John Wiseman Profile picture
Persistent sousveiller. Walt Disney R&D Imagineer. DM for Signal.
Oct 18 7 tweets 2 min read
Video demo of an AI-powered global aviation situational awareness and analysis tool. It's accessing a live, real-time data feed, to answer questions like "What are the 3 aircraft closest to Area 51?" and "How many military aircraft are flying over Germany?" Some notes on this demo: It uses the OpenAI realtime API, which is a new low-latency audio-to-audio model. It's fast, but it's not the smartest model. I gave it access to two tools: one plots markers on the map, the other does SQL queries.
Apr 6 11 tweets 4 min read
Interesting video from the cockpit of an A350 flying from Copenhagen to Bangkok. "The challenge on this route is like the jamming and the spoofing. But we know how to deal with that now. You'll see later on when we come close to Ukraine a lot of our systems will fall out" Image "The worst thing about this is the spoofing so uh because of the jamming the airplane may think it's it's a different place than where it is right so and then it'll it could give us some failures that we have to handle." Image
Dec 12, 2023 6 tweets 1 min read
Short thread on how I made this map, which shows areas where aircraft are being affected by GPS spoofing, and the locations they're being spoofed to (not the location of the spoofing transmitter):
Image 1. Analyze ADS-B data and collect instances where aircraft suddenly jumped to a new location.
Oct 7, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
Wired retracted the op-ed claiming Google alters search results to make more ad money. The story fed into existing beliefs about Google and tech and spread super fast. But the stories we want to believe are the ones we should scrutinize most. wired.com/story/google-a…
Image First I was skeptical because it fit so well into those existing beliefs. Then I realized the story had one source–I couldn't find any other reporters at the Google antitrust trial who mentioned what was clearly a bombshell. That's when I figured it was a misunderstanding.
Mar 18, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
Some friday night midjourney fun. Prompts in ALT text. found webcam picture of a ham radio guy in the early 2000s i b&w photo of SR-71 aircraft flying over the Mojave desert na
Mar 17, 2023 6 tweets 3 min read
OpenStreetMap has an amazingly powerful query language, "Overpass". Sadly it was designed by a madman and is hard to learn. Luckily GPT-4 knows it well: "Give me an overpass query that finds all buildings that straddle the boundary between Glendale and Burbank in California." GPT screenshot. "Give ...OpenStreetMap Overpass-turb... Last night there was a loud explosion in LA. I figured it was a transformer explosion. A friend had video showing a 9 second delay between flash and boom so I used GPT-4 to write an Overpass query to find all electrical substations about the right distance to cause that delay. GPT screenshot: "Give ...Screenshot showing an Overp...
Feb 22, 2023 8 tweets 3 min read
I saw a somewhat astonishing thing today. GPT was asked a question that it needed to write code to answer, and given access to a Python REPL. It wrote buggy code, then based on the error message it fixed its own code until it worked (and gave the correct answer). It debugged. Screenshot of a Python notebook. The code cell contains `age The question posed was "What is the 10th fibonacci number?" The GPT-based agent's first attempt was "fibonacci(10)"—"Action Input" is what the LLM is sending to the Python REPL. This resulted in an error because it's not a standard function. The LLM figured that out.
Jan 1, 2023 7 tweets 4 min read
An experiment in trying to recreate the aesthetic of 50s/60s aerospace photos in Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney. First up: Dall-E. Prompt: "Photo of SR-71 aircraft flying over the Mojave desert faded ektachrome 100sw vintage retro nasa archive" Dall-E image of a black air...Dall-E image of a black air...Dall-E image of a black air...Dall-E image of a black air... Dall-E gets pretty close to the overall aesthetic I'm looking for. It knows an SR-71 is black, but not much else.
Nov 21, 2022 6 tweets 1 min read
There was a time where Bob Iger wanted to buy twitter, and both the Disney and Twitter boards agreed on the deal. After the worst day in 21 years for Disney stock, it's up 7% on the news that Bob's back. Just saying. In the giddiness and optimism of the moment (I haven't seen Disney employees this happy in 3 years), I believe Bob Iger might want to consider rescuing two companies simultaneously.
Nov 19, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
Vaccines—still working very well. Even with newer variants, even after 70%+ of the U.S. has already had COVID ("natural immunity"), unvaccinated people aged 50+ (I'm 52) are dying at 12x(!) the rate of people who have had at least 2 boosters. "Natural immunity" not looking great. Chart from the CDC showing ... Note that the risk of dying from COVID among people aged 50+ who only have 1 booster was 3x that of people with 2 boosters. Get a damn booster.
Oct 18, 2022 21 tweets 7 min read
NOTAM for Dallas Fort Worth Airport: ATTN ALL AIRCRAFT GPS REPORTED UNRELIABLE WITHIN 40NM OF DFW.

