge.
|
| There's room for another provider, and at the same time lots
| of enthusiasts with the boxes will carry on sending it, like
| they do to other closed source, profit-making ventures like
| FlightAware and Flightradar24...
| myself248 wrote:
| Alright, so OpenSky and ADSB Hub are the two I've learned
| about so far in this thread. Very cool.
| mike_d wrote:
| Airframes.io is where everyone is moving to.
| H8crilA wrote:
| Note that at the moment aiframes is for a completely
| different type of aviation-produced data (messages:
| acars, hfdl, vdl, ...). I am assuming that airframes.io
| will create an ADS-B feed too, now that the best open
| system (adsbexchange) is gone.
| theyknowitsxmas wrote:
| Everyone is moving to airframes.io
|
| Also this from SoylentADSB:
|
| > CEO of JETNET ( Greg Fell, now fired from JETNET by
| Silversmith) called and asked for a meeting. We thought was
| sales call. Turns out he offered to buy ADSBx from Dan for $8M,
| they wined dined and toured him around. Flew him to Boston, Dan
| cut us out when we ALL OBJECTED to a sale. We think they gave
| him $20M ish and a $200 a year job at JETNET. They'll fire him
| in a year, that's what PE does.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| I assume you mean $200k?
|
| Is it normal for a company like that to more than double
| their initial offer? I know 20m is probably pocket change to
| them, but it still seems like they were rather desperate to
| buy it.
| cjrp wrote:
| Unless they'd decided to pay up to $50m. Then starting at
| 10 and ending at 20 doesn't seem so bad.
| BizarreByte wrote:
| I can understand the community upset, but honestly? I
| wouldn't be able to say no to that amount of money. I could
| retire tomorrow on that much.
| H8crilA wrote:
| Indeed. There must be safeguards to prevent something like
| this, the incentive is too strong. Kinda like what GPL does
| to the code.
| aeharding wrote:
| Like decentralization? That's the main reason I am now on
| the Fediverse (via Elk + self hosting), because a
| billionaire cannot just scoop it up and change the rules
| of the game.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Perhaps it's legal but it's not ethical for a founder to
| sell something that's provided by thousands of volunteers
| (I'm sure a lot of the code was as well as the data)
| metadaemon wrote:
| That guy is such a whiner
| squarefoot wrote:
| Time to move the ADSB sharing network over p2p? Assuming it's
| doable, that way whoever buys an aggregator site would own just
| the interface, not the data sharing network.
| oldstrangers wrote:
| Well that sucks. I had just gotten into using ADS-B over
| Flightradar24.
| Havoc wrote:
| That shouldn't be affected by the matter at hand. ADS-B is the
| coms standard, ADS-B Exchange is a specific aggregation effort.
| huslage wrote:
| Does anyone want to fund an open ADSB data gathering platform for
| a nonprofit to run?
| jjcon wrote:
| Looks like the official discord community (now formerly
| official I guess) is pushing airframes.io
| gggggg5 wrote:
| GDPR compliance is a big problem in this space, there's no GDPR
| exception which would allow you to legally collect this data in
| the EU. (Unless you limited your collection to whitelisted A/C)
|
| Right now every single player in this space is operating
| illegally, but it'll probably take years before data protection
| authorities will start to crack down.
| sigmar wrote:
| Is SDR accessible through the internet a violation of GDPR?
| Hard for me to understand why relaying ADS-B would be
| different (considering the sdr data is inclusive of the ADS-B
| data)
| tialaramex wrote:
| I'm going to guess that _collecting_ / _organising_ the
| data is a problem.
|
| Data Protection laws, and I believe the GDPR is the same,
| aren't interested in just stuff you've got, for example if
| you write a blog, and you mention that you saw Jim at the
| weekend and his sister is apparently pregnant, these laws
| do _not_ consider that you 've got a database there with a
| single row ("Jim's sister" "Pregnant") which needs to be
| treated as PII and have Subject access requirements etc.
| You're not really collecting pregnancy status data about
| women, you just have a blog post.
|
| Whereas if I build a scraper, and I search thousands of
| blogs and correlate stuff to build a Postgres DB with
| "Jim's sister" "Pregnant" as one of dozens of rows, _that_
| is the sort of thing these laws care about.
|
| So I can imagine that likewise "Here are radio signals I am
| receiving" looks like public information, no big deal,
| whereas "Here is a database of records I gathered by
| studying the past 24 hours of radio signals" is different.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Why? GDPR is about personal data. This data is about
| airplanes, not people.
