When you pur­chase through links in our ar­ti­cles, we may earn a small com­mis­sion. This does­n’t af­fect our ed­i­to­r­ial in­de­pen­dence.

News

Aug 13, 2026

Firefox re­cently an­nounced via Bluesky post: “Our sup­port for uBlock Origin is­n’t go­ing any­where.” The mo­ment comes in re­sponse to news that Microsoft Edge is soon go­ing to lock out uBlock Origin and other ad-block­ing ex­ten­sions that run on Manifest V2 ar­chi­tec­ture.

Once Microsoft Edge moves to Manifest V3, ad-block­ing ex­ten­sions won’t have ac­cess to the func­tions needed to prop­erly iden­tify and block ads that oc­cur while brows­ing web­sites and watch­ing videos.

Microsoft’s move is­n’t sur­pris­ing, as Edge is based on Chromium, the open-source browser en­gine that pow­ers most web browsers to­day, in­clud­ing Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, and Samsung Browser. Google ini­ti­ated the mi­gra­tion from Manifest V2 to V3 in Chrome/Chromium, and Microsoft Edge is now fol­low­ing Google’s lead.

But Firefox is one of the few web browsers re­main­ing that is­n’t based on Chromium, and it’s now the only ma­jor browser to still sup­port uBlock Origin. Neither Safari nor DuckDuckGo—the two other ma­jor non-Chromium browsers out there—sup­port uBlock Origin.

For die-hard uBlock Origin fans, Firefox ap­pears to be the only browser left with­out com­pro­mises. With any other browser, you’ll need to set­tle for uBlock Origin Lite (with fewer fea­tures and less ad-block­ing suc­cess) or what­ever built-in ad-block­ing fea­ture comes with the browser.

This ar­ti­cle orig­i­nally ap­peared on our sis­ter pub­li­ca­tion PC för Alla and was trans­lated and lo­cal­ized from Swedish.

HID++BoltUnifyingBluetoothUSB

Your Logitech mouse,fi­nally lo­cal.

A lo­cal-first al­ter­na­tive to Logitech Options+, writ­ten in Rust.Remap but­tons, drive DPI and SmartShift over HID++.No ac­count, no teleme­try.

$brew in­stall –cask open­logi

.dmg.deb / .rpm / .pkg.tar.zst.msiMIT / Apache-2.0Not af­fil­i­ated with Logitech

Click a but­ton, bind an ac­tion.

The cen­ter of the app, work­ing right here: a mouse di­a­gram with click­able hotspots and a per-but­ton ac­tion picker. Choose a hotspot, then bind any of the built-in ac­tions.

con­fig.tomlschema_ver­sion = 2

schema_ver­sion = 2selected_device = “2b042”[devices.2b042.bindings]MiddleClick = “MissionControl”DpiToggle = “CycleDpiPresets”Thumbwheel = “VolumeUp”Forward = “BrowserForward”Back = “BrowserBack”GestureButton = “AppExpose”

schema_ver­sion = 2

se­lect­ed_de­vice = “2b042”

[devices.2b042.bindings]

MiddleClick = “MissionControl”

DpiToggle = “CycleDpiPresets”

Thumbwheel = “VolumeUp”

Forward = “BrowserForward”

Back = “BrowserBack”

GestureButton = “AppExpose”

MX Master 4Writes straight to con­fig.toml, the file you own.

Everything Options+ does, with­out the ac­count.

OpenLogi dri­ves your mouse over HID++ di­rectly: but­tons, DPI and SmartShift, from a na­tive app that never phones home.

HID++ 2.044 ac­tions

Remap any but­ton

Bind any of 44 built-in ac­tions to each phys­i­cal but­ton, per de­vice. Custom short­cuts, app launch­ers and scripted ac­tions too.

DPI con­trol & pre­sets

Set pointer res­o­lu­tion and cy­cle your own pre­sets, writ­ten straight to the sen­sor over HID++.

HID++ 0x2201

SmartShift

Flip the wheel be­tween ratchet and free-spin, or let it switch au­to­mat­i­cally by scroll speed.

HID++ 0x2111

Per-app pro­file­sCom­ing soon

Per-application over­lays that switch the mo­ment your fo­cused app does. Ships in a later re­lease.

