Releasing the KrakenSDR!

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Thu Jan 27 19:52:08 PST 2022


Thar's gold in them thar signals I tell ya...


Elon Musk Asks College Kid To Remove Twitter-Bot Tracking Private Jet

https://www.protocol.com/elon-musk-flight-tracker
https://twitter.com/ElonJet
https://twitter.com/JxckSweeney

Twitter account, "Elon Musk's Jet," is one of the most popular out of
15 flight-tracking accounts 19-year-old Jack Sweeney developed last
fall. The Twitter bot monitors Musk's private jet movements around the
world.

According to tech website Protocol, Sweeney recently received a direct
message on Twitter from Musk requesting him to take down the account
due to security risks.

Sweeney replied: "Yes, I can, but it'll cost you a Model 3 only joking unless?"

Elon Musk's Jet has 88k followers and uses bots programmed to track
every time Musk departs and arrives at airports worldwide.

The account is becoming so popular that Musk is getting nervous. He
told Sweeney, "I don't love the idea of being shot by a nutcase."

Musk, the world's richest man (according to Bloomberg data), offered
Sweeney a measly $5k to remove the account to "keep crazy people from
tracking his location."

Sweeney responded: "Any chance to up that to $50k? It would be a great
support in college and would possibly allow me to get a car, maybe
even a Model 3."

Musk has since gone radio silent since the last exchange on Jan. 19.

For some color on the complexity of the bots tracking Musk's private
jet. The protocol provides more color:

    But Twitter bots don't get starstruck. They've just gone on
parsing the data Sweeney's told them to. The 15 bots use FAA
information when available — the administration keeps track of when
and where planes depart and land, as well as their intended path.
However, Musk's plane and many others are on the LADD block list,
which removes identifying information from the data.

    Even blocked planes aren't truly private, though. In these cases,
Sweeney uses data from the ADS-B transponders present on most aircraft
which show a plane's location in the air in real-time as charted on
the ADS-B Exchange. Parsing this information is like a logic puzzle:
Sweeney's bots can use a plane's altitude, combined with how long ago
the data was received, to determine when it is taking off or landing.
They can then cross-reference latitude and longitude with a database
of airports to determine where the plane is leaving or headed. And
though Sweeney's bots can't pull from blocked FAA data to figure out
where a plane plans to go, they can cross-reference the real-time
ADS-B data with another website that posts anonymized versions of the
FAA flight plans. This allows the bot to match the plane it is
tracking in real-time to the anonymized FAA flight plans and determine
each plane's intended destination. This information is all entirely
public, and can be used to track most private aircraft.

Tracking private jets of CEOs is nothing new in the hedge fund
industry. There are services that some traders pay upwards of $100k to
retrieve flight data of the movements of deal-makers.

Quandl, a flight tracking company that sells data to hedge funds,
noticed a private jet several years ago that flew to Omaha, Nebraska,
home of billionaire investor Warren Buffett. Traders who had access to
this data saw that representatives of Occidental Petroleum might be in
talks with Buffett.

Days later, Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway infused Occidental with $10
billion cash to proceed with its $38 billion cash and stock offer for
Anadarko.

Rounding back to Sweeney, the proprietary bots he's created shouldn't
be nuked but instead taken private and sold to a hedge fund or Quandl.

According to Elon Musk's Jet's latest tweet, Musk just landed in Austin, Texas.

    Landed in Austin, Texas, US. pic.twitter.com/4l7tKiUspp
    — Elon Musk's Jet (@ElonJet) January 26, 2022


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