8 ms·

List of blocked aircraft on Flightradar24 (2013)

36 points by ce4 11y ago

jMyles 11y ago
I require some context to fully understand what's going on here. I imagine "blocked" means that the flights in question are not displayed? Despite a user presumably uploading the metadata for the flight in question as part of their feed? And thus, can't someone still see these flights with their directly-connected SDR device? And thus, can't someone just start a new FR24 service that doesn't censor these data? > There is a discussion on FAA meetings about encrypting the ADS-B signal. By angering the authorities, we will only speed up this process. Holy hell, for real? At this point, there are vanishingly few laws with which I agree even in principle, but "if you are going to fly a 375-ton hunk of metal through the air, you need to clearly broadcast flight details in plain text" is a pretty damn reasonable one. What possible justification can there be for targeting services like FR24?
- adaml_623 11y ago
  Lol. Take a step back and remember that some planes are privately owned. And now imagine a website called numberplateradar24.com that aggregates the feeds from 1000s of number plates scanners around the country. Which means you can track an individuals car.... does this sound like an invasion of privacy. Where's the dividing line? I think it's totally reasonable that private planes are allowed to encrypt their identities. As long as their position is still trackable it doesn't matter if the general public don't know everything.
  - jMyles 11y ago
    I think I misunderstood - so it's just the identity that is being blocked (and, pursuant to this discussion, may be encrypted)? Not the actual flight data? ...and no, I don't recognize a right to "privacy" that is so tentacular as to prohibit people from walking around with a camera, running some computer vision on it, and sharing the result with like-minded hobbyists doing the same thing.
    - tzmudzin 11y ago
      The hobbyists being the communication networks, tracing your phone location? I guess this has been tried before: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention
    - cm2187 11y ago
      Well, that's the very definition of stalking
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Stalking requires a target and an obsession or questionable intent. If we're stretching definitions that far, then I'll say that this is just thinking - recording inputs, correlating them and possibly acting upon them. Should we ban augmentation of thinking?
      - my-bullshit-job 11y ago
        No, that's not the very definition of stalking.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      > ...and no, I don't recognize a right to "privacy" that is so tentacular as to prohibit people from walking around with a camera, running some computer vision on it, and sharing the result with like-minded hobbyists doing the same thing. Exactly. A lot of people seem to think they can have (and therefore expect) a world in which they can cover the eyes to make themselves invisible. Like little kids, they say "I have my hands on my eyes, you can't see me!". And when that fails for obvious reasons then, unlike kids, they want this magic to be enforced by law. "How dare you look at me? You're not allowed!".
      - rbcgerard 11y ago
        It's about lowering the cost of surveillance - want to keep track of your competitors CEO or M&A team? Just set up an alert in flight radar...and it's like you have a full time team of private investigators
  - nodata 11y ago
    Scale is the difference.
  - tallanvor 11y ago
    If a bunch of hobbyists wanted to build a way to track cars using publicly available methods why shouldn't they have the right to do that? Could it be creepy? Yeah, but as long as they're not exposing information that's publicly available or targeting specific individuals, then it's not what I would consider to be morally wrong.* *On the other hand, the government using public funds to do this, combining the data with private information, and trying to keep the fact that they do this secret is wrong in my book.
    - larrydag 11y ago
      As an aside tracking cars is being done now for collections and repossession industry. Right now its done by scanning parking lots or places of high density and comparing to databases of records.
      - phkahler 11y ago
        >> As an aside tracking cars is being done now for collections and repossession industry. Right now its done by scanning parking lots or places of high density and comparing to databases of records. The DMV records are not supposed to be available to anyone but the police. The ability to abuse that for crime is huge.
        jMyles 11y ago
        > not supposed to be available to anyone but the police... to abuse that for crime is huge So it sounds like an illogical configuration on its face then.
        deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
  - fred2133 11y ago
    Somebody should build that. Why should governments and corps have all the fun? (Insert sousveillance/transparent society/David Brin rant here). Are there any decent open source number plate recognition libraries yet?
    - psykovsky 11y ago
      https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr
  - Zigurd 11y ago
    As long as all vehicles are visible, sure. Why should the government be trusted to monitor what needs monitoring and not abuse the information?
    - joblessjunkie 11y ago
      Why should random people on the internet be trusted not to abuse the information?
      - Zigurd 11y ago
        They can't be trusted. They're just not able to abuse it as much as a government. And the worst abuses would already be against laws against, for example, crimes of violence.
  - kjs3 11y ago
    Position is nice, but you do want to know if that plane a couple of miles out heading in your direction is a Piper Cub doing 80mph or a 737 doing 400mph.
- dagw 11y ago
  "if you are going to fly a 375-ton hunk of metal through the air, you need to clearly broadcast flight details in plain text" Why? I obviously get why you have to tell all the relevant authorities and so on and so forth, but why do you have to tell your nosy neighbor where you went on holiday last weekend. Or did you mean that the rule should only apply to "hunks of metal" 375 tonnes and over (which is pretty damn huge, given that an A330 has a maximum takeoff weight of around 230 tonnes)?
  - stephen_g 11y ago
    They use these kinds of transponders for TCAS (traffic collision avoidance system), so yes, it should be plain text if you like planes not crashing in to each other...
    - dagw 11y ago
      Isn't position and velocity (and acceleration?) enough for TCAS? Why do you need full identity and flightplan for the aircrafts?
      - jMyles 11y ago