Bolt, Unifying, Lightspeed, Bluetooth or wired

Reach de­vices over a Logi Bolt, Unifying or Lightspeed re­ceiver, a di­rect Bluetooth pair­ing, or a USB ca­ble. No re­ceiver re­quired.

Live de­vice view

A carousel of paired de­vices with bat­tery per­cent­age and charge state for every­thing on­line.

HID++ 0x1004

Nothing be­tween your mouse and your ma­chine.

No ac­count, no teleme­try, no cloud. Bindings live in a plain TOML file you own, and every change goes straight to the de­vice over HID++.

NetworkDevice ren­ders only

Up and run­ning in a minute.

Signed builds for ma­cOS, Linux and Windows. Pick your plat­form be­low. Step-by-step setup lives in the docs.

.dmg.deb.rpm.msi

ma­cOS

$brew in­stall –cask open­logi

Homebrew is rec­om­mended, or grab the signed .dmg for Apple sil­i­con or Intel.

Linux

Packages for amd64 and ar­m64, with .rpm and Arch .pkg.tar.zst builds also avail­able.

Windows

New

The newest port: signed x86_64 and ar­m64 in­stallers, val­i­dated on Windows 11.

Quit Logi Options+ be­fore launch­ing: the two fight over HID++ ac­cess, and only one app can own a re­ceiver at a time. On Linux, the same ap­plies to Solaar.

It’s on the roadmap, at the far end: a cross-com­puter pointer and clip­board bridge is a very large fea­ture. The half that lives in the pro­to­col al­ready ships. OpenLogi dri­ves Easy-Switch host switch­ing over HID++ (0x1814/0x1815), and paired mice fol­low the key­board when it switches hosts. If the rest lands, it will be opt-in and lo­cal-net­work only.

Bolt pair­ing ships in the GUI, and Unifying and Lightspeed pair­ing is in progress. Until it lands, pair once with Logitech’s tool or Solaar; OpenLogi dri­ves the de­vice from then on.

Not yet, though an im­porter is in progress. In the mean­time, bind­ings are a short TOML file you can re­build in min­utes, and un­like Options+ they stay in one portable, hand-ed­itable file.

OpenLogi remaps the side but­tons (Back, Forward, mid­dle click) through a CGEventTap, and ma­cOS puts event taps be­hind the Accessibility per­mis­sion. The HID++ paths (gesture but­ton, thumb wheel, DPI, SmartShift) don’t need it.

Only when you ask. The in-app up­date check is opt-in and off by de­fault; new builds come from Homebrew (brew up­grade –cask open­logi) or the signed in­stallers on the re­leases page.

Copy the TOML file. Devices are keyed by phys­i­cal iden­tity (receiver se­r­ial and slot, or the de­vice’s own se­r­ial), so the same mouse keeps its bind­ings wher­ever the file goes. Built-in sync may come one day, but it’s hard to square with the no-ac­count prin­ci­ple.

Also here’s a cool un­re­lated photo of a chip­munk

Look at this lit­tle guy. They don’t know what an AI model is and they’re so much bet­ter off

It’s noth­ing short of an in­dict­ment of our so­ci­ety at large that Aaron Swartz, one of the co-cre­ators of the RSS pro­to­col (among many other things) was ef­fec­tively as­sas­i­nated by our le­gal sys­tem for “illegally” down­load­ing about 70 gi­ga­bytes of aca­d­e­mic ar­ti­cles from JSTOR - charged so ex­ces­sively to be made an ex­am­ple of (we’re talk­ing 35 years in prison, $1million USD fine, and as­set for­fei­ture) to the point where he felt the need to take his own life rather than deal with the court cir­cus and im­pend­ing fi­nan­cial ruin - while Facebook (oh I’m sorry Meta) has tor­rented 80 TERABYTES of books to train their AI mod­els with vir­tu­ally no con­se­quences other than a court case they will most likely get some sort of fi­nan­cial slap on the wrist for while their AI mod­els con­tinue to print them money.

Swartz’ use case was the dis­sem­i­na­tion and archival of knowl­edge; Meta’s use case is pow­er­ing up their pro­pri­etary pla­gia­rism code that cooks the en­vi­ron­ment while giv­ing CEO’s psy­chosis and mak­ing one of the world’s rich­est peo­ple even richer.

