Jetnet Acquires ADS-B Exchange, a community-fed ADSB aggregator

https://www.jetnet.com/news/jetnet-acquires-ads-b-exchange.html

by cobertos • 3 years ago

285 174 3 years ago

dmd• 3 years ago

Did their acquisition price factor in the % of people who will stop feeding because of this? It's one thing to feed a free open source project it's another to give free labor to Silversmith Capital.

Kalibr• 3 years ago

Probably to eliminate the open source competition if anything.

notahacker5• 3 years ago

afaik JetNet hasn't offered a competing service before: their focus is on business jet fleet and transaction related data (I worked for what could loosely be described as a competitor)

The data has some value in supporting that core product (as an additional data feed to sell a handful of enterprise clients, to support their fleet data research and possibly to enhance their FBO/charter products). I guess part of the appeal of ADS-B Exchange is that working in business aviation, an unfiltered dataset is a lot more useful to them than a filtered one like most of the commercial providers.

Still seems like a slightly odd acquisition, since they could have got the data beforehand relatively inexpensively and they'd probably get better feed coverage leaving it as an OS project and I do wonder how they'll manage privacy requests from some of their clients...

mindcrime• 3 years ago

I mean, if I were providing one of these feeds, I'd probably shut it down and look for (or create) a new community-driven alternative.

capableweb• 3 years ago

I chose to contribute my collected ADS-B data to ADS-B Exchange rather than Flightradar24 just because ADS-B Exchange was community driven and not owned by a company.

I just turned off my sharing and looking for alternatives. If anyone know of any, please share them :)

mike_d3• 3 years ago

I helped out a bit with ADSBExchange. The all volunteer staff were completely blindsided by this. The founder just took a payday and ran.

For what it is worth, I don't actually know what the PE company bought. I guess the historical data and a rack full of servers - but the staff, community, and service are moving elsewhere.

wpietri6• 3 years ago

I might feel similarly, especially given my distaste for private equity. But in the AIS (ship tracking) space, commercial versions seem to do ok. MarineTraffic runs its own blatantly commercial effort. And AIShub.net is not commercial itself, but it is run by Astra Paging, which definitely is.

I run a receiver that feeds into both networks, and in both cases I look at it as a value-for-value exchange.

dgacmu4• 3 years ago

Some are likely to, but remember that feeding is a mutual exchange - sites that you feed to generally give you a free, no ads account. I feed both ADS-B exchange and flightaware for this reason. Although I will admit that the flight aware app is more useful unless you're interested in unfiltered data. Contributing to an unfiltered source is one motivation, but it's one of several.

jvanvleet• 3 years ago

This is my situation as well. If you travel a lot, having something light Flightaware giving you more detailed information about what is really happening with your flight or airport is wonderful and starting a feed was a fun way to get more features.

samstave• 3 years ago

Need a list of all private jet tail numbers from DAVOS/WEF and have a tracking system for those... like the Elon tracker

prova_modena3• 3 years ago

ADS-B Exchange used to have another incentive to feed in the form of free API access, subject to certain limits and for noncommercial use only. They stopped that a year or two ago, I believe because various commercial operations kept abusing it.

sschueller2• 3 years ago

Well I for one will stop feeding them.

robbiet480• 3 years ago

Already seeing a lot of people in ADS-B Discords saying they are cutting off their feeds because they feel sold out.

myself2483• 3 years ago

Is the codebase open / is anyone spinning up an alternative yet?

notahacker5• 3 years ago

Not sure how it matches feature for feature, but https://opensky-network.org has been crowdsourcing unfiltered ADSB data for longer, provides tools to view the data and supplies full API access to the raw data to academics and non-profits at no charge.

There's room for another provider, and at the same time lots of enthusiasts with the boxes will carry on sending it, like they do to other closed source, profit-making ventures like FlightAware and Flightradar24...

theyknowitsxmas• 3 years ago

Everyone is moving to airframes.io

Also this from SoylentADSB:

CEO of JETNET ( Greg Fell, now fired from JETNET by Silversmith) called and asked for a meeting. We thought was sales call. Turns out he offered to buy ADSBx from Dan for $8M, they wined dined and toured him around. Flew him to Boston, Dan cut us out when we ALL OBJECTED to a sale. We think they gave him $20M ish and a $200 a year job at JETNET. They'll fire him in a year, that's what PE does.

metadaemon4• 3 years ago

That guy is such a whiner

BizarreByte• 3 years ago

I can understand the community upset, but honestly? I wouldn’t be able to say no to that amount of money. I could retire tomorrow on that much.

