Somebody used spoofed ADSB signals to raster the meme of JD Vance

Juvenile times call for juvenile measures. In case you haven’t noticed, the US is being run by a bunch of arrested development high school bullies. Juvenile is one of the only languages they understand.

Why? Was anybody harmed?

Hopefully they don't find out who did this. There was never any danger, and without this kind of joke, the world would be less fun.

(Obviously it should be harder to fool critical systems, so this served also as a warning, but if you want to attack such a system, a real bad guy would do this in more subtle ways.)

What's almost more frightening is how many people actually buy it.

Oh I thought that was the angry little man, what's his name... Ben Shapiro! (Google knew what I meant.)

Probably because the required expertise, effort, risk, and reward ratios don't work out. You can cause a minor disturbance that isn't particularly visible and in exchange get investigated by the FBI. Seems about as wise as attempting to graffiti the front gate of a military base.

(IIUC they did not actually transmit data, just fed it directly into an ADS-B receiver, but transmitting would've been trivial at this point)

The spoofer could have just sent them fake location information drawing an image using latitude, longitude and altitude for color (in the default view flight paths have different colors based on the altitude of the plane at that point in time).

They could have built an antenna and actually broadcast this data, but that would be a lot more effort and most likely some form of crime.

They didn't actually "broadcast" anything. This was created by uploading fake data to absexchange.

That said, TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) does not operate on flight data reported by ADS-B.

I think the API is secured? The entire premise is that a volunteer creates an account and uploads ADS-B telemetry. Detecting falsified data is a separate matter.

"The Government’s interpretation of the statute would attach criminal penalties to a breathtaking amount of commonplace computer activity,” Barrett wrote. “If the ‘exceeds authorized access’ clause criminalizes every violation of a computer-use policy, then millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens are criminals."

adsbexchange is a user-generated content platform where you can submit decoded radio signals to a common database. Sending fake data to adsbexchange is as much a CFAA violation as posting hoaxes to Wikipedia or a social media platform.

Whatever transmitter you're using would not be type-accepted for operation on the 1080 MHz or 978 MHz band. (47 USC § 301)

Additionally, RF operation with the intent of willful interference is inherently illegal. (47 USC § 333)

This is easily-prosecutable willful interference or possibly aircraft sabotage: ADS-B operates in licensed bands and uses an already highly-contended modulation scheme and transmission protocol.

Most are from US or from a HN user: population, well technically switzerland iirc (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33450094) But I don't know, I feel like there are definitely times where people create two accounts on HN or more or lose access of previous or want better names (I am thinking of creating a new account on HN myself) so assume half to go through ~2.5 million users

Over the span of one decade+ year though, a lot of people completely leave the forum and so I would consider frequent users to be around ~ 1 million

Then the people who are actually active a lot of days or are weekly active or monthly active and tonight's the night (dexter reference) that they open it,I would assume ~500k users

I would consider these ~500k impressions to be an average estimate on a really really impactful HN post on front page & they all might come through say ~24 hours.

I am being more generous and assuming 500k HN impressions on 3-6 hours timeframe then technically the server just has to handle like ~46 users/sec or ~23 users/sec

But even on a really high estimate we assume ~500 users/sec

But I have seen some benchmarks of websites/frameworks/languages which are able to handle 5k-10k requests as a really low to decent estimate depending on the task

I do feel like its something that I can architect ~500 users/sec on some hetzner box most likely at max for ~30-40 usd/month or using their smallest plan with cloudflare tunnels for around I guess ~2.99 euros or 3 euros per month

I feel like its definitely possible to survive the "HN wall of death" but any of my websites haven't gone and hit this wall but if anyone of your projects or anyone can anecdotally tell me something it would be interesting & we can discuss it.

Also I have seen this one person who was able to survive this HN wall of death on a literal 780 mb alpine server using lighthttpd. Which if we are assuming racknerd or dedirock or something can get to around ~7$/yr or ~6.70-ish$/yr deal from black friday & you can get such deals on websites like lowendtalk for quite a low price.

Though these providers have comparatively low bandwidth if you actually want the cheapest somehow option and want to survive this HN wall of death. (these providfe around 1TB-2TB/month iirc)

Personally I feel like netcup (my preferred provider) / IONOS might be better options as they are still cheap while giving more lenient bandwidth or you can also find probably some really cheap high bandwidth black friday deals around the 7$/yr mark as well

I think I am getting off topic but I really like german hosting providers usually for the most part except the only thing I do hate a (little?) about them is that I have observed that they have a reputation of being exceptionally strict to the rules/some have the more ban first-ask-later approach which um might suck if your project is a little unconvential or quite frankly it can sometimes conflict with my morals as I always feel a little bit of hestitation around building around such system.