A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

(sprocketfox.io)

102 points | by kareiva 3 hours ago ago

8 comments

  • iamnothere 18 minutes ago

    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?

    • ikidd 11 minutes ago

      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.

    • BowBun 15 minutes ago

      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?

  • martianvoid 43 minutes ago

    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?

    • wood_spirit 26 minutes ago

      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...

      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iD6XaaO9bEo

    • jxf 32 minutes ago

      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.

      • lgeorget 25 minutes ago

        To predict anything on the ground, you have to predict air temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction etc. for the entire troposphere. The output of the models in altitude are as relevant to the meteorologists as the output on the ground for manual expert analysis.

  • mschuster91 6 minutes ago

    > 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...