        I think the problem is that some of us aren't up to speed on the particulars. Is that what's being blocked (and proposed for encryption)? Just the "full identity and flightplan"?
        ce4 11y ago
        Flight history of blocked aircraft is inaccessible as well. E.g. executives may not want to reveal insightful flights. E.g. American Airlines AA1 recent flight history: http://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/aa1/ http://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/aa1/
        deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
        11y ago
- _djo_ 11y ago
  You're correct, these are cases where organisations have asked FlightRadar24 to not display any data about their aircraft. In some cases you can still see an aircraft on the site with all identifying details saying "BLOCKED", but as I understand it you can request for your aircraft to not display at all. This doesn't prevent you from seeing those aircraft via your own ADS-B receivers like directly-connected SDR devices, nor does it apply to any of the other flight tracking applications or services like PlanePlotter, FlightAware or PlaneFinder to which an aircraft owner would need to apply separately. I can't say I disagree with FR24's position on this, seeing as though if they didn't offer it there would be a lot more pressure on the FAA and others to introduce an encrypted form of the ADS-B standard and because when ADS-B was introduced nobody foresaw consolidated services like FR24 which could provide not only an extraordinary level of crowdsourced data but also historical data. This is a problem for air forces, which are are required to use ADS-B in certain areas but for obvious reasons don't want other countries to be able to see exactly when, where and how their aircraft fly. It's also an issue for private companies, where the ability to track the movement of corporate jets might give competitors extremely good intel on what a company's plans are based on where its execs are flying to and when. This has only been compounded by the introduction of multilateration[0] which allows for aircraft using only Mode-S and without ADS-B onboard or activated to be tracked with the same level of positional data. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilateration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilateration
- golergka 11y ago
  > you need to clearly broadcast flight details in plain text And here I was, thinking that HN crowd is so pro-privacy.
  - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
    Ah yes but gubiment is the evils oh but I can do anything I want.
    - golergka 11y ago
      Actually I think that this comes from unspoken assumptions that powerful and rich people, as well as powerful and rich corporations, are evil, while ordinary people and small companies are good. Which is complete and total bullshit, but can explain a lot of HN and Reddit's worldview.
gadders 11y ago
My key takeaway - Holy shit! The Crossfit people have a plane!!
- sorenjan 11y ago
  I noticed that too. Turns out it's a small single engine plane. http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/NNum_Results.aspx?NNumbertxt=123FU http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/NNum_Results.aspx?NN... http://www.crossfit.com/mt-archive2/008612.html http://www.crossfit.com/mt-archive2/008612.html
  - tacticus 11y ago
    It's an awesome plane though. I've met a few people who have flown the cirrus planes.
    - strictnein 11y ago
      Yep. It's the one with the parachute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_SR22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_SR22
      - gadders 11y ago
        WOD: - Fly to 15,000 feet - Deploy Parachute - AMRAP
- protomyth 11y ago
  I was actually surprised more NASCAR teams aren't on that list.
pjc50 11y ago
Open flight information has in the past been used to track both the world's biggest illegal arms dealer Viktor Bout, and also the CIA rendition-to-torture flights.
- troisx 11y ago
  This is why they want the information blocked. If you look at the list of blocked names, it's the government and the wealthy.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Not really. I.e. they don't have to do something repugnant to want that information blocked. The military may not want to provide free intelligence about their forces to other nations. And "the wealthy" are pretty much at constant war with each other; tracking when a CEO leaves and where they go in order to gain advantage on the stock market is not unheard of.
  - mootothemax 11y ago
    If you look at the list of blocked names, it's the government and the wealthy. I wouldn't say this is very insightful; how many large jets aren't operated by the government or the wealthy?
luso_brazilian 11y ago
The position of the site admin [1] is: >> Quote Originally Posted by Mike >> Will will not publish any information in the FAQ just to keep this as low below "radar" as possible. Every exclusion request is handled manually and we will no comment or publish this process in public. >> Quote Originally Posted by Mike >> FR24 should work with authorities, and not against them. I think we will close this thread as there is nothing more to discuss. This is not about democracy or censorship, but about keeping our hobby alive without authorities enforcing new laws in order to limit ADS-B usage. >> UPDATE. Maybe I was not clear when I posted this before. There is a discussion on FAA meetings about encrypting the ADS-B signal. By angering the authorities, we will only speed up this process. This is very similar to the policy of many sites, to enforce "self censorship" by accepting polite take-down requests in order to avoid harsher consequences. This is reasonable from the perspective of the site owner. Sometimes an acceptable loss is worthy to keep the most freedom intact. On the other hand there is a chilling effect on speech, the fear it cause in others potential site and service creators who could give up instead of creating for fear of this kind of public drama. [1] http://forum.flightradar24.com/threads/5217-Blocked-flights?p=32686&viewfull=1#post32686 http://forum.flightradar24.com/threads/5217-Blocked-flights?...
mdekkers 11y ago
lol @ N1757 - Google Jet - http://www.flightradar24.com/data/airplanes/N1757 http://www.flightradar24.com/data/airplanes/N1757 Privacy is only overrated for others...
United857 11y ago
FYI - anyone can request to the FAA that their registration be blocked from tracking on these websites, and compliance is mandatory for users of the FAA data feed. (FR24 does use FAA data in U.S. Airspace.) So likely FR24 is just basing their block list (at least for US registered aircraft) from this. http://www.nbaa.org/ops/security/asdi/ http://www.nbaa.org/ops/security/asdi/