| gggggg5 wrote:
| Because the data can often easily be tied to specific
| people.
|
| You also can't set up a camera on the side of the road and
| store peoples registration plates and times when they drove
| past.
|
| You could also easily track cellphone IMEIs and locations
| in the same way these services track aircraft, that's not
| gonna fly either.
|
| Obviously you'll be completely fine if you only store data
| on commercial aviation, general aviation will pretty much
| immediately veer into GDPR territory.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| It's not a direct link though. The owner of the airplane
| doesn't actually have to be in it. And very often it's a
| company anyway.
|
| > You also can't set up a camera on the side of the road
| and store peoples registration plates and times when they
| drove past.
|
| That's just because setting up cameras on public roads
| isn't allowed as you can capture people as well. Writing
| down license plates would be fine.
| looping__lui wrote:
| Yes, and FR24 is investigated in the EU:
| https://se.linkedin.com/pulse/en-digitalsektor-ger-
| imy-m%C3%...
| dmd wrote:
| Did their acquisition price factor in the % of people who will
| stop feeding because of this? It's one thing to feed a free open
| source project it's another to give free labor to Silversmith
| Capital.
| dgacmu wrote:
| Some are likely to, but remember that feeding is a mutual
| exchange - sites that you feed to generally give you a free, no
| ads account. I feed both ADS-B exchange and flightaware for
| this reason. Although I will admit that the flight aware app is
| more useful unless you're interested in unfiltered data.
| Contributing to an unfiltered source is one motivation, but
| it's one of several.
| samstave wrote:
| Need a list of all private jet tail numbers from DAVOS/WEF
| and have a tracking system for those... like the Elon tracker
| Zigurd wrote:
| That's part of why an unfiltered ADS-B exchange is
| valuable. You can track senior executives and try to get
| ahead of the news. Flying in to Davos is pretty
| uninteresting compared with travel to factories,
| competitors' offices, mining operations, international
| travel, etc. It gives you an idea what executives are
| thinking about doing.
| jvanvleet wrote:
| This is my situation as well. If you travel a lot, having
| something light Flightaware giving you more detailed
| information about what is really happening with your flight
| or airport is wonderful and starting a feed was a fun way to
| get more features.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I have a basic (free) Flightaware account. I can't imagine
| anything relevant to commercial airliner travel that I'd
| need that I don't get from that free account. Is there
| something I'm missing?
|
| (I totally get the fun aspect and it's fairly cheap to put
| a receiver up.)
| dgacmu wrote:
| the only value for me is having no ads. which is, in
| fact, something i value, but not at the $80/month it
| would take to subscribe for. But it's worth sending my
| feed.
| james_pm wrote:
| From FR24, you get two years of historical data for
| starters.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Lots of interesting stuff outside of commercial
| airliners.
|
| Flightaware (and FR24) censors (for a fee).
|
| I remember emailing a journo covering a protest to look
| up and observe the plane circling around.
|
| But ultimately they're different services: Adsb is vessel
| focussed, while FA/FR24 are flight# focussed.
|
| Want to find out what routes your aircraft typically
| flies? Adsb will be the place to check.
|
| Want to see if your flight is typically on-time? FA/FR24.
| prova_modena wrote:
| ADS-B Exchange used to have another incentive to feed in the
| form of free API access, subject to certain limits and for
| noncommercial use only. They stopped that a year or two ago,
| I believe because various commercial operations kept abusing
| it.
| Kalibr wrote:
| Probably to eliminate the open source competition if anything.
| notahacker wrote:
| afaik JetNet hasn't offered a competing service before: their
| focus is on business jet fleet and transaction related data
| (I worked for what could loosely be described as a
| competitor)
|
| The data has some value in supporting that core product (as
| an additional data feed to sell a handful of enterprise
| clients, to support their fleet data research and possibly to
| enhance their FBO/charter products). I guess part of the
| appeal of ADS-B Exchange is that working in business
| aviation, an unfiltered dataset is a _lot_ more useful to
| them than a filtered one like most of the commercial
| providers.
|
| Still seems like a slightly odd acquisition, since they could
| have got the data beforehand relatively inexpensively and
| they'd probably get better feed coverage leaving it as an OS
| project and I do wonder how they'll manage privacy requests
| from some of their clients...
| error503 wrote:
| Perhaps enabling them to censor the feed is one of the
| primary reasons for the acquisition. I can't imagine it was
| _that_ expensive, considering the likes of whom might take
| issue with the data being public.