I never met Aaron but I get mad on his be­half so of­ten and I don’t know what to do with it other than get more rad­i­cal­ized.

Maybe that’s for the best.

Anyway, here’s your end-of-post cat photo. Her name is Lilith and she’s won­der­ing why we don’t do some­thing about all these tech bil­lionares.

It’s not tech­ni­cally a tax. Taxes pro­duce valu­able pub­lic ben­e­fits, like med­ical re­search and parks. This is sim­ply le­gal theft.

Amazon makes nearly a bil­lion dol­lars in profit from search ads. Every week. Each week, they sell mer­chants and pub­lish­ers enough search-dis­tort­ing ads to cap­ture a bil­lion dol­lars in rev­enue. Amazon makes enough in search ad rev­enue to give every sin­gle one of their em­ploy­ees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over.

My pub­lisher is ter­rific, and they’re work­ing hard to in­tro­duce peo­ple to my new book. Last week, they be­gan buy­ing search ads on Amazon.

At first glance, this is com­pelling. Someone who is­n’t sure what they’re look­ing for, who is look­ing for a book or a kitchen ap­pli­ance, might find one if the right ad showed up at the right time.

But of course, that’s not what yields, or what most of the ads you see on Amazon do.

If you’re search­ing for an air fryer, Amazon al­ready knows quite a bit. They know the best-re­viewed, least-re­turned, best-priced model. The only pur­pose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that is­n’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse. [Cory wrote about this three years ago, and the scale has al­ready dou­bled.]

When there are plenty of ads, the maker of the best air fryer now has to bid on ads as well, if only to pro­tect the sales they were en­ti­tled to in the first place. Businesses con­tinue to buy the ads—not be­cause they’re dumb, but be­cause the sys­tem has cre­ated a sit­u­a­tion with few op­tions. Folklore im­plies that buy­ing the ads some­how shifts how search re­sponds in the long run, even af­ter the ads stop run­ning, but there’s lit­tle data to con­firm this.

Traditional ads in­crease de­mand. We see some­thing that’s clearly an ad, it might spark de­sire, and sales go up. But zero-sum search ads aren’t like that–the to­tal sales in the cat­e­gory stay the same, and mer­chants are merely com­pet­ing for a share of a sta­tic pie. This study ar­gues that an ecom­merce site with search ads ac­tu­ally sells fewer items than the same site with­out ads.

The high­est-yield­ing ad my pub­lisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“. It costs about a dol­lar per click. My pub­lisher is pay­ing Amazon a dol­lar to show you an ad for the book you went to buy in the first place.

Who ends up pay­ing the more than $50 bil­lion a year spent on these ads? It’s not the sell­ers. Sellers can’t make heart­felt do­na­tions for long. It’s you. By mak­ing the mar­ket­ing of prod­ucts sig­nif­i­cantly less ef­fi­cient, Amazon’s theft makes prod­ucts more ex­pen­sive or sucks the en­ergy out of the de­vel­op­ment of new prod­ucts.

It leads to two per­verse side ef­fects. First, pro­duc­ers re­al­ize that if brand rep­u­ta­tion mat­ters less than a bud­get for clicks, they will shift to shoddy and cheap ver­sions of their prod­ucts so they have a big­ger bud­get for clicks. And sec­ond, Amazon (and Google be­fore it) have an in­cen­tive to make their or­ganic search re­sults worse–giv­ing pro­duc­ers more in­cen­tive to buy more ads.

For decades, Amazon cre­ated value for con­sumers by low­er­ing the price of just about every­thing. And they opened the doors to mer­chants who did­n’t have suf­fi­cient dis­tri­b­u­tion. They claimed to be cus­tomer-cen­tric, and they were.

I don’t think they can claim this any longer. The ad sys­tem they built is­n’t il­le­gal, but it’s pretty clear who it’s for.

Amazon is steal­ing from the cus­tomers they said they were here to serve.

This repos­i­tory con­tains FP8-quantized model weights and con­fig­u­ra­tion files for the post-trained model in the Hugging Face Transformers for­mat. These ar­ti­facts are com­pat­i­ble with Hugging Face Transformers, vLLM, SGLang, TokenSpeed, etc. The quan­ti­za­tion method is fine-grained fp8 quan­ti­za­tion with block size of 128, and its per­for­mance met­rics are nearly iden­ti­cal to those of the orig­i­nal model.