RobotToaster• 3 years ago

I assume you mean $200k?

Is it normal for a company like that to more than double their initial offer? I know 20m is probably pocket change to them, but it still seems like they were rather desperate to buy it.

lsllc2• 3 years ago

I wonder if this was done to stop trackers like @ElonJet since ADS-B Exchange doesn't seem to support the "privacy" requests of the rich & famous as FlightAware / FlightRadar24 et al do.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-private-jet-no-lon...

cobertos2• 3 years ago

Interestingly, ADS-B Exchange's twitter is suspended when I looked to see if there was any news updates there

wkat424210• 3 years ago

That's because they pissed off Elon by supplying the source data for ElonJet. He's been on a banning spree for weeks. Anyone who so much as mentioned the account would get the banhammer.

sftomato• 3 years ago

Let's not forget that thanks to adsb-exchange, authorities were also able to track Jeffrey Epstein's private jets. https://www.insider.com/jeffrey-epsteins-private-jet-flight-... https://github.com/adsbxchange/Jeffrey_Epstein_Lolita_Expres...

mlindner4• 3 years ago

All of this information is public and known to the government. ADBS Exchange didn't provide anything that wasn't already available.

mlindner4• 3 years ago

They're not requests, they're mandated by US law. Also it's not limited to rich and famous. Anyone can do it. Only the rich and famous seem to have passionate enough haters that they actively try to subvert the privacy protections.

ranger207• 3 years ago

AIUI it's mandated by US law if you use data from the FAA's system, and ADS-B Exchange didn't use the FAA's data so wasn't required to hide things on the privacy list

nocoiner11• 3 years ago

What’s the saying? The law, in its majestic equality, prohibits both the rich and the poor from sleeping on the streets?

Something like that.

arprocter• 3 years ago

maintaining our enthusiast roots and unfiltered data

Interesting to see if a certain someone's jet(s) remain trackable

dgacmu4• 3 years ago

I cynically wonder how much they'll start charging billionaires to hide their private jet info.

jgalt212• 3 years ago

or at the very least, the partners at Silversmith will have a long list of billionaires who owe them favors.

sschueller2• 3 years ago

Cynic in me thinks the was arranged by billionaires that don't want to be tracked. Chump change for them.

myself2483• 3 years ago

Well, fuck.

Companies eat things to kill them because it works. Only some fraction of users will jump to the alternative, and indeed the alternative never ends up as strong as the original.

Are there examples of where the alternative turned out stronger?

ninjagoo• 3 years ago

LibreOffice is a good example.

account423• 3 years ago

As far as mindshare goes, I'm not so sure. Plenty of people that still only know "Open Office" even if some of them are actually using LibreOffice.

jmyeet2• 3 years ago

Years ago compact disc metadata was really important. There was an open library for this called CDDB. At some point the owners of that started silently inserting an agreement by the user to assign ownership of the submissions to the company.

That “open” database got sold off and became Gracenote [1].

I’m not sure how many times we need to learn this lesson.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote

wpietri6• 3 years ago

Not to be cynical, but I doubt the lesson will ever get learned. These things start with big ideas, hope, and an ignorance of the practical details. Over time, practical realities, like paying for goods and services, crop up. In a capitalist society, most of the ready-made solutions to that look like businesses. And our current culture of capitalism then shifts toward short-term revenue-maximization, putting things in the hands of predators and sociopaths.

I know people have made attempts to solve this, like B Corps and groups like the Apache Foundation. But I don't think we're there yet. One could try to create a foundation that specifically incubates projects that go beyond open source to open/collective services. But even if one solves funding for that, there's still the problem of finding the naive starters of things and crushing their dreams just enough to get them on a better course, but not so much that they quit.

tialaramex2• 3 years ago

Because profit motive is the usual problem, you can deliberately design that out if you're careful.

England (where I live) had a lot of Building Societies - mutual institutions where some members are saving money, and those savings are lent to other members (borrowers) to buy homes to live in, the interest from which of course makes this a good deal for the savers done at scale (so as to smooth out inevitable losses when some borrowers default). This can be a very lucrative line of business during a housing boom, and many of these societies found themselves with a considerable cash positive position in the 1980s. Since the members own the society, they can just change the rules of the society and "demutualize", extracting the cash for themselves. Of course this destroys the society, an important institution which has helped so many people to own somewhere to live - but hey, you've got some money and isn't that what's really important?

