How a joke domain purchase turned into geopolitical warfare
A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare
In 2017, the author started tracking weather balloons as a hobby. A joke redirect site, sondehub.org, evolved into SondeHub, a community-run radiosonde tracking service. As the service grew, it attracted attention from government agencies, the military, and even the FAA. The author recounts how reverse predictions accidentally mapped artillery sites, how the service survived a DDOS attack possibly linked to the Ukraine conflict, and how a $439,000 missile was used to shoot down an amateur balloon. The story also covers requests from the US Office of the Secretary of War and the NTSB, highlighting the unexpected consequences of a hobby project.
It is incredibly important that the http request data is not distributed. It is also important that the source AWS account is not blocked, rate limited or terminated - loss of life could occur.
- monitron
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.
- xur17
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.
- Firefishy
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.
- wongarsu
"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
- iamnothere
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?
- giancarlostoro
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.
- m-i-l
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.
- rawling
How did they pivot from just providing a redirect to
> 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.