This repos­i­tory con­tains FP8-quantized model weights and con­fig­u­ra­tion files for the post-trained model in the Hugging Face Transformers for­mat.

These ar­ti­facts are com­pat­i­ble with Hugging Face Transformers, vLLM, SGLang, TokenSpeed, etc.

The quan­ti­za­tion method is fine-grained fp8 quan­ti­za­tion with block size of 128, and its per­for­mance met­rics are nearly iden­ti­cal to those of the orig­i­nal model.

For users seek­ing man­aged, scal­able in­fer­ence with­out in­fra­struc­ture main­te­nance, the of­fi­cial Qwen API ser­vice is pro­vided by Qwen Cloud. In par­tic­u­lar, Qwen3.8 – 27B will be avail­able as a hosted ver­sion with more pro­duc­tion fea­tures, e.g., 1M con­text length by de­fault, of­fi­cial built-in tools. For more in­for­ma­tion, please re­fer to the Qwen3.8 – 27B Overview. The ser­vice is com­ing soon. Stay tuned for up­dates.

For users seek­ing man­aged, scal­able in­fer­ence with­out in­fra­struc­ture main­te­nance, the of­fi­cial Qwen API ser­vice is pro­vided by Qwen Cloud.

In par­tic­u­lar, Qwen3.8 – 27B will be avail­able as a hosted ver­sion with more pro­duc­tion fea­tures, e.g., 1M con­text length by de­fault, of­fi­cial built-in tools. For more in­for­ma­tion, please re­fer to the Qwen3.8 – 27B Overview. The ser­vice is com­ing soon. Stay tuned for up­dates.

Following the wide­spread com­mu­nity adop­tion of the Qwen3.5 and Qwen3.6 se­ries, we are pleased to in­tro­duce Qwen3.8, the most ca­pa­ble gen­er­a­tion in the Qwen open-model fam­ily to date.

Built on the ar­chi­tec­tural foun­da­tion of Qwen3.5, Qwen3.8 de­liv­ers sub­stan­tial gains across cod­ing, pro­fes­sional work, re­search, and long-hori­zon agen­tic tasks. Qwen3.8 – 27B brings these ad­vances to a com­pact, de­ploy­ment-friendly dense model: a na­tive vi­sion-lan­guage model that un­der­stands im­ages and videos, with flex­i­ble think­ing con­trol, de­signed to carry com­plex, multi-step tasks through to com­ple­tion with greater re­li­a­bil­ity.

Qwen3.8 Highlights

Qwen3.8 – 27B fea­tures the fol­low­ing en­hance­ments:

Core Capabilities: Comprehensive im­prove­ments across cod­ing, pro­fes­sional work, re­search, and long-hori­zon agen­tic tasks.

Agent Execution: Stronger au­tonomous plan­ning and bet­ter han­dling of en­vi­ron­ment feed­back, lead­ing to more re­li­able end-to-end task com­ple­tion.

Downstream Compatibility: Broader sup­port for pop­u­lar har­nesses and de­vel­op­ment tools, mak­ing it eas­ier to in­te­grate into your ex­ist­ing stack.

Flexible Thinking Control: Thinking mode is on by de­fault and can be dis­abled per re­quest; rea­son­ing depth can be tuned with rea­son­ing_­ef­fort, and rea­son­ing con­text from his­tor­i­cal mes­sages is re­tained via pre­serve_­think­ing.

Vision-Language Understanding: Native sup­port for im­age and video un­der­stand­ing, from STEM di­a­grams and doc­u­ments to hour-scale videos.

Model Overview

Type: Causal Language Model with Vision Encoder

Training Stage: Pre-training & Post-training

Language Model Number of Parameters: 27B Hidden Dimension: 5120 Token Embedding: 248,320 (Padded) Number of Layers: 64 Hidden Layout: 16 × (3 × (Gated DeltaNet → FFN) → 1 × (Gated Attention → FFN)) Gated DeltaNet: Number of Linear Attention Heads: 48 for V and 16 for QK Head Dimension: 128

Gated Attention: Number of Attention Heads: 24 for Q and 4 for KV Head Dimension: 256 Rotary Position Embedding Dimension: 64