36 points by ce4 11y ago

I require some context to fully understand what's going on here. I imagine "blocked" means that the flights in question are not displayed? Despite a user presumably uploading the metadata for the flight in question as part of their feed? And thus, can't someone still see these flights with their directly-connected SDR device? And thus, can't someone just start a new FR24 service that doesn't censor these data? > There is a discussion on FAA meetings about encrypting the ADS-B signal. By angering the authorities, we will only speed up this process. Holy hell, for real? At this point, there are vanishingly few laws with which I agree even in principle, but "if you are going to fly a 375-ton hunk of metal through the air, you need to clearly broadcast flight details in plain text" is a pretty damn reasonable one. What possible justification can there be for targeting services like FR24?

adaml_623 11y ago
Lol. Take a step back and remember that some planes are privately owned. And now imagine a website called numberplateradar24.com that aggregates the feeds from 1000s of number plates scanners around the country. Which means you can track an individuals car.... does this sound like an invasion of privacy. Where's the dividing line? I think it's totally reasonable that private planes are allowed to encrypt their identities. As long as their position is still trackable it doesn't matter if the general public don't know everything.
- jMyles 11y ago
  I think I misunderstood - so it's just the identity that is being blocked (and, pursuant to this discussion, may be encrypted)? Not the actual flight data? ...and no, I don't recognize a right to "privacy" that is so tentacular as to prohibit people from walking around with a camera, running some computer vision on it, and sharing the result with like-minded hobbyists doing the same thing.
  - tzmudzin 11y ago
    The hobbyists being the communication networks, tracing your phone location? I guess this has been tried before: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention
  - cm2187 11y ago
    Well, that's the very definition of stalking
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Stalking requires a target and an obsession or questionable intent. If we're stretching definitions that far, then I'll say that this is just thinking - recording inputs, correlating them and possibly acting upon them. Should we ban augmentation of thinking?
    - my-bullshit-job 11y ago
      No, that's not the very definition of stalking.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > ...and no, I don't recognize a right to "privacy" that is so tentacular as to prohibit people from walking around with a camera, running some computer vision on it, and sharing the result with like-minded hobbyists doing the same thing. Exactly. A lot of people seem to think they can have (and therefore expect) a world in which they can cover the eyes to make themselves invisible. Like little kids, they say "I have my hands on my eyes, you can't see me!". And when that fails for obvious reasons then, unlike kids, they want this magic to be enforced by law. "How dare you look at me? You're not allowed!".
    - rbcgerard 11y ago
      It's about lowering the cost of surveillance - want to keep track of your competitors CEO or M&A team? Just set up an alert in flight radar...and it's like you have a full time team of private investigators
- nodata 11y ago
  Scale is the difference.
- tallanvor 11y ago
  If a bunch of hobbyists wanted to build a way to track cars using publicly available methods why shouldn't they have the right to do that? Could it be creepy? Yeah, but as long as they're not exposing information that's publicly available or targeting specific individuals, then it's not what I would consider to be morally wrong.* *On the other hand, the government using public funds to do this, combining the data with private information, and trying to keep the fact that they do this secret is wrong in my book.
  - larrydag 11y ago
    As an aside tracking cars is being done now for collections and repossession industry. Right now its done by scanning parking lots or places of high density and comparing to databases of records.
    - phkahler 11y ago
      >> As an aside tracking cars is being done now for collections and repossession industry. Right now its done by scanning parking lots or places of high density and comparing to databases of records. The DMV records are not supposed to be available to anyone but the police. The ability to abuse that for crime is huge.
      - jMyles 11y ago
        > not supposed to be available to anyone but the police... to abuse that for crime is huge So it sounds like an illogical configuration on its face then.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