| brookst wrote:
| Perhaps, but it would be like buying a newsstand to
| censor a newspaper.
|
| The data is still freely available and will be
| distributed via another channel.
| mikewarot wrote:
| But will it really become available again? Or, more
| likely, like RSS, will this snuff it out.
|
| It's amazing how someone with a bit of capital and time
| can control almost anything that offends them.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| That sort of irrational behavior makes me wonder if das
| muskrat has his paws in this. If he was willing to drop
| $44 billion on Twitter, this is pocket change by
| comparison. And he's been desperately trying to get that
| guy to stop tracking his jet. The data is
| still freely available and will be distributed via
| another channel.
|
| The ADS-B transmissions are still freely available but
| the value is in the aggregate product. In the case of
| ADS-B Exchange that aggregate takes a ton of work from
| volunteers who (if the comments here are any indication)
| are inclined to stop volunteering. An ADS-B receiver has
| a range of dozens, maybe hundreds of miles. Without that
| network of volunteers Joe Schmo in Santa Cruz will have
| no way of tuning in to that freely observable transponder
| in Austin.
| notahacker wrote:
| The information is already publicly broadcast; nobody's
| paying one particular feed company big bucks to remove it
| from their records when most others do it simply because
| they ask nicely or because they don't want to upset the
| government. And even without the feeds, if a guy with a
| device somewhere near an airport decides to tweet that
| Elon has landed, everybody knows anyway.
| sschueller wrote:
| Well I for one will stop feeding them.
| mindcrime wrote:
| I mean, if I were providing one of these feeds, I'd probably
| shut it down and look for (or create) a new community-driven
| alternative.
| capableweb wrote:
| I chose to contribute my collected ADS-B data to ADS-B
| Exchange rather than Flightradar24 just because ADS-B
| Exchange was community driven and not owned by a company.
|
| I just turned off my sharing and looking for alternatives. If
| anyone know of any, please share them :)
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| Why not create a blockchain on webtorrent?
| Operyl wrote:
| Man, the blockchain being inserted wherever it doesn't
| need to be is becoming rampant on HN, isn't it? Humor me,
| though, how would that work and why would the cost of
| running a "blockchain," both in terms of money and energy
| wasted, be better than a simple feed aggregator?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I assumed that was satire or sarcasm.
| kelnos wrote:
| So did I, before I read the entire reply chain :(
| Operyl wrote:
| Given his entire chain above your comment, it was a
| serious comment.
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| A signed append only log, distributed with webtorrent
| would provide provenance and distribution. This would
| allow for not having to have dedicated infrastructure for
| collection.
|
| One could also use USENET and get rid of the garbage will
| killfiles.
| Operyl wrote:
| And who maintains the signing keys? It's just as
| centralized, with tons more complexity..
|
| EDIT: Regardless, the point I'm making is this is just
| way more work for something that really doesn't need a
| blockchain.
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| It really isn't. Everyone hopping on to the next fad-air-
| trak-site.io is going to reproduce the same problem.
| Distributing the data over webtorrent from the beginning
| will make data access democratic.
| fudgefactorfive wrote:
| Can you explain how you'd use Webtorrent to synchronize a
| large dataset that's updated in realtime? If you mean to
| get a P2P transport wouldn't WebRTC be what you're aiming
| for?
|
| I'm genuinely curious but isn't Webtorrent just using
| WebRTC to join a Torrent Swarm? Torrents are
| fundamentally immutable, the identifier is a static hash
| of the content of the torrent. That would mean producing
| a new torrent for each new data point or chunk of data
| points only to then submit that hash to a WebRTC based
| connection to again fetch torrent content?
|
| Genuinely curious, I'm interested in how torrent swarms
| can be used for novell applications.
| Operyl wrote:
| Something that happens once in a blue moon, for data that
| is already in multiple locations (to varying degrees of
| precision).. You've failed to sell it to me, I'll
| continue to contribute to the simpler solutions that
| won't need a crap ton of extra work, thanks.