Feed Forward Network: Intermediate Dimension: 17,408

LM Output: 248,320 (Padded) MTP (Multi-Token Prediction): trained with mul­ti­ple steps

Number of Parameters: 27B

Hidden Dimension: 5120

Token Embedding: 248,320 (Padded)

Number of Layers: 64

Hidden Layout: 16 × (3 × (Gated DeltaNet → FFN) → 1 × (Gated Attention → FFN))

Gated DeltaNet: Number of Linear Attention Heads: 48 for V and 16 for QK Head Dimension: 128

Number of Linear Attention Heads: 48 for V and 16 for QK

Head Dimension: 128

Gated Attention: Number of Attention Heads: 24 for Q and 4 for KV Head Dimension: 256 Rotary Position Embedding Dimension: 64

Number of Attention Heads: 24 for Q and 4 for KV

Head Dimension: 256

Rotary Position Embedding Dimension: 64

Feed Forward Network: Intermediate Dimension: 17,408

Intermediate Dimension: 17,408

LM Output: 248,320 (Padded)

MTP (Multi-Token Prediction): trained with mul­ti­ple steps

Context Length: 262,144 na­tively and ex­ten­si­ble up to 1,000,000 to­kens.

Benchmark Results

Text Performance

Agentic ter­mi­nal cod­ing

Terminal Bench 2.1 (Terminus)

Agentic cod­ing

SWE-bench Pro

Repo-level code gen­er­a­tion

NL2Repo-Bench

Agentic cod­ing

DeepSWE 1.1

Software en­gi­neer­ing

QwenSWEBench

Long-horizon of­fice work

CoWorkBench

Professional job tasks

JobBench

Frontier agen­tic tasks

Agents’ Last Exam

Pass@1

20.4

Score

42.9

Pass@1

10.6

Score

27.3

Pass@1

13.2

Score

33.6

Instruction fol­low­ing

IFBench

Scientific rea­son­ing

GPQA Diamond

Multidisciplinary rea­son­ing

HLE

Competitive cod­ing

LiveCodeBench v6

SWE-bench Pro: Except for Opus4.6 Max, which uses the of­fi­cially re­ported score, all mod­els are eval­u­ated with the Claude Code har­ness at temp=1.0, top_p=0.95, and a 256K con­text win­dow. Problematic tasks were cor­rected, and all base­line mod­els were re-eval­u­ated on the re­fined bench­mark.

NL2Repo-Bench: Evaluated with the Claude Code har­ness. To pre­vent re­ward hack­ing, we dis­able Bash com­mands that at­tempt to ac­cess the spe­cific repos­i­tory, such as pip down­load, pip in­stall, and git clone.

DeepSWE 1.1: Evaluated with the Claude Code har­ness at temp=1.0, top_p=0.95, and a 256K con­text win­dow.

QwenSWEBench: In-house cod­ing bench­mark for eval­u­at­ing mod­els’ soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties. Evaluated with the Claude Code har­ness. Reporting avg@3 with an 8-hour time­out, max_­to­kens=32,768, tem­per­a­ture=1.0, and a 256K con­text win­dow.

CoWorkBench: In-house cowork bench­mark for eval­u­at­ing long-hori­zon tasks across com­puter sci­ence, fi­nance, law, med­ical, and other pro­duc­tiv­ity do­mains.

HLE: Judged by GPT-4o.

The best re­sult in each row is shown in bold.

Empty cells (–) in­di­cate that re­sults are not yet avail­able or not ap­plic­a­ble.

VL Performance

Computer use

OSWorld-Verified

Browser use

WebArena-Verified

Mobile use

AndroidWorld

Application recre­ation

RecreationBench

Multimodal tool use

ClawEval-MM

Pass@3

57.4

Average

I’m SUPER jeal­ous that I did­n’t think of this first…

Alas! Hat tip to se­clilc for tweet­ing this gem out two days ago.

lil c@se­clilc

AI;DR

(AI; did­n’t read)

4:13 PM · Aug 15, 2026 · 346K Views

83 Replies · 2.09K Reposts · 16.6K Likes

I’ve been think­ing about it ever since. Why? Because there is grow­ing grum­bling among every­one about AI writ­ing. And it’s not just oth­ers; it’s me! I am get­ting to the point where I phys­i­cally flinch (sometimes drop­ping my shoul­ders and hunch­ing, or hav­ing a slight eye twitch) when some­one I re­spect sends me un­fil­tered and unedited AI out­put.