None of this interference was here yesterday: gpsjam.org/?lat=32.76692&… In case the preview above doesn't work, here's the new interference as of today that the NOTAM seems to be warning about: Screenshot from gpsjam.org showing medium/yellow interferenc
Oct 7, 2022 20 tweets 7 min read
Very entertaining talk by Tom Clancy, given at the National Security Agency in 1986, about the origin story of The Hunt for Red October. I hadn't heard of the real-life mutiny on a Russian warship that inspired the book. . In 1975 the political officer of the Russian frigate Storozhevoy locked the captain in the sonar compartment and enlisted the rest of the crew to his plan. Half the Baltic fleet & 60 aircraft were sent to find it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_fr…
Jul 29, 2022 15 tweets 6 min read
Finally, the only daily, global, free map of GPS interference has officially launched: gpsjam.org Watch jamming around conflict zones develop over time. Wonder who's jamming GPS all around Moscow. Like all the best maps, it raises more questions than it answers! Generously powered by data from ADS-B Exchange and supported by Mapbox and everyone who has donated money (and a laptop!), there's nothing like gpsjam.org available at any price. OK, that's hyperbole—It's probably available from somewhere if you pay a lot of money.
Jul 28, 2022 5 tweets 1 min read
From the Facebook page of a podcast about public safety and law enforcement aviation. I think they’re overly concerned to me, given that law enforcement is one of many types of activity that trigger the bots, they’re not flagged as law enforcement in the posts, and it’s all publicly available info. I’m not trying to interfere with law enforcement ops. Am I wrong?
Jul 27, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
gpsjam.org got posted to Hacker News, and I have learned that using the wonderful Mapbox globe may not be sustainable. At current traffic levels, which are still rising even after falling off the front page of HN, it'll cost something like $2000/month just for Mapbox A very kind offer by @Mapbox to comp my usage of Mapbox GL in order to cover the Hacker News surge has saved gpsjam.org, just in time! Image
Apr 18, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
I totally should have made fake merchandise (t-shirts etc.) for all the fake companies used as fronts by the FBI to register aerial surveillance aircraft. Trying to offload some of the work to GPT-3, but it's a bit too on the nose. ImageImage
Mar 7, 2022 7 tweets 3 min read
I thought making maps of GPS/GNSS interference might turn out boring. But 3 days ago suddenly the Baltic (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Kaliningrad) started having some of the most significant interference on the planet, after weeks of nothing unusual. Why now? This data comes from ADS-B Exchange. You can see a real time map of aircraft reporting degraded GNSS at globe.adsbexchange.com/?badgps
Nov 4, 2021 21 tweets 7 min read
Execs: We'll fly using PIA codes to stay discreet; don't wanna draw attention.

planespotter/OSINT nerds seeing 3 aircraft flying together in privacy mode: *breaks glass & pulls lever* ALL HANDS ON DECK.
They may seem low-key, but there's some real excitement in this thread. Besides the call for observers to run outside with binoculars, people instantly start finding their radio comms with ATC.
Oct 11, 2021 7 tweets 3 min read
I think N300WQ was doing bathymetric LIDAR scans along the coast of Los Angeles last night. A couple nights before someone took this video of it doing the same thing in San Diego. A commenter from reddit says "Yes, this mission is in support of the National Coastal Mapping Program. We’re currently flying at night in San Diego and LA due to air traffic congestion during the day in those areas."

reddit.com/r/gis/comments…
Mar 26, 2021 6 tweets 2 min read
I can't tell you how elated I am that there are already at least 19 pieces of fanfic, many anthropomorphizing the Ever Green, at Archive of Our Own. “Please, call me Suey. I’m not fond of my given name.”
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"I'm so very glad," the Suez Canal said, acidly, "that we're doing this live. How convenient that we have minute-by-minute GPS updates so the whole world can see exactly how bad your aim is."
Aug 17, 2020 6 tweets 3 min read
I've been furloughed from Disney Imagineering R&D for 4 months without pay, and now my laptop broke, so I've decided to take donations to support my work on the Advisory Circular bots and other projects that help you figure out what's flying overhead. skycircl.es/donate/ The Advisory Circular bots tweet in real-time whenever they see aircraft circling (*doing something* vs *going somewhere*). They detect a lot of police helicopters, but sometimes they get FBI front companies or military spy planes surveilling protests.