Tailspotting: Identifying and profiting from CEO vacation trips | Hacker News Reader

Tailspotting: Identifying and profiting from CEO vacation trips

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232 pointsmathattack54 comments

This was what came to immediate mind after reading about ADS-B becoming mandatory in the US a few years back. This started a small few-month long obsession to understand it all, and became one of my more fun hobbies in the past few years. It already is mandatory in Europe. I didn't think of the vacationing correlation to stock prices, but simply tracking corporate movements and inferring future stock price movement from those movements. "Wall Street" of course coming to immediate mind here.

For those not aware, ADS-B is essentially a transmitter in aircraft that periodically report registration number, altitude, GPS coordinates, and airspeed. This is to supplement the current air traffic control system, and eventually take it over. This data is in real time, and not delayed or censored like the FAA supplied data feeds are.

It is not encrypted, so anyone with an antenna and the proper equipment can get the location information of every equipped aircraft within usually a 50-250mi radius, depending on antenna height, receiver quality, topology, etc. While many US domestic aircraft are not so equipped, this is rapidly changing as I believe all must be by 2022. Any aircraft that ever enters European airspace must be equipped, so that means for practical purposes any International flight can be tracked. This includes most corporate jets which are used to fly anywhere but within the United States.

It's trivial to decode in software, and I run a couple installations with hacked up USB DBS TV dongles. They are not the highest quality (a few enterprising folks sell custom ASIC/boards for doing this better), but are cheap and easy to make work.

It's a fun project to hack on for a weekend, I learned a bit about software defined radio among other things. Even fixed a bug in some code that accidentally calculated the aircraft's location to the wrong hemisphere :) Turns out GPS math is somewhat interesting, in the way they encode the data for the little bandwidth available.

This is also the data that powers flightradar24, and probably some other sites out there. Basically a network of enthusiasts that run antenna installations reporting their data to a central server for visualization.

I brought a small antenna and box on vacation with me to Jamaica a couple years back, and was able to track aircraft a good 300nm+ off the coast from the beach. It was fun watching the tracks route around storms and such.

That sounds like great fun, I'd be really interested in a write-up of your project if you have the time. Particularly hacking the TV dongles, and working out the interesting GPS math!

rtlsdr[1] is the name of the project that lets you use your $10 USB TV tuner as a software defined radio receiver (bless those osmocom people). rtl-sdr.com[2] has some more information.

dump1090[3] is the particular project for decoding ADS-B broadcasts.

With £15 of equipment (USB Tuner and some TV coax hacked into an antenna) I'm looking at aircraft 200+nm away [4] (though today's weather doesn't help).

[1] http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr [2] http://www.rtl-sdr.com/ [3] https://github.com/antirez/dump1090 [4] http://i.imgur.com/jncyTIe.png

I always thought a fun phone app would be a Google Sky clone for aeroplanes. i.e. instead of pointing your phone at a planet, point it at a plane and get the ADS-B details on it appear.

Flightradar24, the iOS mobile app, at least, already do it.

Flightradar24 pro offers this feature

I recently found "Plane Finder AR" for iOS that does exactly this for free

Ask Siri "What planes are above me?".

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=flights+overhead

Thanks all! I'll see if it's on Android.

My father would adore that app...

It's not mandatory in Europe until 2017 - for instance you won't see any FlyBE ADS-B tracking data on sites like flightradar24 because their fleet consists mostly of Embraer's and Dash 8-Q400 and very few of those aircraft have ADS-B transponders (at least at the moment).

How do enthusiasts track the planes over the ocean? I saw a plane on flightradar24 that looked like it was 360mi+ away from the coast. (It was yellow, meaning ADS-B data.)

Filed flightplans and dead reckonging are sometimes intermixed when ADS-B coverage is poor.

My guess is that planes reach their cruise heading, altitude and speed by the time they get out of range of ADS-B receivers. Since they follow predefined air corridors, location can be easily inferred from last known information. Obviously it won't be accurate if the plane has changed course to avoid bad weather (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447).

So, I can fake being any plane since there is no cryptographic signing of the broadcasts?

According to the FAA they have a way to determine what is fake and not. Not sure how they do it but it could involve comparing the signal to an actual radar return.

As the density of receiver sites increases, it will likely be possible to use trilateration to identify broadcasts which are obviously bogus.

That would require broadcasting in restricted bands.

Well, I think that's the lesser moral problem here...

FlightAware also uses ADS-B: https://flightaware.com/adsb/

Notably, right now ADS-B coverage is not very thorough, especially in the US. Most aircraft are not equipped with ADS-B transmitters. The restricted feeds like the one the FAA supplies are still essential to getting thorough coverage in some areas.

What are the FAA feeds and where can I find them?

FYI There is only one vendor I know of, fltplan.com, which would let you file under an obfuscated 'dotcom456' callsign. I believe they are the only provider of this service? (maybe airinc?). Obviously there are still other fields available in the ADS-B that would help identify movements, but this is what i've recommended as its also used over the radios, combating the transcribing algorithms using liveatc feeds.