My parents voted "Yes" to demutualize the society where they'd saved money and from which they had borrowed to buy the house I grew up in, I (as an idealistic teenager who had my own modest savings) voted "No", the "Yes" votes won and the resulting entity, now a bank, eventually was mired in scandal and no longer serves the purpose the proud building society had served before. But hey, they got their money. People like them were nicknamed "Carpetbaggers" in the UK as a result, by analogy to the US concept.

Now, I mention this because as several larger societies were demutualised this way, the remainder realised that the same fate could be theirs, and many swallowed a "poison pill" to prevent it. They changed their rules so that all future members (savers, borrowers, whichever) signed away rights to the proceeds of any demutualisation (e.g. giving it to a charity). So you could vote to tear the society to pieces, but you would no longer make a penny from doing so, and suddenly that's not very attractive.

It worked.

upofadown• 3 years ago

I guess the interesting and significant difference here is that value of the previous location of aircraft fades fairly quickly. So just setting up a different server and switching to that is an effective solution. The value here is not retained in the data but instead the network that collects the data.

nocoiner11• 3 years ago

I’m still not sure how Amazon pulled off that same move with IMDb. I remember it WAY back when (I think it had several mirrors, one of which was hosted at a URL like msstate.edu/~imdb, which gives you an idea of how long ago that would have been) and I can’t imagine they had a valid assignment of copyright from all their contributors…

voakbasda• 3 years ago

They might not have cared about getting necessary permission from every contributor. They only needed to get permission from anyone likely to sue and win in court. It's the standard play for companies the size of Amazon: why follow the law when it is cheaper to fight or pay the fine?

vlovich1232• 3 years ago

Out of curiosity, how does this community effort do quality control (ie preventing someone rich from paying some people to flood the system with conflicting information)

dgacmu4• 3 years ago

There's a protocol for multilateration of the detected jets using all of the receivers that are in range of its signal. Whil I'm sure there are ways you could attack it, it's pretty robust to the more obvious things.

wkat424210• 3 years ago

The mlat is more for receiving aircraft that use traditional transponders which don't include gps coordinates but just a squawk code and altitude. Hence it needs multiple receivers to triangulate their location. I don't think it uses this for real adsb feeds.

vlovich1232• 3 years ago

Would switching to a federated / distributed protocol fix things? Or is there some additional critical role that ADS-B was providing?

Cesartheiceman5• 3 years ago

We have a community in RadarBox and that we have direct contact with the developers: RadarBox.com/addcoverage

toomuchtodo2• 3 years ago

Anyone want to work together on spinning up a non profit replacement with governance that prohibits a transfer of ownership to a for profit entity?

wpietri6• 3 years ago

I run an AIS receiver and have previously run a technical co-op. I am happy to chat, although I don't have time to do much direct labor right now. But the first questions I'd want to answer:

1) What will participants get out of it?

2) How will you pay for the central services used?

3) Where there isn't enough volunteer labor, how will you pay for needed labor?

I don't want to discourage anybody, but there are some hard sustainability problems there.

andiareso• 3 years ago

I'm interested in helping as well (software engineer). This is such a loss for the community. Like other's have stated, ADS-B exchange didn't have to follow the privacy requests as they didn't aggregate FAA data so it remained open. I'm wondering what the future will hold with the new ownership.

notahacker5• 3 years ago

Depending on what sort of commercial arrangements participants were happy with, the obvious fundraising options are selling value added services or derived data on top or classic FOSS 'sponsorship' with corporate partners (hard to get for a new project in this space). That doesn't guarantee sustainability of course, particularly with there being a lot of competition in this sector with good coverage already.

(FWIW I'm happy to chat: have sold non-ADSB aviation data and consulting before and been involved with buying ADSB and AIS from a commercial provider)

toomuchtodo2• 3 years ago

Great questions. I have never run a non profit myself (but run several small business ventures, real estate investments, have previously owned and sold a small technology company), but view it as an optimal structure to support technology services like this that are intended as a public good or utility versus something that is going to get flipped to someone that is going to extract the value out of it (investors like PE and similar). I want to build where there can be no rug pull for stakeholders.

1. The same they got out of ADS-B Exchange: open aviation data. I would work with the Internet Archive to archive batches of the data stream on a cadence. We should never be able to take historical data away. It is yours, forever.

