The flight tracker that powered ElonJet has taken a left turn | Hacker News Reader

The flight tracker that powered ElonJet has taken a left turn

wired.com

27 pointsTomte8 comments

> “Today is a sad day,” Jack Sweeney, who ran the @ElonJet Twitter account that earned him legal threats from Musk himself, wrote on Mastodon following the acquisition announcement. His efforts to track an array of private jets, including that of the Tesla and Twitter CEO, relied on ADS-B Exchange. “If you feed ADSBexchange we encourage you to stop feeding. ADSBExchange was founded on the principles of hobbyists community not for-profit PE firms.”

..says the guy who, when Elon asked him if he would take it down out of concerns for his personal safety, wanted 50k.

Taking it down doesn’t make flight tracking infeasible, just moderately less accessible. Any sufficiently motivated attacker is going to be able to get the information without a problem. Isn’t it better to have the information more public to increase awareness?

I’ve also really enjoyed seeing how much negativity these peoples’ wasteful habits receive. That’s just me personally though.

Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520355

People in that thread seemed to be jumping to https://adsbhub.com and https://opensky-network.com and seem to be expecting https://airframes.io to start supporting ADSB messaging in the future.

I haven't used these services, but asbhub [dot] com doesn't appear to be serving anything and has an invalid cert, and opensky-network [dot] com doesn't resolve for me. Are they https://www.adsbhub.org/ and https://opensky-network.org/ instead?

Not sure how I managed to mess both those up so completely - your corrected URLs were the ones I was aiming for - thank you.

> ADS-B Exchange, on the other hand, is entirely user-supported. Across the globe, volunteers set up receivers—which can be built, or bought for relatively cheap—designed to receive real-time data from planes in mid-flight. They, in turn, feed that data into ADS-B Exchange’s software, which compiles the thousands of inputs and displays a real-time map of all the world’s in-transit flights.

Seems like you could fork it relatively easily then?

It runs on combine1090 [0]....I've got it running here [1] as well; couple friends feed me data via Raspberry Pi's in addition to my rigs.

[0] https://github.com/wiedehopf/combine1090

[1] https://radar.airport-frequencies.com

https://archive.is/2ffTU

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