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" "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."

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):

https://twitter.com/x00live/status/1734467433417650237

1. Analyze ADS-B data and collect instances where aircraft suddenly jumped to a new location.

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…
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.

Some friday night midjourney fun. Prompts in ALT text.

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." 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.

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. 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.

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 gets pretty close to the overall aesthetic I'm looking for. It knows an SR-71 is black, but not much else.

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.

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. 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.

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:

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…

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.

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?

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!

https://twitter.com/chris_whong/status/1552376525105897473

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.

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

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.

https://twitter.com/ADSBexchange/status/1456304359554228227

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.

https://twitter.com/asterlingrep/status/1456321967221579783

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.

https://twitter.com/SkyCirclesLA/status/1447491480155611141

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…

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."

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.

https://twitter.com/SkyCirclesMPLS/status/1267681883862650887

If you want to try the shortcut, visit this url from an iOS device:

Once it's installed (and you give it permission to access your location and network), you can say "Hey, Siri, what's overhead?" and it will describe the closest aircraft to you. icloud.com/shortcuts/78c1…
I use it like 10x per day, while I'm walking, driving, at home, whatever. A friend said "it's like a superpower."

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