2. I would pay for a dedicated server out of my pocket to bootstrap, with the eventual goal of accumulating enough donations to have a very small non profit investment account that would throw off just enough returns to pay for the server(s) or a rack of equipment at a colo indefinitely (I’m partial to Hurricane Electric but any reasonable priced vendor will do). Again, strong governance around this as a US non profit to demonstrate transparency and efficiency. I would also accept equipment, colo, and bandwidth donations from folks who could ensure consistency, quality, and continuity of the resource.

3. We would rely primarily on volunteers, similar to OpenStreetMap, who runs lean fiscally speaking [1]. The Internet Archive runs their servers for 5-7 years (per u/jonah-archive's ops talk), so I would shoot for a long bare metal depreciation schedule, a time series database stored in Backblaze B2, high level just an efficient use of capital for the technology components. I suppose I'm going back into an on call rotation. C'est la vie. Automate All The Things.

Poke holes in my thoughts, that's how they improve. I would also be interested in expanding into the AIS space; it's all UDP packets from SDRs coming into a software router and logger (with a visualization and admin frontend).

[1] https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Finances

nocoiner11• 3 years ago

I’d be interested in helping out. I have experience with corporate governance and setting up transfer-restricted entities, though unfortunately not so much experience with setting up non-profits (though I have served on non-profit boards).

That said, I can also think of a few ways you might be able to structure a successor that can’t exit like this, without having to deal with the headache of qualification and compliance as a non-profit. Interesting thought exercise.

blantonl2• 3 years ago

I own adsb-router.com (currently unused) and would be glad to donate the domain and leadership expertise in governance and managing crowdsourced type sites (i own and manage radioreference.com and broadcastify.com). you can contact me through my profile

lsllc2• 3 years ago

radioreference.com is a great site, thank you for running it!

yardie• 3 years ago

One of the first projects I created with the Raspberry Pi Model A was setup a SDR listening station. Then I wrote some software and downloaded software to listen and stream ADS-B data to a few aggregators. One of them was ADS-B Exchange. The other was ADS-B Hub[0]. The later is still free and still open source.

[0] https://www.adsbhub.org/

H8crilA3• 3 years ago

Thanks, I'm switching my feeds from the shitty people behind ADSBExchange.

commandersaki• 3 years ago

Just to be clear it’s the owner/founder that’s being shitty. The people behind running the infrastructure are against the acquisition. It’s also unclear whether they’re getting paid (enough) to transition the servers to the new company.

Cesartheiceman5• 3 years ago

Yardie, I am a feeder and share data with RadarBox. For me, it is the best flight tracking website and I also get 10% off on hardware products.

huslage• 3 years ago

Does anyone want to fund an open ADSB data gathering platform for a nonprofit to run?

gggggg52• 3 years ago

GDPR compliance is a big problem in this space, there's no GDPR exception which would allow you to legally collect this data in the EU. (Unless you limited your collection to whitelisted A/C)

Right now every single player in this space is operating illegally, but it'll probably take years before data protection authorities will start to crack down.

looping__lui• 3 years ago

Yes, and FR24 is investigated in the EU: https://se.linkedin.com/pulse/en-digitalsektor-ger-imy-m%C3%...

sigmar• 3 years ago

Is SDR accessible through the internet a violation of GDPR? Hard for me to understand why relaying ADS-B would be different (considering the sdr data is inclusive of the ADS-B data)

wkat424210• 3 years ago

Why? GDPR is about personal data. This data is about airplanes, not people.

jjcon• 3 years ago

Looks like the official discord community (now formerly official I guess) is pushing airframes.io

femboy• 3 years ago

The Discord link on ADSBExchange points to a server called "Airframes.io Enthusiasts" - going to the website shows:

Airframes is an aircraft-related aggregation service that receives ACARS, VDL, HFDL, and SATCOM data from volunteers around the world.
It is under very active development and you will notice changes from day to day. Also, issues are expected.
Contributing your feed allows us to make ground developing new decoders and make important statistical observations. It also benefits users of the service so that they can see more about flights as they traverse covered territories.

Perhaps the original founders' work will continue here?

EDIT: It does not seem like the original founders has collaborated with the community on this, and the people there are just as lost as anyone else.

cobertos2• 3 years ago

The discord was originally the ADSBExchange discord, but, I believe a mod has taken control, banned the person who owned/sold ADSBExchange (Dan Streufert) and made a bunch of announcements. The mod used to have Outlook email access on the original domain, so it seems like there's kind of a shakeup going on as well

It's kind of chaos currently. I only joined this Discord in December and it was very different then. It seemed to be pretty community oriented, with images for RaspPi and scripts to help setup feeding and the developers of these tools were in there chatting. Not company employed people to my knowledge.

oldstrangers2• 3 years ago

Well that sucks. I had just gotten into using ADS-B over Flightradar24.

