China Bans Flightradar24 (theprint.in) 72
China has decided to ban access to Flightradar24, a real-time commercial aircraft flight-tracking service that provides equipment to volunteers to collect aviation data. A Chinese national security agency in 2020 discovered that a citizen with the surname Li had signed up to receive the equipment from Flightradar24 and track aircraft. From a report: CCTV reported that Beijing Municipal National Security Bureau found data-sharing poses a security threat to military aircraft. It added that security agencies seized the equipment given to volunteers by Flightradar24. Chinascope recently told you that China's Ministry of State Security declassified an investigation into the theft of Chinese airlines' data by a foreign spy agency. It is unclear if the Flightradar24 case and that are related.
Yes, horrible that publicly broadcast information (Score:3)
Is shared!
not all countries agree (Score:3)
Some countries say you have to pay a license fee to receive over-the-air radio waves. Even ones intended to be received by average people. And then there's the whole mirroring-broadcast-to-internet-without-a-license thing.
Re:not all countries agree (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because someone is doing it doesn't make it right.
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Thank you AC.
(That's a rare thing to say)
Had no idea what 50cent army referred to.
But now I have a sudden desire to play a White Stripes song.
Re: fittywho? (Score:1)
Also see "wumao" and the retard from Oregan who's pretending to be a techbro in Seattle.
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That logic is so funny. If they don’t want their radio waves hitting peoples antennas then maybe they should stop broadcasting.
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That logic is so funny. If they don’t want their radio waves hitting peoples antennas then maybe they should stop broadcasting.
They are arresting the laws of physics as we speak.
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It does seem to be the trend, though, to attack the messenger or sharer, and ignore the source. How many times have we seen stories coming out of the EU where, when defamatory, copyright infringing, or otherwise illegal content is found, they go after Google or Yahoo or Facebook or Twitter or whoever; and they totally ignore the source, allowing it to remain up and offending? Just look up the stories about the notion of the "right to be forgotten" and you should find examples.
China is just getting onboard
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The small comma 8 caused me to stop developing a project for a scientific institute, where we used VOR transmitters as signal s
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Not wildly surprising though - one of the reasons we still have licensing of "ham" radio operators is to give a wartime resource of people to get into the military, or into prison, at the drop of a parliamentary "Order in Council". "We don't need no stinkin' democratic oversight", as our democratically elected overlords would put it.
Re: Yes, horrible that publicly broadcast informat (Score:1)
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The difference between one person with an antenna and a network of people contributing to a public database covering a wide area that can be mined and combined with other data is apparently not entirely obvious.
In the UK we had the first laws covering electronic records in the 80s. It was recognised that databases pose a much greater threat to privacy and fairness than paper records. Collecting and processing data is significant.
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That's espionage equipment, no matter how you cut it.
You might throw your hands up at it, but I can remember breathing a sigh of thanks to the burglars who stopped me from taking my handheld GPS with me on my second visit to Russia, when I heard - from the ex-pat press - about an American who had been caught within 600km of where I was working, in possession of a
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China has a mandatory obfuscation and secrecy on a lot of what Westerners would consider public information. Map information for example. In PRC, it's scrambled. You can see this by simply going to google maps, and try to overlay road maps with satellite maps. You'll find that roads as you can see them on the maps are in different places from where they are on the satellite images.
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A plane has no privacy.
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Nor cars. ;-) ;-)
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Just recline your seats...
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I don't necessarily disagree for planes, but come on. Don't just be one of those people who say "you have no expectation of privacy in a public place", like that's a universal truth and ends the argument. Don't be That Guy.
Explain why there should be a social norm that it's OK not only to see everything that goes on in public, but to systematically create a detailed record, keep that record indefinitely, and share it widely.
Don't pretend there's no difference between a world where somebody might see what yo
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Explain why
OK. Because I don't want to have to ask permission to get non private data from some bureaucrat. And even if I could get such permission, collecting and organizing it only after I make my case may make it useless.
Back in the old days, when data collection was expensive, people would have to design an experiment and identify parameters to be measured before beginning a study. Now there's a lot of useful stuff that gets discovered just because someone can sit down with a database and think, "What if..."
Case
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Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
He’s playing the conservative victim card. He’s scared someone is tracking the movements of his imaginary airplane. Missing the entire point of ADS-B is so that you can be tracked. Maybe he should cover up the tail number and wear a mask while flying too.
That or he’s a butthurt FBI pilot https://www.aclu.org/blog/priv... [aclu.org]
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Heâ(TM)s playing the conservative victim card. Heâ(TM)s scared someone is tracking the movements of his imaginary airplane. Missing the entire point of ADS-B is so that you can be tracked. Maybe he should cover up the tail number and wear a mask while flying too.
Just a remember to meta mods there is no "-1 I disagree". I communicated my opinion whether one agrees with it or not is not a valid reason for a down mod.
As for the conservative victim I'm not a conservative. I've never once voted for a republican for president in my entire life. Neither is political ideology relevant.
ADS-B was explicitly designed for use by secondary surveillance not to enable a global database of the global movement of all aircraft. ADS-B after all is just unsolicited mode S. The rep
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Can you cite your source for safety being the reason national aviation authorities don't maintain publicly accessible APIs over ADS data? Not that I'm ruling it out, but "we see no reason to spend resources on that" seems more likely to me.
