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.