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.

Does the title mean, "...turned into..."?

That is, should it be "A joke domain purchase turned into geopolitical warfare"

Anyway, fascinating reading.

I enjoyed reading this. It has a "butterfly effect" kind of vibe how such a random trivial-sounding pursuit can lead to something consequential. It's also mind-opening to realize how many strange human activities are happening in the background.

This really escalated amusingly. Some things just write themselves.

> 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...

I was one of the data points in that spike related to the Chinese balloon incident though that is not the first time I used sondehub. A couple years before that incident I found the site while trying to help someone understand what they were seeing in the sky near where they live.

An old dopehead, friend-of-a-friend was paranoid that they were being surveilled by aliens in UFOs, something they could assure you had been happening since the 1970's. Not coincidentally I'm sure, that's when they were a young dopehead. While outwardly funny to most of us, it was a serious issue for them. To help them understand all the shiny things in the sky at night I assembled a list of tools that could help them rule out various terrestrial sources for the shiny things. Stellaris or Celestia could help them identify stars and constellations, even showing them what the sky should look like at their exact location so they could compare in real time. They could also use their digital camera (after instructions on how to take low light photos that show stars) to take photos and later compare those photos to stars and planets that would've been visible when the photo was taken. I pointed them at Flightradar24 and FlightAware for air traffic and recommended they get a license instead of the free version so they could track more things better. They weren't close to an active military base but using either or both of those could help rule out military air traffic when the pilots were flying and broadcasting ADS-B.

Since many UFOs in the historical record were blamed on weather balloons I looked around for a way to find weather balloons visible in your area and that is when I found sondehub. The ability to see the balloon track was especially useful since I explained how objects at high altitudes could be visible even if they are hundreds of miles distant when you have a clear line of sight so the balloon doesn't need to be between them and the horizon. It only needed to be visible above the horizon and using the tools they could rule out quite a few things. Around the same time people were posting great photos of sprites associated with powerful thunderstorms well over the horizon so this helped them understand that shiny things in the sky are not necessarily close to them. I also used HeavensAbove to help them track known satellites and the ISS. Having them see the ISS cross the sky at their location a little after dark helped them understand why a bright light crossing the sky can quickly disappear once the concept of the earth's shadow was clear. It was nice and bright while sunlit and winked out as soon as it passed into shadow. I gave them links to astronomy sites so they could know when to expect meteor showers and other celestial phenomena.

All in all, they got a nice collection of tools, freely available, that they could use to understand why there were sparkly, shiny things in their sky. I haven't yet had confirmation that any of those sparkly, shiny things could not be explained using those tools.

Thanks for this link.

I've only read the first few paragraphs but I've noticed a narrative issue. I might be the only person to have this peeve, but when introducing a story to non technical and even technical readers, it's always clearer to introduce which website is not theirs and which website is theirs. It's written in a 3rd person perspective that doesn't take ownership of the websites.

"Only Melbourne and Adelaide radiosondes (the transmitter on weather balloons) were being tracked on a website called Habhub - high altitude ballooning hub."

Ok, I can infer that habhub probably isn't the speaker's website.

"A query parameter could be added to the URL to remove the filter and on 12th of May 2018 sondehub.org registered with a single purpose - a URL redirect to Habhub with a radiosonde specific filter."

Ok, I can infer sondehub was set up by a jokey duo or group of weather balloon hobbyists.

But it's really annoying reading and doubting this because I'm not 100% sure that the speaker is actually the domain creator of sondehub.

You can say "we registered sondehub" or "I registered sondehub.org." Poor journalists use this passive voice sometimes. "Something happened. A source said..." Unless you're protecting a source, you can say who said what, and what caused something to happen.

So I stopped reading, and wrote this comment.

> Meteolabor AG

> climate hoax

Once again, the Swiss are confirming their image as the most US-like country in Europe :'(

I like how a website for tracking balloons escalated into critical infrastructure. Reminds me of 99 Red Balloons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99_Luftballons