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| Not advocating you stop or that your solution is wrong.
|
| If you are going to log, I'd look into CF offerings.
| mike_d wrote:
| I helped out a bit with ADSBExchange. The all volunteer staff
| were completely blindsided by this. The founder just took a
| payday and ran.
|
| For what it is worth, I don't actually know what the PE
| company bought. I guess the historical data and a rack full
| of servers - but the staff, community, and service are moving
| elsewhere.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Really good to know!! I'll join them.
| totoglazer wrote:
| Where to?
| KirillPanov wrote:
| This would be a great use for nostr.
|
| Instead of everybody uploading their data to one dude who
| can sell out, instead flood-fill it. We're not talking
| about a lot of data here.
| mike_d wrote:
| > We're not talking about a lot of data here
|
| It is actually a massive amount of data. Gigabits per
| second that need to be aggregated, sorted by geographic
| region, fed into multilateration systems, and cleaning
| the output before it can be shown on a map.
| dx034 wrote:
| Opensky seems to be the only non profit network left?
| tpmx wrote:
| The founder is Dan Streufert. (From the linked press
| release.)
| nocoiner wrote:
| One would think there would be recent lessons to be learned
| on how to vaporize value in connection with an asset-light
| acquisition... Actually, the guy who sold probably did
| learn those lessons. Best of luck to the buyer, I suppose.
| wpietri wrote:
| I might feel similarly, especially given my distaste for
| private equity. But in the AIS (ship tracking) space,
| commercial versions seem to do ok. MarineTraffic runs its own
| blatantly commercial effort. And AIShub.net is not commercial
| itself, but it is run by Astra Paging, which definitely is.
|
| I run a receiver that feeds into both networks, and in both
| cases I look at it as a value-for-value exchange.
| nocoiner wrote:
| Welps, shutting off my feed today. I was actually thinking about
| this exact scenario just last week. Funny to hear that it
| happened.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Funny but also sad :(
| lsllc wrote:
| I wonder if this was done to stop trackers like @ElonJet since
| ADS-B Exchange doesn't seem to support the "privacy" requests of
| the rich & famous as FlightAware / FlightRadar24 et al do.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-private-jet-no-lon...
| mlindner wrote:
| They're not requests, they're mandated by US law. Also it's not
| limited to rich and famous. Anyone can do it. Only the rich and
| famous seem to have passionate enough haters that they actively
| try to subvert the privacy protections.
| ranger207 wrote:
| AIUI it's mandated by US law if you use data from the FAA's
| system, and ADS-B Exchange didn't use the FAA's data so
| wasn't required to hide things on the privacy list
| nocoiner wrote:
| What's the saying? The law, in its majestic equality,
| prohibits both the rich and the poor from sleeping on the
| streets?
|
| Something like that.
| sftomato wrote:
| Let's not forget that thanks to adsb-exchange, authorities were
| also able to track Jeffrey Epstein's private jets.
| https://www.insider.com/jeffrey-epsteins-private-jet-flight-...
| https://github.com/adsbxchange/Jeffrey_Epstein_Lolita_Expres...
| mlindner wrote:
| All of this information is public and known to the
| government. ADBS Exchange didn't provide anything that wasn't
| already available.
| bahbahbahblah wrote:
| [dead]
| trothamel wrote:
| To the government. Having this available to journalists
| (and people to check the journalist's work) is also useful.
| mlindner wrote:
| Sure, but the comment I replied to was about "the
| authorities".
| cobertos wrote:
| Interestingly, ADS-B Exchange's twitter is suspended when I
| looked to see if there was any news updates there
| wkat4242 wrote:
| That's because they pissed off Elon by supplying the source
| data for ElonJet. He's been on a banning spree for weeks.
| Anyone who so much as mentioned the account would get the
| banhammer.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| You can still post the link with TinyURL or another URL
| shortener.
| arprocter wrote:
| >maintaining our enthusiast roots and unfiltered data
|
| Interesting to see if a certain someone's jet(s) remain trackable
| donaldcjackson wrote:
| I suggest that folks that want to feed open ADSB aggregators
| consider feeding https://opensky-network.org
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Interesting possibilities here:
|
| > You can now feed VHF/voice data to OpenSky and help
| researchers around the world. Check out the interface and set
| up a feeder at https://ui.atc.opensky-network.org/
| dgacmu wrote:
| I cynically wonder how much they'll start charging billionaires
| to hide their private jet info.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| or at the very least, the partners at Silversmith will have a
| long list of billionaires who owe them favors.
| sschueller wrote:
| Cynic in me thinks the was arranged by billionaires that don't
| want to be tracked. Chump change for them.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Out of curiosity, how does this community effort do quality
| control (ie preventing someone rich from paying some people to
| flood the system with conflicting information)
| dgacmu wrote:
| There's a protocol for multilateration of the detected jets
| using all of the receivers that are in range of its signal.