- fred2133 11y ago
  Somebody should build that. Why should governments and corps have all the fun? (Insert sousveillance/transparent society/David Brin rant here). Are there any decent open source number plate recognition libraries yet?
  - psykovsky 11y ago
    https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr
- Zigurd 11y ago
  As long as all vehicles are visible, sure. Why should the government be trusted to monitor what needs monitoring and not abuse the information?
  - joblessjunkie 11y ago
    Why should random people on the internet be trusted not to abuse the information?
    - Zigurd 11y ago
      They can't be trusted. They're just not able to abuse it as much as a government. And the worst abuses would already be against laws against, for example, crimes of violence.
- kjs3 11y ago
  Position is nice, but you do want to know if that plane a couple of miles out heading in your direction is a Piper Cub doing 80mph or a 737 doing 400mph.
dagw 11y ago
"if you are going to fly a 375-ton hunk of metal through the air, you need to clearly broadcast flight details in plain text" Why? I obviously get why you have to tell all the relevant authorities and so on and so forth, but why do you have to tell your nosy neighbor where you went on holiday last weekend. Or did you mean that the rule should only apply to "hunks of metal" 375 tonnes and over (which is pretty damn huge, given that an A330 has a maximum takeoff weight of around 230 tonnes)?
- stephen_g 11y ago
  They use these kinds of transponders for TCAS (traffic collision avoidance system), so yes, it should be plain text if you like planes not crashing in to each other...
  - dagw 11y ago
    Isn't position and velocity (and acceleration?) enough for TCAS? Why do you need full identity and flightplan for the aircrafts?
    - jMyles 11y ago
      I think the problem is that some of us aren't up to speed on the particulars. Is that what's being blocked (and proposed for encryption)? Just the "full identity and flightplan"?
      - ce4 11y ago
        Flight history of blocked aircraft is inaccessible as well. E.g. executives may not want to reveal insightful flights. E.g. American Airlines AA1 recent flight history: http://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/aa1/ http://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/aa1/
        deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
        11y ago
_djo_ 11y ago
You're correct, these are cases where organisations have asked FlightRadar24 to not display any data about their aircraft. In some cases you can still see an aircraft on the site with all identifying details saying "BLOCKED", but as I understand it you can request for your aircraft to not display at all. This doesn't prevent you from seeing those aircraft via your own ADS-B receivers like directly-connected SDR devices, nor does it apply to any of the other flight tracking applications or services like PlanePlotter, FlightAware or PlaneFinder to which an aircraft owner would need to apply separately. I can't say I disagree with FR24's position on this, seeing as though if they didn't offer it there would be a lot more pressure on the FAA and others to introduce an encrypted form of the ADS-B standard and because when ADS-B was introduced nobody foresaw consolidated services like FR24 which could provide not only an extraordinary level of crowdsourced data but also historical data. This is a problem for air forces, which are are required to use ADS-B in certain areas but for obvious reasons don't want other countries to be able to see exactly when, where and how their aircraft fly. It's also an issue for private companies, where the ability to track the movement of corporate jets might give competitors extremely good intel on what a company's plans are based on where its execs are flying to and when. This has only been compounded by the introduction of multilateration[0] which allows for aircraft using only Mode-S and without ADS-B onboard or activated to be tracked with the same level of positional data. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilateration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilateration
golergka 11y ago
> you need to clearly broadcast flight details in plain text And here I was, thinking that HN crowd is so pro-privacy.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
  Ah yes but gubiment is the evils oh but I can do anything I want.
  - golergka 11y ago
    Actually I think that this comes from unspoken assumptions that powerful and rich people, as well as powerful and rich corporations, are evil, while ordinary people and small companies are good. Which is complete and total bullshit, but can explain a lot of HN and Reddit's worldview.

