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Comment by jjwiseman | Hacker News Reader

Commercial flight trackers encourage enthusiasts to feed them data, then take money from operators to hide that data. If you want everyone to have access to the data, consider feeding a network that doesn't censor or block anything, like ADS-B Exchange (https://www.adsbexchange.com/).

A project like Dictator Alert (https://dictatoralert.org/) uses ADS-B Exchange because the authoritarian regimes they're tracking can just pay a commercial site to hide their aircraft—they don't like being tracked.

My Advisory Circular bots (https://skycircl.es/bots/), which tweet in real time whenever they detect police, FBI, military, news or fire aircraft circling, and my "What's Overhead?" Siri shortcut (https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1238149529469202433) use ADS-B Exchange because a lot of the most interesting aircraft are the ones that are blocked on commercial trackers.

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Seconding this. If you have a PiAware setup or other off the shelf ADS-B tracker, it's super easy to add feeding to ADS-B Exchange. https://www.adsbexchange.com/how-to-feed/#scriptmethod

A Pi4-based rig can feed multiple services; I'm currently feeding six or so, including a semi-provate service that specialises in low-flying military traffic in the UK (I'm just off the main cross-London helicopter route, so get a lot of traffic that wouldn't be tracked any other way than by MLAT from Mode-S).

Just curious, why is the network private, or semi-private?

It was originally set up to cater for folk photographing low flyhing in the Welsh mountains, particularly around the Mach Loop. So it's historically a subscription service with its own ICAO lookup database for military aircraft in the UK, which is very accurate indeed...

Now anyone can subscribe to 360radar, but it is limited to the UK and a small part of northern Europe. It's not the cheapest service, but if you're an aviation photographer in the UK it and its linked community are a key resource.

I'll have to check that out. I've been feeding flightaware since November 9, 2016 it would be nice to feed ADS-B Exchange as well.

It's noteworthy that a relatively modern protocol like ADS-B (and Mode S transponders) has completely no regard for information security. It would have been very easy to generate a random address on startup and assign a correlation code only known to ATC in the clearance. Like the original 4 digit mode C codes were not identifiable.

That wouldn't stop any traffic collision or ATC function from working but would prevent persistent tracking of for example private jets.

> That wouldn't stop any traffic collision or ATC function from working but would prevent persistent tracking of for example private jets.

I'm not sure how well that would work w/r/t ATC hand-off and their ability to look up flight plans.

Furthermore, there's the problem of getting the random ID to ATC after the plane has "started up."

They're already doing this, but there's no reason for it to be a random ID—It's an ephemeral ID assigned by the FAA. So you know your ephemeral ID & registration, the FAA knows your ephemeral ID & registration, and while everyone else can see your ephemeral ID they do not know the aircraft registration it's tied to.

https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/equipadsb/privacy/

An interesting image recognition project would be a camera watching departures from an airport that records the tail number of a plane and correlates it with the ephemeral ID to feed back into the exchange.

> would prevent persistent tracking of for example private jets

Why? They are using our airspace. Looking down in to our backyards. I have a right to at least get an identifier I can use to report to authorities.

I've worked with VVIP executive protection teams before and if the trip needs to be secret they will schedule plane swaps along the trip or rent a jet that is not attributable to the company.

The only time I would bother looking into your backyard would be if I was about to land off-airport into it.

ATC isn't the only party who needs to see the aircraft IDs.

As a pilot, it's valuable to be able to see tail numbers to help correlate what I'm hearing on the radio with what I'm seeing on my displays. I can guess who's who from position reports, but seeing the tail number leaves no ambiguity.

There are also some smaller facilities that use ADS-B to monitor traffic, but aren't networked into the national ATC radar system.

Aviation events will also setup their own temporary control tower, and frequently use ADS-B as an aid for sequencing traffic. (Again, without access to the national ATC radar network.)

For folks who need privacy, there are a couple options that already exist - UAT privacy mode or private Mode S addresses. Though notably, both of these are only available options for domestic flight within the US.

Aircraft systems I know don't show the callsign of TCAS targets (although they should be able since it's in the extended mode S reply). I think only iPad based systems in small general aviation typically do that? I've never felt like I missed that information when flying.

This isn’t a “lack of information security”, the whole point of transponders is the broadcast your aircraft identity and position.

Having to coordinate with every ATC jurisdiction along a flight path would be extra work and leave room for errors.

Additionally it wouldn’t work for flights that don’t have a planned route, like a civil aviation pilot who’s just cruising.

It’s akin to having a license plate on your car.

It will work, it's called "Privacy ICAO Address" (PIA) by the FAA, and it's already being phased in: https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/equipadsb/privacy/

This is really interesting stuff. Do you know of any services which show aircraft present in ADS-B but missing in, say, FlightRadar24?

Try https://globe.adsbexchange.com/ for a good unfiltered map.

ADSB and Opensky are the big ones. IIRC one of them censors aircraft on the owners' request but because they're lower profile lots of planes that are blocked on Flightaware are still visible. One of them also has an API that returns "interesting" aircraft (military, government, owned by celebrities etc) which is fun to look at

Edit: I think it's Opensky that filters their data. Not many planes are filtered but their coverage also isn't as comprehensive as ADSBExchange. For one specific usecase I did find Opensky's API easier to work with

Seconded. In the SF Bay Area the “fun” (or worrisome) planes are on adsbexchange but not FlightRadar24.

I'm curious what you mean by worrisome in this context?

I'm not who you responded to but I'd guess they mean something like a Boeing E-6B Mercury "doomsday plane," with the full capability to command the launch of the country's ballistic missile submarines and ground based ICBMs, a plane with access to enough firepower to plausibly end our civilization... worrisome in any context!

ADS-B exchange added to an existing FR24 install.

For anyone reading this doing same - you need to fix the ports. FR24 pi image outputs to port 30003. adsb is looking for 30005 and thus fails to find the existing feed

edit it in /etc/default/adsbexchange to align them

No we don't need to fix the ports, we recommend installing a standalone decoder. Data going through fr24feed is likely not to work for MLAT. Anyhow that port 30003 is unreliable as fr24feed at least used to crash with multiple connections to it.

In a similar spirit: FR24 should fix their installs and ports.

30003 is SBS data? Don't change the ADSBx data port. FR24 feder client disables 30005 beast port to make it hard for people to feed other sites.

Install a separate decoder like readsb and drop that FR24 mind control. Then set FR24 craptastic client to read from the decoder if you insist on feeding FR24 ...

Comments like this make me wonder whether I want to be anywhere near ADSBx & community at all

Love this stuff. I have a view of the Chesapeake and watch AIS stuff for marine traffic. I notice Local police, Navy and USCG vessels do not show up.. Pretty sure they transmit tho. Anybody know of similar sites that show unfiltered AIS info?

How about MarineTraffic?

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-12.0/cent...

My best guess would be that most commercial provider like MarineTraffic wouldn't show those vessels because they would be running duplicate MMSI numbers to hide their identity to make them harder to track.

If you go to marinetraffic.com and look at a military port like San Diego you'll see plenty of military ships (for example https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/shipid:5892129/zoo...). Sometimes they spoof, but often they don't, and the trackers show them even when they're spoofing.

Thanks. Been using marine traffic.com for years, and vesselfinder.com for a while also. Rarely if ever see the vessels I'm referring to in either place.

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