| Whil I'm sure there are ways you could attack it, it's pretty
| robust to the more obvious things.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| The mlat is more for receiving aircraft that use traditional
| transponders which don't include gps coordinates but just a
| squawk code and altitude. Hence it needs multiple receivers
| to triangulate their location. I don't think it uses this for
| real adsb feeds.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Would switching to a federated / distributed protocol fix
| things? Or is there some additional critical role that ADS-B
| was providing?
| tecleandor wrote:
| The dullest non-announce ever:
|
| https://twitter.com/ADSBex/status/1618306706861338625
|
| Hasn't said anything in the forum or the site news section, and
| hasn't posted that tweet until after the official announce by
| Jetnet.
|
| Looks like a case of "take the money and run". Doesn't smell good
| for the ads-b community.
| jmacd wrote:
| Just unplugged my receiver.
| myself248 wrote:
| Well, fuck.
|
| Companies eat things to kill them because it works. Only some
| fraction of users will jump to the alternative, and indeed the
| alternative never ends up as strong as the original.
|
| Are there examples of where the alternative turned out stronger?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Anyone want to work together on spinning up a non profit
| replacement with governance that prohibits a transfer of
| ownership to a for profit entity?
| wpietri wrote:
| I run an AIS receiver and have previously run a technical co-
| op. I am happy to chat, although I don't have time to do much
| direct labor right now. But the first questions I'd want to
| answer:
|
| 1) What will participants get out of it?
|
| 2) How will you pay for the central services used?
|
| 3) Where there isn't enough volunteer labor, how will you pay
| for needed labor?
|
| I don't want to discourage anybody, but there are some hard
| sustainability problems there.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Great questions. I have never run a non profit myself (but
| run several small business ventures, real estate investments,
| have previously owned and sold a small technology company),
| but view it as an optimal structure to support technology
| services like this that are intended as a public good or
| utility versus something that is going to get flipped to
| someone that is going to extract the value out of it
| (investors like PE and similar). I want to build where there
| can be no rug pull for stakeholders.
|
| 1. The same they got out of ADS-B Exchange: open aviation
| data. I would work with the Internet Archive to archive
| batches of the data stream on a cadence. We should never be
| able to take historical data away. It is yours, forever.
|
| 2. I would pay for a dedicated server out of my pocket to
| bootstrap, with the eventual goal of accumulating enough
| donations to have a very small non profit investment account
| that would throw off just enough returns to pay for the
| server(s) or a rack of equipment at a colo indefinitely (I'm
| partial to Hurricane Electric but any reasonable priced
| vendor will do). Again, strong governance around this as a US
| non profit to demonstrate transparency and efficiency. I
| would also accept equipment, colo, and bandwidth donations
| from folks who could ensure consistency, quality, and
| continuity of the resource.
|
| 3. We would rely primarily on volunteers, similar to
| OpenStreetMap, who runs lean fiscally speaking [1]. The
| Internet Archive runs their servers for 5-7 years (per
| u/jonah-archive's ops talk), so I would shoot for a long bare
| metal depreciation schedule, a time series database stored in
| Backblaze B2, high level just an efficient use of capital for
| the technology components. I suppose I'm going back into an
| on call rotation. C'est la vie. Automate All The Things.
|
| Poke holes in my thoughts, that's how they improve. I would
| also be interested in expanding into the AIS space; it's all
| UDP packets from SDRs coming into a software router and
| logger (with a visualization and admin frontend).
|
| [1] https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Finances
| wpietri wrote:
| Great starter thoughts! Thanks for contributing them.
|
| I'd be interested to see if the Internet Archive wants
| large globs of this kind of data. I actually have something
| like 5 years of AIS data that I've been collecting and I'd
| be happy to contribute it.
|
| I totally agree with you on transparency and efficiency.
|
| Taking donations is a chancy model. People get excited up
| front, but ongoing expenses requires ongoing begging unless
| you get really lucky with the amount of money raised up
| front. And even then, as Wikipedia shows, people tend to
| get ideas about using the money to do more stuff. As
| someone else suggested, a revenue-driven model might be
| more sustainable.
|
| The co-op I helped run was Bandwagon. We rented a cabinet
| and then shared it out among a bunch of sysadmins who
| wanted their own boxes on the internet. This started circa
| 2001, when single-box hosting was rare and virtual hosting
| was nonexistent. We wound it up a few years ago as most of
| the people moved to the cloud.