What I said is that ADS is for safety. It was explicitly designed and implemented for secondary surveillance purposes. ADS-B is basically just an unsolicited mode S transmission. There was no intent for global public data collection systems at the time of its deployment. It was neither designed nor intended for that purpose.
I am NOT asserting that the data is not being provided to the public for safety reasons. I am saying the reason ADS-B exists is for safety of aircraft and traffic control not to cr
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It’s not my fault your radio waves are hitting my antenna. Stop broadcasting if you don’t like it.
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Itâ(TM)s not my fault your radio waves are hitting my antenna. Stop broadcasting if you donâ(TM)t like it.
In the US we are subject to the communications act which allows people to receive and listen to radio communications. However the act makes it is illegal to reap profit from what you overhear. There are legal limits on use even though data is in the clear.
Hope they get 'im! (Score:2)
"...a citizen with the surname Li had signed up to receive the equipment from Flightradar24 and track aircraft..."
That narrowed down the search for the perpetrator significantly. /s
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Breaking news: Chinese agents detained and then surreptitiously exfiltrated actor Chow Fun Fat from his Hong Kong residence after discovering sales records identifying a Mr. Li Mu Bai as the purchaser of the Flightradar24 tracking equipment.
Facepalm (Score:2)
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As if military aircraft squawked ADS-B. In Europe, they don't, typically, except if under civil ATC control. But indeed, China is empty atm on FR24, which it wasn't when I checked last.
So logically, anything that doesn't squawk is either police or military. You can see why that could be a problem? Let's say you're planning your next killing of Indian troops [bbc.co.uk] then you might want to send a bunch of planes in preparation. This kind of data would mean many people would know you are coming.
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Made in China (Score:2)
As if military aircraft squawked ADS-B.
Perhaps when your military aircraft are made in China the off-switch on the ADS-B transmitter does not always work?
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But indeed, China is empty atm on FR24
What sort of security threats are they worried about? FR24 is for general public information, not navigation and safety. The ADS broadcasts are for safety and traffic control. But I doubt any national air traffic system will use the FR24 feed for that. As to providing flight info to the public, I doubt that many in the public within Chinese borders have the wherewithal to act maliciously on that information. And as far as foreign intelligence, ADS (and other) signals are easily monitored from LEO satellites
China. A dark place in some ways. (Score:2)
Anything not expressly permitted is prohibited.
I would bet that the bureaucrat that imposed the ban was following that edict rather than reacting to any actual threat.
Next? (Score:2)
Equipment? (Score:5, Informative)
Do you mean one of those cheap SDR USB dongles that the Chinese have been flooding the world market with? They actually make pretty nice ADS-B receivers. There is open source s/w available that makes them a pretty nice scanner and can feed data into sites like FR24.
At this point I've got to think that the market for dedicated ADS-B receivers (at $200, $300 and up price points) has pretty much dried up in the face of $10 dongles.
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They mean a better quality version of that, same chip but a lower noise front end tuned for ADB (1050MHz IIRC). Also a decent antenna, and some shielded coax and mounting gear.
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A 1050MHz filter, coax, antenna and weatherproof project box. Now we're up to about $30.
My receiver (the above sans filter) is good for a 50 mile range around my house. Anything farther out than that is blocked by the mountains anyway.
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Yeah I'm guessing they are looking at hundreds of kilometres or more to get decent coverage in a country that size.
Re:Equipment? (Score:4, Interesting)
A couple of dozen observers could cover most of Chinese airspace.
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Line of sight isn't the issue. Radio waves obey the inverse square law, i.e. their intensity is the inverse of the square of their distance from the receiver.
If you have TV dongle and a little TV antenna built down to the lowest possible price, by the time distance ADS-B signals get to you they will be buried in the noise and impossible to decode.
So yes, a few dozen receivers could cover China, but only if they have decent equipment. Hence the scheme to send them the right gear.
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They probably just sourced the equipment from Chinese manufacturers and had it delivered. Maybe some nice big poles to get the height as well, although then lightning becomes an issue.
One way around the coax issue is to just use something like a Raspberry Pi and mount it right next to the antenna. Then all you need is power and maybe ethernet, although wifi is a good option too. You can ship them a complete working set-up that way, plug and play.
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For not particularly subtle reasons, this makes me think of the "DIY" underwater tethered drone project I was looking at a few years ago. I think then that they were using customised micro-computers, but it's the sort of place where an interacting network of Pis might work well. One Power-over-Ethernet entry into the pressure vessel - good for reducing leaks.
Trying to remember what the project was called - it was a game I couldn't afford to get involved in. "OpenROV", it seems, and the project ha [kickstarter.com]
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Although some have tried and failed!
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Nah, that's a bit cruel. I've colleagues who died in CFIT.
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Cumulus Granite?
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SDR is your friend... (Score:2)
Grab a cheap chinese usb DVB pen (most of then use the RTL2838 DVB-T), connect to any metal pipe or existent antena, load the sdr module (rtl2832_sdr), use the Dump1090 software ... that is it, you can now track planes with common hardware.
Don't stop there, you can also listen to any frequency using gqrx or cubicsdr
And you can unload the sdr module and load the normal dvb (dvb_usb_rtl28xxu) and watch some TV using kaffeine.
And as you are listen only, you can't be detected, so unless you are announcing it,
That's nothing (Score:2)
Wait until they hear about marinetraffic.com.