Havoc4• 3 years ago

That shouldn't be affected by the matter at hand. ADS-B is the coms standard, ADS-B Exchange is a specific aggregation effort.

oldstrangers2• 3 years ago

Well that sucks. I had just gotten into using ADS-B Exchange over Flightradar24.

jmacd• 3 years ago

Just unplugged my receiver.

prova_modena3• 3 years ago

Well, dang. I have been maintaining a Twitter bot that uses the ADS-B Exchange API, but paused development after Musk started going after ElonJet aggressively and Twitter began to ban aircraft tracking accounts. I just restarted work this week to implement Mastodon support, but looks like I need to pause again to reassess what ADS-B data source(s) to support.

I would really like to know the story behind this acquisition as my previous interactions with the ADS-B Exchange owner (edit: after checking back in on the discord maybe this person was not the owner, but one of the main team members) on discord were positive and they seemed like a very passionate and principled person. This was like more than 1 year ago now, though. My suspicion is that the loud, polarized public discourse around the ElonJet controversy, which led to ADS-B Exchange getting banned from Twitter, may have caused them to reassess their priorities. I hope they are not under any kind of legal threat from Musk.

nocoiner11• 3 years ago

Welps, shutting off my feed today. I was actually thinking about this exact scenario just last week. Funny to hear that it happened.

wkat424210• 3 years ago

Funny but also sad :(

nocoiner11• 3 years ago

I don’t mind feeding FlightAware and Flightradar24 - they’re for-profit companies, and are clear about the terms of exchange something of (dubious) value for the data they receive.

This feels a lot more skeezy. Oh well, fool me once, and all that. I do look forward to shutting down my feed once I’m back in front of a computer.

Something something, why we can’t have nice things.

metadaemon4• 3 years ago

These were already very skeezy guys if you interacted with them on Discord.

nocoiner11• 3 years ago

I think I’m on their server, but I don’t think I ever really interacted with them. In retrospect, I suppose I should have and gotten a better sense of their character (which is why I’m being a bit more careful in evaluating whether I start feeding anyone new).

Too bad that every TOS out there basically boils down to “we own your data to the maximum extent that doesn’t create any liability for us (but if it does, you’ll indemnify us) and we can change these terms at any time.” Makes it hard to do a proper assessment of what exactly you’re stepping into.

james_pm3• 3 years ago

Same. I get value back from FR24 in the form of a Business subscription which gives me a TON of data and access I wouldn't be able to afford. I fed ADS-B Exchange for nothing because it seemed like a nice thing to do to benefit the wider tracking community. To have the founder cash out and sell OUR data without even talking to the community first? That really rubbed me the wrong way. I stopped feeding about an hour ago.

Havoc4• 3 years ago

Also doing same re FR24 and biz sub. Curious what data you use from it though? I haven't had much use for it frankly

zymhan2• 3 years ago

FlightAware was less skeezy before they were bought by L3 Harris. I'm not in this hobby to help out defense contractors.

ADSBx are still far worse, since they built the site as an "open community".

devstar• 3 years ago

Your remark about FlightAware being owned by L3 Harris piqued my interest since I was not aware of this. I took a look at their About section and it seems they are actually owned by Collins Aerospace a subsidiary of Raytheon. Does not change your point but just a small correction and I also learned something new.

Cesartheiceman5• 3 years ago

I prefer RadarBox. They are an independent company. And we have a community of feeders on WhatsApps and Telegram.

phkahler2• 3 years ago

750,000 messages per second! Imagine if each node knew where it was and all of its nearest neighbors. The receivers could filter and not send messages that are coming from planes closer to their neighbors! Distributed filtering of redundant messages FTW!

sorenjan2• 3 years ago

You need messages from multiple receivers for MLAT, I think they use messages with known plane positions to calibrate the MLAT solver since the receivers doesn't have a high quality common time source.

Plus proximity doesn't mean you can see airplanes that are behind buildings, at low altitude, etc.

phkahler2• 3 years ago

What is MLAT in this case? The planes transmit their location in the ADS-B message. They are filtering a lot of redundant message receptions from multiple receivers. I would assume the messages also include altitude and heading information, so locations can be predicted between message receptions.

KirillPanov2• 3 years ago

750,000 messages per second!

