Probably to eliminate the open source competition if anything.

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 ADBS-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...

Perhaps enabling them to censor the feed is one of the primary reasons for the acquisition. I can't imagine it was that expensive, considering the likes of whom might take issue with the data being public.

Perhaps, but it would be like buying a newsstand to censor a newspaper.

The data is still freely available and will be distributed via another channel.

But will it really become available again? Or, more likely, like RSS, will this snuff it out.

It's amazing how someone with a bit of capital and time can control almost anything that offends them.

That sort of irrational behavior makes me wonder if das muskrat has his paws in this. If he was willing to drop $44 billion on Twitter, this is pocket change by comparison. And he's been desperately trying to get that guy to stop tracking his jet.

  The data is still freely available and will be distributed via another channel.

The ADS-B transmissions are still freely available but the value is in the aggregate product. In the case of ADS-B Exchange that aggregate takes a ton of work from volunteers who (if the comments here are any indication) are inclined to stop volunteering. An ADS-B receiver has a range of dozens, maybe hundreds of miles. Without that network of volunteers Joe Schmo in Santa Cruz will have no way of tuning in to that freely observable transponder in Austin.

There’s most definitely a coordination problem to be solve to recreate that network, and I don’t mean to understate the difficulty of that at all, but I’m wondering if a (reconstituted) network of a small-ish number of volunteers could scale up to, say, 80% of the current ADSB Exchange coverage surprisingly quickly?

My feeder, which cost maybe $100 all-in (pi + sdr + antenna; though the pi was much cheaper then than it is now) has full coverage of two major airports. Normal range is 200 miles (obviously dependent on altitude) and sometimes picks up plans ~250 miles away, I assume depending on relatively rare atmospheric conditions.

With reasonably optimal distribution of what, a few hundred receivers, my mental math is suggesting you could cover a majority of the continental U.S. landmass and a large majority of its population and air traffic?

Again, not to understand the magnitude of this. But if someone’s objective is generally to redistribute public data, or track Gulfstreams on their way to Omaha during times of financial upheaval, or poke a finger in the eye of the private jet lobby, but not to create a 99% comprehensive, monetizable data source for a sale to private equity - maybe it’s not crazy infeasible?

It's not impossible or even infeasible really, but it is unlikely and it is a lot of effort. How many open source software projects even have 100 people working on them full time?

I hope something fills the shoes left by ADS-B Exchange, but I won't hold my breath. I already had the Pi so I probably spent around $40 getting the SDR + cheapo antenna. I got bored with it quickly though as there's already decent coverage of the Bay Area – and the SDR has since been repurposed to monitor my fridge.

I agree that 20M isn't much for Musk but I really doubt he'd hide his involvement behind another company like this.. It's not his style, he'd trumpet it all over Twitter and claim it as a win for free speech or something :P

Considering the new owner is a jet charter they do probably have a similar motive, I just don't think Elon is behind it here.

The information is already publicly broadcast; nobody's paying one particular feed company big bucks to remove it from their records when everybody else does simply because they ask nicely or because they don't want to upset the government.

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.

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 :)

Why not create a blockchain on webtorrent?

Man, the blockchain being inserted wherever it doesn't need to be is becoming rampant on HN, isn't it? Humor me, though, how would that work and why would the cost of running a "blockchain," both in terms of money and energy wasted, be better than a simple feed aggregator?

A signed append only log, distributed with webtorrent would provide provenance and distribution. This would allow for not having to have dedicated infrastructure for collection.

One could also use USENET and get rid of the garbage will killfiles.

And who maintains the signing keys? It's just as centralized, with tons more complexity..

It really isn't. Everyone hopping on to the next fad-air-trak-site.io is going to reproduce the same problem. Distributing the data over webtorrent from the beginning will make data access democratic.

Something that happens once in a blue moon, for data that is already in multiple locations (to varying degrees of precision).. You've failed to sell it to me, I'll continue to contribute to the simpler solutions that won't need a crap ton of extra work, thanks.

Not advocating you stop or that your solution is wrong.

If you are going to log, I'd look into CF offerings.

Can you explain how you'd use Webtorrent to synchronize a large dataset that's updated in realtime? If you mean to get a P2P transport wouldn't WebRTC be what you're aiming for?

I'm genuinely curious but isn't Webtorrent just using WebRTC to join a Torrent Swarm? Torrents are fundamentally immutable, the identifier is a static hash of the content of the torrent. That would mean producing a new torrent for each new data point or chunk of data points only to then submit that hash to a WebRTC based connection to again fetch torrent content?

Genuinely curious, I'm interested in how torrent swarms can be used for novell applications.

There are thousands of people contributing ADS-B data many times a minute.

You can't just "create a blockchain". Blockchains depend on hashing power for security. A new niche chain provides very little security, and a rich person like Elon could set up a hash cluster to out-hash everyone else and block updates for his jets.

In order to fund hashing power and security, there has to be economic incentive for the miners. That requires some token, which ultimately requires everyone who submits updates to pay a fee.