You can use a similar technique for identifying international arms dealers, sanction busters, CIA rendition flights, etc. Alex Harrowell occasionally blogs about this:

http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2011/01/09/a-quick-howto/ - aircraft investigation resources

http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/07/23/o-rly/ - Suspicious Iran-to-Syria flights

http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2009/12/23/mystery-jet-upda... - mystery 727 in a desert

One of the best pieces of advice I heard from our resident stats/machine learning researcher at Uni was this: If a paper is published which claims to show a technique for profiting on the share market, then it doesn't work. If it did, they wouldn't have published it.

Having said that, there is plenty of interesting papers in this area, and from the abstract, this paper seems to take an interesting approach too.

My first thought too. This must already be a variable in high frequency trading software for a number of years.

I think it was Michael Lewis' "Liars Poker": "Those that tell don't know and those that know don't tell."

Hmmmmmm if I apply that to that researcher's own words, then he is lying to confuse you! It's a Goedelian paradox!

Actually, I think the bigger point is that researcher's rarely "tell all." Just like Moriarty in the final episode of Season 2 of Sherlock (on BBC 2013-2014), sometimes a work is created as an advertisement demonstrating the ability to draw larger returns. Those intimate with the data will always have more than than will or can possibly publish.

Interesting academic work on this recently. It shows that, as expected, the publication of a working investment strategy decreases its efficacy.

http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=64857...

Of course, contra your ML researcher, this presupposes that there are effective strategies that are published.

Some of it is about the agenda of the person writing it.

The Fama-French 3 factor model still holds. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fama%E2%80%93French_three-facto...) Part of this is because Gene Fama doesn't have a hedge fund on the side. He advises DFA, but they want their customers to understand the model. (He also won this year's Economics Nobel)

A similar technique was used to "predict" Sarah Palin's choice as running mate in 2008.

> In 2008, as John McCain prepared to announce his running mate, Fitzpatrick and his fellow trader Joe Schilling were monitoring the movements of all the contenders, calling their press secretaries and checking a flight-tracking website. They noticed a Gulfstream jet from Anchorage, Alaska, bound for the site of a McCain rally, and bought Sarah Palin, a longshot. When the surprise pick was unveiled, Fitzpatrick took home $25,000.

Source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewrice/the-fall-of-intrade-and-t... (despite being from buzzfeed, the article is well worth reading)

In mid 2012 the company I was working for went through a lengthy acquisition process. I started monitoring our corporate calendar and meeting rooms in Exchange. One day I figured out our CTO was leaving the company: our head of HR, the CTO and all his managers were to be unavailable in a couple hours, for the same 30 minutes and, at the same time, one of the meeting rooms was booked.

It was announced the next day. Right after the meeting, one of his managers had several new bookings extending through most of his day. We accurately predicted (with some surprise) the successor.

Meta-use of a shared company calendar is worthy of a whole separate article, IMO.

From personal experience - even if you can't see where your management is meeting or who they are meeting with, just knowing they will be out of the office can be valuable. Especially when you are job-hunting.

The only thing I've managed to use shared calendars for up to this point is figuring out when the meetings with leftover food were ending.

You really should put that code on Github. ;-)

It would be exceedingly popular.

I'll be happy to provide it as a service. You just share your calendar with my system, and it will automatically tell you when your boss is away and where you can get free food.

I will totally not use this data to trade stocks ;).

That's brilliant!

Depending on how the calendering system reports busy-ness, there's a nice timing attack on figuring out who people are meeting with. If the calendar shows busy when an invitation has been sent, instead of when someone accepts the invitation, and you take snapshots frequently enough, you can probably group people into meetings based on when the meeting showed up on peers' calendars.

When Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, the execs would both meet in a third, neutral city but would fly into other airports within a few hours' drive of the meeting location specifically so that anyone tracking their planes wouldn't know they were flying to the same location.

pdf for download here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2022822

Thanks, their site has been down for hours.

viewable in browser (chrome at least) here: http://lsr.nellco.org/nyu_lewp/293/

My first thought was: there obviously needs to be a reference to the 1987 movie "Wall Street" in there somewhere.

"Due to their large size, aircraft can also be observed physically taking off and landing at airports by scouts stationed as “tailspotters,” a role played memorably by actor Charlie Sheen in the 1987 feature film Wall Street."

Yep, I'm right.

So a CEO that wants to see interest in their stock rise, should just take vacation more often. Win for everyone!

Or schedule flights to their vacation homes using easily identified planes. They don't actually have to go with the plane.

I imagine that a Stingray-like IMSI/IMEI/MEID interceptor that looked for executive mobile phones could be even more profitable.

Here is a video explaining the idea.

http://vimeo.com/44382964

This is cool, although companies have probably become aware of this.

Possible, but it doesn't take many people trading on a signal to wipe out any correlation that may have been there.

What can they do? Send their executives on random vacations and plane trips?

you're close :) Use a charter aircraft that flys many different clients is one way to limit this, or offer their own aircraft available for charter when its not in use by the company. All corporate flight departments already do charter other aircraft for supplemental lift or when an aircraft is down for maintenance.

Paywalled. $39.95.

scroll up for link to PDF

I'll take this to mean that we should just fire our CEO and not have to worry about problems ever again. ;)

Testing attention please.

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