ZOMG, that's like... a 1990s DSL connection!

mkl• 3 years ago

Only if your messages are 1 byte long or something.

rhacker• 3 years ago

This isn't going to go over well. I hope everyone shuts down their feed.

nerpderp82• 3 years ago

Most likely the goal.

wkat424210• 3 years ago

I don't know, now that they own it they can just start censoring it like the others.

And I'm sure at least one alternative will pop up

donaldcjackson• 3 years ago

I suggest that folks that want to feed open ADSB aggregators consider feeding https://opensky-network.org

everybodyknows• 3 years ago

Interesting possibilities here:

You can now feed VHF/voice data to OpenSky and help researchers around the world. Check out the interface and set up a feeder at https://ui.atc.opensky-network.org/

squarefoot• 3 years ago

Time to move the ADSB sharing network over p2p? Assuming it's doable, that way whoever buys an aggregator site would own just the interface, not the data sharing network.

wkat424210• 3 years ago

Oh nooo.. Now there's no volunteer driven tracking network left. And they'll probably start blocking military and private flights just like the other commercial trackers. Too bad, it was great while it lasted. Hopefully someone starts up a new one that will stay independent.

tecleandor• 3 years ago

The dullest non-announce ever:

https://twitter.com/ADSBex/status/1618306706861338625

Hasn't said anything in the forum or the site news section, and hasn't posted that tweet until after the official announce by Jetnet.

Looks like a case of "take the money and run". Doesn't smell good for the ads-b community.

plantain• 3 years ago

Good. ADS-B Exchange's API is horribly broken and they never even replied to my support/refund requests so I had to chargeback. A shakeup might help.

Cesartheiceman5• 3 years ago

I am a RadarBox feeder and can use the API. I use it for some of my applications.

reallymental• 3 years ago

Is there any service like this for AIS data?

Cesartheiceman5• 3 years ago

Yes, ShipXplorer.

evil-olive• 3 years ago

if this news has gotten anyone interested in running an ADSB antenna/feeder, the SDR Enthusiasts book [0] is an excellent resource.

their github [1] has a bunch of very nice, modular Docker images that make it easy to feed one or more ADSB aggregators. (by comparison, a lot of the other software ecosystem around amateur SDR / ADSB relies on `curl | sudo bash` type install scripts)

0: https://sdr-enthusiasts.gitbook.io/ads-b/

1: https://github.com/sdr-enthusiasts

Havoc4• 3 years ago

Thanks. Will try to tweak my setup to feed all of them. Don’t really see the point in being stingy with this info

RNAlfons• 3 years ago

It actually really did get me interested in the topic.

I have a raspi which doesn't do much left. I guess I'll add it to the network soon.

Thank you :)

Awelton• 3 years ago

Looks like I am going to stop feeding then. Donating electricity and bandwidth to an open source project and donating to a massive corporation just aren't the same thing. Pay me and I will turn it back on, but until then I guess it is going to sit idle.

esjr• 3 years ago

I run this site : https://ducis.net/ It is a hobby that got out of hand. The idea was/is to see what this data reveals. What can be learned just by observing 'traffic'. The answer is : a lot and I know various agencies and governments freaked out when they realized how visible some things are. Basically, with enough 'training' and domain-knowledge it's all pretty much out there : military transports, private military contractors, refugee flights, mercenaries, embargo busters, the spooks etc. Obviously there was a reaction. Over the years they've tried to tidy things up with some success by putting pressure on the tracker-sites (or simply attacking the small players' servers). Anyway, the point is : it is complex and fascinating. I'm not interested in shouting "SECRET flight..." for clicks but if someone wants to try and set up a new 'ADS-B Exchange' : basically free, responsible, open source etc and wants to take on board a couple of years of deep domain-knowledge and decades of coding skills, contact details are on the site. I know this is like a shameless (well) plug but...it's complicated ;)

yooo000• 3 years ago

The dude who owned it was kind of a douche to start with, as I recall. That being said, I think I'd be hard-pressed not to sell something I started as a hobby that grew and grew.

Speaking of which, I created my own site[1] within the past couple of years...have a few friends feeding data. I set them up with Pi's, antennas, cords and the proper software. Would be super stoked if anyone else wanted to feed me!

[1]https://radar.airport-frequencies.com

Hit me up if you want to join!

RankingMember• 3 years ago

Replacement site from the people behind the original (except for the sellout) already up: https://globe.adsb.fi/tar1090/

windex• 3 years ago

Billionaires are going dark and buying out all the flashlights.

Jetnet Acquires ADS-B Exchange, a community-fed ADSB aggregator

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