Comment by areoform | Hacker News Reader

Comment by areoform | Hacker News Reader

One of the saddest parts of this affair is that he has kicked a hornet's nest. Twitter is one of the homes of the OSINT movement and these moves, including the lawsuit against Sweeney, have pissed off enough people in the OSINT movement that they stopped tracking Russian war crimes and the FSB to find where the stalker video was taken.

It was nowhere close to an airport. Of course, the person could have followed the car from an airport, but we currently don't have any third-party evidence for that. I don't wish anyone harm. But the response and rage directed at someone merely reposting publicly available information from an API seems to be disproportionate.

The excuse used to purge elonjet was being held together by a fairly thin rope that seems to be down to a few threads.

From the founder of Bellingcat, https://twitter.com/eliothiggins/status/1603454821700452365

I looked at the discord on how they did it, and they went frame-by-frame, found a very specific curb, then they looked for that specific curb in the area. After they found the curb, they then cross-referenced it against a building that was visible in a reflection of the car window that they then used to confirm their find.

It took them just a few hours.

I expect that the more this hornet's nest gets kicked, the closer they'll look. I, personally, wouldn't want to be in their crosshairs.

edit — a link to the images,

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1036758130761158677/1...

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1036758130761158677/1...

the building itself,

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1036758130761158677...

This was done by https://twitter.com/Sepulco1

Oh man when I saw that and thought it was in my home town (South Pasadena), I didn't realize it was right at my gas station! It's a block or so down from my favorite Trader Joes too.

His allegation makes little sense based on my knowledge of the area. Not only is that location not near an airport but getting to one would take a hell of a long time. Painfully slow arterial roads in every which way except the 110 which goes straight through Downtown LA, usually with very heavy traffic. If you follow Orange Grove north, it enters one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in East LA with some incredible chateau sized houses, so if he wanted to find a rando to frame it makes sense he'd do it from there (assuming he owns property there).

Edit: according to [1] the child in question might have been one he had with his ex Grimes and according to [2] she bought a house in the area. Kinda checks out? Except the whole bit about someone stalking them all the way there from LAX [3]! If you were driving from LAX to Pasadena though, this is exactly the place you’d exit the freeway to gas up before heading up Orange Grove to the fancy neighborhoods

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34010663

[2] https://observer.com/2018/06/grimes-buys-house-pasadena-los-...

[3] https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af&lat=37.359&lon=-...

Do you have the tweet where Elon says that they were stalked all the way from LAX? The way I read it was Elon was making a tenuous connection all along. He never said his kid was near an airport.

> Don't ever, ever try to lie to the internet - because they will catch you. They will de-construct your spin. They will remember everything you ever say for eternity.

Gabe Newell, 2013

The internet is written in ink. --someone on the internet in the past

The counter to that is if you spread and repeat your lie far more than the debunkers are wiling or able to spread the truth, then your lie will be the thing generally believed.

"A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on."

--various

An important distinction, I think, is that Sweeney (@elonjet) appears to use a different tracker than the publicly available one. PIA is the freely available and public flight tracker, but can be put into private mode which Musk does. Sweeney then (likely) reverts to using non-public ICAO addresses which he identifies by manually coordinating Musk's known plane location/history.

I'm not an expert here, just sharing what I've seen. Please offer corrections.

https://twitter.com/scottwww/status/1490553502640140288/phot...

https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1603533380150181888

On his jet registration [1] it lists the code as A835AF and I believe this is the flight to LA in question [2]. This means that he was not using the spoofed ICAO code from PIA, broadcasting the publicly known one instead.

[1] https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Search/NNumberResul...

[2] https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af&lat=37.359&lon=-...

So few people use a privacy codes it just makes it easier to track if he uses it.

It's the same situation with privacy features in browsers. All it does is give trackers another data point to cross reference with the things you can't or don't think to scrub.

That's false. Musk's jet is not enrolled in PIA, which is just a programme that obfuscates the ADS-B identifier from the FAA's registry. Spotters can still find the aircraft.

However as I said it's not true in this case, the FAA registry entry for the aircraft has the accurate ADS-B hex code identifier, and the aircraft is trackable openly on sites like ADSB Exchange and even using your own ~$20 hardware radio receiver.

Sweeney is doing nothing out of the ordinary for this particular aircraft other than linking the ADSB Exchange API to a Twitter account.

As an aside, there's also nothing illegal nor morally wrong about spotters deobfuscating a jet that's in the PIA programme either. That's just a fig leaf measure, it's not actually effective.

A lot people on Twitter seem to believe he is enrolled in PIA.

Probably because he was at one point. Even Sweeney bragged about getting around it: http://web.archive.org/web/20220204202539/https://twitter.co...

Might’ve been one of his other aircraft, or more likely he allowed it to lapse. PIA is something you have to keep updating/requesting to remain part of.

the claim that he’s using PIA has been disproven dozens of times in the endless thread about the drama - how have you not seen any, not oookes into it yourself and still so confidently made an assertion?

this isn't my full time job.