|
| My experience is that people's motivations change over
| time, and so actually owning hardware is risky if you want
| to avoid the one-person-in-Nebraska problem. [1]
|
| [1] https://xkcd.com/2347/
| andiareso wrote:
| I'm interested in helping as well (software engineer). This
| is such a loss for the community. Like other's have stated,
| ADS-B exchange didn't have to follow the privacy requests as
| they didn't aggregate FAA data so it remained open. I'm
| wondering what the future will hold with the new ownership.
| notahacker wrote:
| Depending on what sort of commercial arrangements
| participants were happy with, the obvious fundraising options
| are selling value added services or derived data on top or
| classic FOSS 'sponsorship' with corporate partners (hard to
| get for a new project in this space). That doesn't guarantee
| sustainability of course, particularly with there being a lot
| of competition in this sector with good coverage already.
|
| (FWIW I'm happy to chat: have sold non-ADSB aviation data and
| consulting before and been involved with buying ADSB and AIS
| from a commercial provider)
| wpietri wrote:
| Having been both on the buy and sell side is a very
| valuable perspective to include.
|
| Do you have a sense of where some good dividing lines are
| between what to give to the general public, what
| contributors get, and what is marketable?
|
| As an example, AISHub data contributors get a free real-
| time stream of global data in the same format that comes
| out of an AIS receiver. They also get limited API access:
| https://www.aishub.net/api
|
| On top of that, the company that runs AISHub sells both
| software and data services:
| http://www.astrapaging.com/data-services
| notahacker wrote:
| Dividing lines would depend to a large extent on what
| contributors want, particularly if it's set to be a
| nonprofit with a FOSS ethos.
|
| Potentially a lot of the value comes from providing
| specific cuts of the data for specific purposes to
| companies (statistics on aircraft hours and cycles for
| companies supplying parts and maintenance, trend
| analysis). There are of course already authoritative
| sources that specialise in that, but they're relatively
| expensive, and a lot of the commercial customers want
| Excel files with prepared data tables for their
| commercial use, not API access to a stream that probably
| needs some cleaning up. Selling that value add stuff is
| compatible with making the core data streams open. The
| rest obviously comes from API access (which you'd likely
| want to limit to some extent so consumer web and mobile
| apps aren't hammering them for data)
|
| Marketability is going to depend a huge amount on whether
| it's possible to get enough people on board to get good
| coverage, bearing in mind there are plenty of ADS-B data
| aggregation services out there (and they tend to have
| historical data going back several years, with the more
| commercially oriented ones having sales teams and full
| service customer support)
| blantonl wrote:
| I own adsb-router.com (currently unused) and would be glad to
| donate the domain and leadership expertise in governance and
| managing crowdsourced type sites (i own and manage
| radioreference.com and broadcastify.com). you can contact me
| through my profile
| nocoiner wrote:
| I'd be interested in helping out. I have experience with
| corporate governance and setting up transfer-restricted
| entities, though unfortunately not so much experience with
| setting up non-profits (though I have served on non-profit
| boards).
|
| That said, I can also think of a few ways you might be able to
| structure a successor that can't exit like this, without having
| to deal with the headache of qualification and compliance as a
| non-profit. Interesting thought exercise.
| yardie wrote:
| One of the first projects I created with the Raspberry Pi Model A
| was setup a SDR listening station. Then I wrote some software and
| downloaded software to listen and stream ADS-B data to a few
| aggregators. One of them was ADS-B Exchange. The other was ADS-B
| Hub[0]. The later is still free and still open source.
|
| [0] https://www.adsbhub.org/
| H8crilA wrote:
| Thanks, I'm switching my feeds from the shitty people behind
| ADSBExchange.
| phkahler wrote:
| 750,000 messages per second! Imagine if each node knew where it
| was and all of its nearest neighbors. The receivers could filter
| and not send messages that are coming from planes closer to their
| neighbors! Distributed filtering of redundant messages FTW!
| KirillPanov wrote:
| > 750,000 messages per second!
|
| ZOMG, that's like... a 1990s DSL connection!
| mkl wrote:
| Only if your messages are 1 byte long or something.
| sorenjan wrote:
| You need messages from multiple receivers for MLAT, I think
| they use messages with known plane positions to calibrate the
| MLAT solver since the receivers doesn't have a high quality
| common time source.
|
| Plus proximity doesn't mean you can see airplanes that are
| behind buildings, at low altitude, etc.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Oh nooo.. Now there's no volunteer driven tracking network left.
| And they'll probably start blocking military and private flights
| just like the other commercial trackers. Too bad, it was great
| while it lasted. Hopefully someone starts up a new one that will
| stay independent.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-01-25 23:00 UTC)