gadders 11y ago

My key takeaway - Holy shit! The Crossfit people have a plane!!

sorenjan 11y ago
I noticed that too. Turns out it's a small single engine plane. http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/NNum_Results.aspx?NNumbertxt=123FU http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/NNum_Results.aspx?NN... http://www.crossfit.com/mt-archive2/008612.html http://www.crossfit.com/mt-archive2/008612.html
- tacticus 11y ago
  It's an awesome plane though. I've met a few people who have flown the cirrus planes.
  - strictnein 11y ago
    Yep. It's the one with the parachute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_SR22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_SR22
    - gadders 11y ago
      WOD: - Fly to 15,000 feet - Deploy Parachute - AMRAP
protomyth 11y ago
I was actually surprised more NASCAR teams aren't on that list.

pjc50 11y ago

Open flight information has in the past been used to track both the world's biggest illegal arms dealer Viktor Bout, and also the CIA rendition-to-torture flights.

troisx 11y ago
This is why they want the information blocked. If you look at the list of blocked names, it's the government and the wealthy.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Not really. I.e. they don't have to do something repugnant to want that information blocked. The military may not want to provide free intelligence about their forces to other nations. And "the wealthy" are pretty much at constant war with each other; tracking when a CEO leaves and where they go in order to gain advantage on the stock market is not unheard of.
- mootothemax 11y ago
  If you look at the list of blocked names, it's the government and the wealthy. I wouldn't say this is very insightful; how many large jets aren't operated by the government or the wealthy?

luso_brazilian 11y ago

The position of the site admin [1] is: >> Quote Originally Posted by Mike >> Will will not publish any information in the FAQ just to keep this as low below "radar" as possible. Every exclusion request is handled manually and we will no comment or publish this process in public. >> Quote Originally Posted by Mike >> FR24 should work with authorities, and not against them. I think we will close this thread as there is nothing more to discuss. This is not about democracy or censorship, but about keeping our hobby alive without authorities enforcing new laws in order to limit ADS-B usage. >> UPDATE. Maybe I was not clear when I posted this before. There is a discussion on FAA meetings about encrypting the ADS-B signal. By angering the authorities, we will only speed up this process. This is very similar to the policy of many sites, to enforce "self censorship" by accepting polite take-down requests in order to avoid harsher consequences. This is reasonable from the perspective of the site owner. Sometimes an acceptable loss is worthy to keep the most freedom intact. On the other hand there is a chilling effect on speech, the fear it cause in others potential site and service creators who could give up instead of creating for fear of this kind of public drama. [1] http://forum.flightradar24.com/threads/5217-Blocked-flights?p=32686&viewfull=1#post32686 http://forum.flightradar24.com/threads/5217-Blocked-flights?...

mdekkers 11y ago

lol @ N1757 - Google Jet - http://www.flightradar24.com/data/airplanes/N1757 http://www.flightradar24.com/data/airplanes/N1757 Privacy is only overrated for others...

United857 11y ago

FYI - anyone can request to the FAA that their registration be blocked from tracking on these websites, and compliance is mandatory for users of the FAA data feed. (FR24 does use FAA data in U.S. Airspace.) So likely FR24 is just basing their block list (at least for US registered aircraft) from this. http://www.nbaa.org/ops/security/asdi/ http://www.nbaa.org/ops/security/asdi/