> prosecution

Persecution? :-)

Good catch ty! In my defense, he is prosecuting a case against him, but it's weird usage so I fixed it :)

> It was nowhere close to an airport.

Its less than 10 miles from the nearest airport (San Gabriel Valley Airport).

Is that the airport the jet tracker said Elon was at?

Obviously he followed the car from the airport — how else would he identify the car with Elon Musk’s kid?

we don't know anything about the "stalker" other than what Musk said. Musk has been caught lying about his children in the past [1] to justify his Twitter policy swings. I'd like to think he wouldn't stoop so low as to use his kid like that, but the truth is we don't know.

Now journalists are being banned for copying word-for-word the police response stating that "no police report was filed" over the stalker incident.

[1] https://twitter.com/justinemusk/status/1595506087570333696

It's like journalists don't believe that anything will happen to them. The faster they divest from twitter the better.

That would be a loss for twitter IMO. I know it's being remade into ground zero for culture war discourse, but there's nowhere else online like Twitter when it comes to breaking news and developing situations. Journalists and reporters sharing information as it's verified real time.

When something was going down, you went to twitter.

and now Mastodon is the same thing, but decentralized and not owned by a single point of human failure.

Well this should be a good lesson in why not to trust something that supposedly is in the public interest to a private company that can easily be bought up by some billionaire with emotional problems.

Twitter was lost the day Musk carried that sink into the building. I agree that it was an important cultural institution, but I don't think there's anything that can be done to save it. The faster we let it fall, the faster we can develop alternatives.

Twitter is dead. Long live the Fediverse.

No one cares about the fediverse.

Only the tiny minority of techies screaming about the 'fediverse' care. There is little interest with the majority of non-techies 200M+ that care to use it daily, let alone sign up; hence why they still use Twitter.

Federated social networks such as Mastodon are a solution in search of a problem, and it always has been like that for years.

I hear a lot of people talking about the Fediverse of many different technical backgrounds. It's true it would take a huge event to get non-technical people interested in the Fediverse - but that's exactly what I'm seeing.

They're not a solution in search of a problem. They're a solution a small, dedicated group of people have cared deeply about, but most people have ignored. But people have been unsatisfied with the centralized aspects of social media for a long time. They're not stupid; they see the way the algorithms are designed for engagement, and the toxicity that causes. They see how fragile it is that someone like Musk can just swoop in and sabotage the platform.

Network effects have made it difficult to adopt a decentralized solution. Well - lots of communities are looking for a home they won't have to leave for the same reason they did before. That's creating network effects in the opposite direction.

If you'd said this to me a few weeks ago I'd have been inclined to believe it. But things are in flux. Maybe the Fediverse won't take off, but it has a very really shot right now.

I simply don't get the problem with the "Fediverse". Mastodon works very much like Twitter and you can follow people on your server or another one with ease. You don't need to know anything about anything to do this.

Go ask your mom what algorithm she prefers for her content feed and report back.

Meh, she seems happy following other emeritus professors on mathstodon.xyz and crafty types in weaving and bridge groups.

How about your mom?

Like yours, she doesn't give a damn about the algorithm and thus isn't on Mastodon for that reason.

That's rather unlike my mother who is on a Mastodon instance and has a long and documented love of algorithms.

I am on Mastodon, and none of the people who follow me there or who I am following are techies - oh, except Cory Doctorow. All are refugees from Twitter.

Mastodon solves my problem, "How do I keep track of my friends without Twitter or Facebook" very well, and each day new friends of mine appear there.

I do.

And even if you think "not the fediverse," Twitter is still dead. Let's get to "long live" something.

I'm gonna be honest, you're coming off a bit delusional. No meaningful amount of people care about the issues you do to abandon twitter for an already dead network like mastodon. The idea of federation doesn't appeal to normies, it only confuses them.

This is a reflection on your perception, what you imagine to be possible, and how much respect you afford "normies", more than it is a reflection on me.

Well I was calling you delusional if you think your average person cares about Elon's shenanigans enough to jump ship to a platform no one uses. So it was solely a comment on you.

I see that I wasn't as clear as I could have been, so I've edited it to be "a reflection" rather than "a comment."

If you'd like me to be entirely explicit; in trying to insult me, you're telegraphing your own lack of awareness.

If you're perceiving it as in insult rather than taking a second to consider the possibility you may be drastically overstating the importance of certain things to the average person then, it's just you lacking self-awareness here friend.

The kid dying in his arms or his wife’s beside him — I feel like this is not a good one to be screaming “liar.”

There are many legitimate reasons to track Elon Musk's coordinates, for example to offer him ads more relevant to his interests.

>Obviously...

We know too little about this incident to say that that is obvious at this point.

Please explain how the car in question was found in the first place, at an airport the size of a small city. Flight-tracking data will have been of absolutely zero help in doing that, of course.

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