The reasons I and many other people provide ADS-B data to aggregation sites is that it's free (minus the one-time cost of the hardware) and I get something in return: a free upgraded account which, depending on the site, enables historical flight searches. If I lost money every time I provided data, it wouldn't make any sense to continue.

I also wouldn't want to have to download an entire (or a good chunk of a) blockchain or raw data ledger to check history for a tail number. That's what I'd have to do if it were truly decentralized. Ledgers do not provide efficient indexing.

It would be data signed by a key and added to a torrent swarm. This would only handle data collection, someone would still need to sync the swarm and process/visualize it.

I assumed that was satire or sarcasm.

Given his entire chain above your comment, it was a serious comment.

So did I, before I read the entire reply chain :(

I just heard about https://opensky-network.org/

"The OpenSky Network is a non-profit community-based receiver network which has been continuously collecting air traffic surveillance data since 2013. Unlike other networks, OpenSky keeps the complete unfiltered raw data and makes it accessible to academic and institutional researchers."

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.

One would think there would be recent lessons to be learned on how to vaporize value in connection with an asset-light acquisition… Actually, the guy who sold probably did learn those lessons. Best of luck to the buyer, I suppose.

Where to?

Opensky seems to be the only non profit network left?

It's the only one that was always a non-profit by the way - the fact that ADSBX was an LLC should have been a giveaway, also to the employees/volunteers.

This would be a great use for nostr.

Instead of everybody uploading their data to one dude who can sell out, instead flood-fill it. We're not talking about a lot of data here.

> We're not talking about a lot of data here

It is actually a massive amount of data. Gigabits per second that need to be aggregated, sorted by geographic region, fed into multilateration systems, and cleaning the output before it can be shown on a map.

The founder is Dan Streufert. (From the linked press release.)

Really good to know!! I'll join them.

Can't blame the founder, though. I would have done the same.

Sounds just like freenode 2.0. Some investor buying the domain, and everyone else just moving on to a new project.

I think the Freenode takeover could have worked without loosing the majority of the channels if rasengan hadn't tried so hard to kill the network. After all, Freenode was a free service people were making use of and as long as it was run somewhat competently most wouldn't have cared too much about operator drama.

Here it feels more like people are providing unpaid work (by running receivers) and who in their right mind would continue doing that for a commercial entity.

>> "Here it feels more like people are providing unpaid work (by running receivers) and who in their right mind would continue doing that for a commercial entity."

Most people with a smartphone. I do enjoy more precise GPS even if it means Apple and Google are soaking up Wi-fi hotspot info to improve triangulation. I think the difference is most people don't realize they're feeding this info to companies.

You can run Tower Collector and feed that data to Mozilla and OpenCellID instead.

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.

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.

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.

I have a basic (free) Flightaware account. I can't imagine anything relevant to commercial airliner travel that I'd need that I don't get from that free account. Is there something I'm missing?

(I totally get the fun aspect and it's fairly cheap to put a receiver up.)

From FR24, you get two years of historical data for starters.

the only value for me is having no ads. which is, in fact, something i value, but not at the $80/month it would take to subscribe for. But it's worth sending my feed.

Lots of interesting stuff outside of commercial airliners.

Flightaware (and FR24) censors (for a fee).

I remember emailing a journo covering a protest to look up and observe the plane circling around.

But ultimately they’re different services: Adsb is vessel focussed, while FA/FR24 are flight# focussed.

Want to find out what routes your aircraft typically flies? Adsb will be the place to check.

Want to see if your flight is typically on-time? FA/FR24.

> Flightaware (and FR24) censors (for a fee).

Are there any services you're aware of that don't censor?

ADSBExchange ... that is why I contributed.

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

That's part of why an unfiltered ADS-B exchange is valuable. You can track senior executives and try to get ahead of the news. Flying in to Davos is pretty uninteresting compared with travel to factories, competitors' offices, mining operations, international travel, etc. It gives you an idea what executives are thinking about doing.

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.

Not true -- I currently access the API to obtain an aggregated feed in exchange for my feeding ADSB-X with my receivers (1090 and 978 MHz). You have to ask for access and it's poorly documented but it works and feeds my own local tracking site running 24.7.

They specifically removed the text on the website saying you can get API access from feeding, replaced this with a link to their paid RapidAPI (under "Enthusiast Usage Terms") and no longer automatically give you API access with an active feeder key. That seems like a pretty clear message even if they made an exception for you. Besides, how long do you think your free access will last under the new ownership?

EDIT: In their FAQ it currently states: "In very limited situations ADSBexchange.com may choose to allow non-profit, research, or educational entities access to the historical data or API at reduced fee, in these situations such entities must meet all other requirements including hosting a feeder. ADSBexchange.com API pricing is a fraction of the cost of ADS-B data available anywhere else." To me that is quite different than their previous policy of providing automatic noncommercial API access to anyone hosting a feeder. It removes an incentive to feed and discourages use of the API.

Well I for one will stop feeding them.