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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • Rail also has a sort of hidden economic benefit in that once you overcome the network effect, it boosts economics on a larger scale. Some people in China thought it was crazy for the government to build high speed rail at the speed and scale that they did, and that it would never compete with flights, etc. And yes, the line all the way out to Xinjiang is not profitable and subsidized by other lines. But the overall benefit to the Chinese economy by connecting all the major cities together can’t be underestimated.








  • Dempf@lemmy.ziptoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world*ACTION ROLL*
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    5 months ago

    Even the older Mode C/S transponders broadcast altitude, and passive radar could probably get you position. As I understand it, ADS-B doesn’t add a ton that wasn’t already available (from the point of view of a terrorist), but it does eliminate the need for radar, and includes ICAO hex codes that make it easier to uniquely identify an aircraft.

    To shoot down a plane flying at 33,000 feet you’d need a surface-to-air missile system and a few missiles. Looks like the system used to shoot down MH17 cost ballpark of $100m, possibly more. Missiles are around $200k each.

    You get target tracking and missile control radar included for free in your mobile SAM. At that point ADS-B is probably redundant, though I guess it could help you track the plane before it enters your airspace.

    Though, really, where an airplane is going is usually not a secret. In most cases a flight plan will be filled (unless VFR). And there are other sources for near-realtime and realtime flight path information, including directly from the FAA.

    You could also hire spotters with binoculars just to confirm that the plane is headed towards your mobile SAM.

    Or, once the flight plan is filled and the departure time is confirmed, just stand outside the airport with a shoulder mounted missile launcher.



  • The other bit of this is that Taylor Swift sent a C&D letter to Jack Sweeney who is the guy who has been publishing flight paths of various celebrities. Sweeney obtains this data publicly because since 2020 all aircraft (with few exceptions) are required to use ADS-B transponders. The ADS-B system has numerous safety benefits compared to previous systems, but a side effect is that every aircraft now constantly broadcasts its position, velocity, and altitude information, and anybody who wants to can build a ground station capable of receiving this information.

    Generally, threatening legal action against somebody who isn’t doing anything wrong or illegal is considered a dick move, and puts Taylor Swift in the same category as Elon Musk (who has also previously threatened legal action against Jack Sweeney). So we are proceeding to make fun of her without remorse, as it was her decision in the first place to fly privately, which is very bad for the environment.

    Instead of threatening to sue the guy who’s breaking no laws and publishing information that is already public, she could just consider another mode of transit if privacy is that important to her. But in the meantime we will enjoy the memes



  • VPN drains my phone battery like crazy, plus eventually I’d like to be able to share my services with some less technical people, and want to keep the barrier to entry low for them, so I’ve been looking at what I’d want in order to be comfortable exposing services publicly.

    Services are running on Truenas Scale (k3s).

    What I’ve been thinking is:

    1. Isolate services’ network access to each other and to my local network.
    2. Reverse proxy in front of all services (probably Caddy)
    3. Coraza as a WAF
    4. Crowdsec Caddy module
    5. Some sort of auth layer in the proxy, like oauth2-proxy (kind of tricky because not every service would work well with this, especially without client support). Probably would start with a 3rd party identity provider rather than rolling my own, especially since 3rd party will probably do a lot more monitoring around logins, patterns, etc.

    Thinking of hosting the reverse proxy piece on a VPS. Probably not completely necessary because I don’t think hiding my home IP really buys me much security, but Caddy might be easier to configure on the VPS compared to Truenas (though I guess I could run it in a VM on Truenas).

    Each app could run a wireguard sidecar to connect it to the VPS.

    Curious what others think about this setup, or if the recommendation is still to keep things behind a VPN.