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- Hacker News
- The author’s concern about keeping the infrastructure decentralized is pretty understandable, not just from a censorship/open-data perspective, but also from a security perspective: you don't want one server, or one person, to become an obvious target.by voxleone
- 2 is 1, one is none. I hope they do regular backups too.by webdoodle
- I think in this sort of case it's more likely that the one person loses interest in the hobby (or time for it) and leaves it unmaintained than anything else, but yes.by moffkalast
- 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.
by rawling - I didn’t understand that part either.by drdexebtjl
- Slightly unrelated but I have no idea how wind speed predictions are made up high in the altitudes, is it just interpolation of data that are get from various radiosonoids across various timestamps and finding a regular or seasonal pattern?by martianvoid
- Not just wind speed, but all kinds of weather data can be extracted from radiosonde recordings. The data output is called a Skew-T Log-P graph. Some examples of how to interpret them at https://www.weather.gov/source/zhu/ZHU_Training_Page/convect...
There are of course several different global weather models that predict the behavior of the atmosphere, and it is a lot more complicated than just interpolating past data. But they all do rely on radiosonde data for daily calibration of actual atmospheric conditions.
by buildsjets - As I understand it, it's a combination of things: aircraft reports, atmospheric motion vectors (e.g. a cloud doesn't have any propulsion, so if a cloud moves 30 km in an hour, you have learned something about the wind), Doppler wind lidar, and satellite measurements.
The numerical predictions of weather models often have many vertical components as well, so solving it for ground level also requires extending the forecast to the air, depending on the model.
by jxf - Generally at altitude the wind goes from west to east. During the Cold War the US would launch spy balloons to overfly Russia whilst the wind was blowing against the Russians reciprocating. This is generally true in the current Ukraine war too.
Some interesting links:
https://www.hisutton.com/US-Navy-CIA-Submarine-Launched-Spy-...
https://www.hisutton.com/Chinese-Navy-High-Altitude-Spy-Ball...
by wood_spirit - > Official response from Meteolabor AG: For strategic reasons, we do not provide any data or sample devices. 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.
>We are aware of the so-called waste problem.
>Personal comment: I would personally like to draw attention to military activities, particularly in the Middle East, which result in significantly (exponentially) more waste and toxic substances being released into the atmosphere and left lying around in the environment – or entering the food and water cycles
>In addition to military operations, countless “missions” are currently being flown over Europe with the aim of leaving “contrails” in the sky [rather “chemtrails”]. I know their purpose; I know what NetZero is supposed to achieve, and what decarbonization and CO2 reduction are intended to accomplish. I am well-informed about the climate hoax.
>Start there! The people to talk to are politicians, NGOs, and very wealthy old white men.
I wonder who at the company wrote that? Paul Klöti? Rolf Maag? Elisabeth Ruppert-Bolliger? Walter Büchler? Andreas Kräuchi?
by KennyBlanken - The most interesting thing is like, contrail conspiracy theories from a weather date collection organisation? That seems... odd to say the least?by zipy124
- 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.by m-i-l
- reminds me of keys/badges with "drop in any mailbox" instructions that recover them.by m463
- 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.
- > Meanwhile (and you might have noticed me asking for AWS help on fedi) we contacted AWS as the source IP was from an AWS network. It was very important however to make sure the AWS support did not shutdown access.
I'm legitimately impressed that whoever got that ticket on AWS side actually followed through and was able to divert from their script...
by mschuster91 - Ditto. My experience with AWS support has been generally disappointing.
- When AWS suspects malicious usage in my experience they usually ask before shutting you down.
The company I work at got one of these emails from AWS. We had a bug which caused us to hit a 3rd party API much more than we should have, and the service provider reported us to AWS for attempted DDoS. AWS just asked us to give our side of the story. I'm sure that being a large (but not enterprise) customer gives us some leeway, but I've also heard similar things from hobbyists.
There are exceptions if you are a fairly new account, or if you operate in certain low reputation regions. Specifically I have heard regions in Africa tend to get the "shoot first ask questions later" treatment from AWS Support.
However, all of this was before 2026 (when AWS Support seems to have 100% turned over to AI). For all I know their actions might look completely different now.
by frenchtoast8 - 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?
by iamnothere - I feel like it's a "cast a wide net" type of strategy. Doesn't really hurt to ask and there _could_ be the tiniest hint that could lead to something. Maybe?by BowBun
- Rings a bell, I think it was because Curl showed up as the user agent for malicious activity.
You have to be kind of lost to contact Daniel about it, but I think it's ok behaviour for junior sysadmins that are just starting out, everyone was starting out sometime, and curl is like a lightning catcher for the world's daily lucky thousand.
by TZubiri - Actually, it wasn't unreasonable. If the guy caused the damage while picking up a sonde, to know who's sonde it was would help identify the culprit.by ikidd
- "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
by wongarsu - If the transmitters continued to operate after battery exhaustion, then I may begin to question the laws of physics, as well as my life choices
- 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.
by Firefishy - Can i already subscribe? I hope you decide to do it!by zigman1
- I really want to read this!by matkoniecz
- I encourage you to make it! That sounds like it could be a really fun read.by yhvr
- You should compare notes with the trove of weird emails that Daniel at haxx.se gets (the curl guy) because his email address is in the curl license text appended in the fine print of a bunch of products.by walrus01
- I remember being in Tel Aviv for work, and pulling up maps to plot out a bike route from the hotel to the office. Only to find that the entire route is blurred out online. Turns out our office was a few 100 meters from something important to the IDF, so no map/route data available. Too far to reasonably walk, and didn't want to try a bike without knowing there was a reasonable route...by makr17
- 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.
by xur17