Look, I get it. It’s Q3 2026, and we should ex­pect that every­one is uti­liz­ing AI at SOME point in their process (sourcing ideas, cre­at­ing out­lines, re­fin­ing prose, etc.).

However, I have a new pol­icy.

If you’re not both­ered enough to re­view and edit it…

…then I’m not go­ing to bother read­ing it.

Yes, there are cer­tain sit­u­a­tions in which we should ex­pect 100% AI-generated copy. Customer sup­port would be a per­fect ex­am­ple. We’re not look­ing for ar­ti­sanal “did you make sure to re­set your phone” style di­a­logue.

But if you’re my col­league and we’re in a Slack dis­cus­sion and you post a wall of Claude out­put, then I’m afraid I re­ceived a dif­fer­ent mes­sage than you in­tended.

The same is true for peo­ple’s newslet­ters and so­cial con­tent. It’s your name on it; are you proud of the prose and weird AI-isms sprin­kled through­out it? If so, great. But I can ask Claude di­rectly if I wanted to.

TL;DR (too long; did­n’t read) was the so­lu­tion for so­cial me­dia.

AI;DR (AI; did­n’t read) is the so­lu­tion for AI slop.

May you em­brace this pol­icy your­self and seek out those will­ing to care enough to pri­or­i­tize a hu­man touch when they talk to you.

Update 1 2026 – 08-17: Daniel in the com­ments shared a won­der­ful web­site dont­pasteth­eai.com. Amazing. I es­pe­cially loved the Take me to the Angry Version ver­sion.

The in­tro header says it all (polite ver­sion be­low).

Update 2 2026 – 08-18: This made it to #1 on Hacker News on 2026 – 08-18 with >600 com­ments. It ap­par­ently struck a cord.

No posts

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Details: cache-bos-kbos510033-BOS 1787172821 3285793255

Varnish cache server

Prefer an­other lan­guage?

Don’t pastethe AI, please.

When some­one asks you some­thing, they want your an­swer. Not a wall of ChatGPT text. A short an­swer from a hu­man will al­ways be worth more than one from a ro­bot, even if the ro­bot is right.

What hap­pened

Someone asked you an hon­est ques­tion. You dumped it into a chat­bot, copied the an­swer, and sent it back. It felt fast. It felt help­ful. It was­n’t.

It might not look like it, but the per­son on the other side has the same tools you do. If they wanted the generic an­swer, they’d have it in a cou­ple of sec­onds. They asked you be­cause they wanted your take… Your con­text, your taste, your judg­ment.

The world is full of peo­ple who don’t want to read or think things through. Don’t be one of them.

Do this in­stead

You can use AI. Seriously! It’s a great tool for draft­ing. Just read what it gave to you , then write your own ver­sion, or pol­ish the text. Don’t be a mid­dle­man be­tween it and the an­swer.

Take the part that ac­tu­ally an­swers the ques­tion and ig­nore the rest. Three sen­tences is all it takes, and even if they’re copied, at least you read them.

If some part of the mod­el’s an­swer is gen­uinely use­ful, quote it and ex­plain why. “I asked Claude and this bit here makes sense:”.

If you have noth­ing to add, just say so. “No strong opin­ion here”. Silence is also an op­tion.

Want to send this to some­one?

If some­one just com­mit­ted a wall of LLM text in your DMs, Slack or code re­view, you can send them this link.

Click to copy.

Want a rougher ver­sion?

If you’d rather send a ver­sion with stronger feel­ings in­volved, we got you!

I wanna burn bridges 🔥

Might not have an amaz­ing re­cep­tion at work, but you do you

— with… Love? Everyone

spir­i­tual cousin of no­hello.net & don­task­toask.com.writ­ten by some ran­dom guy (believe it or not). Just like in the old days.

Recently I ran into a strange prob­lem with my Bluetooth head­phones. They sup­port mul­ti­point Bluetooth au­dio, so they can be con­nected to my PC and phone at the same time. Normally the PC takes pri­or­ity play­ing au­dio, with my phone be­ing able to play au­dio when noth­ing is play­ing on the PC.

Usually I lis­ten to mu­sic on my phone but with no­ti­fi­ca­tions or Youtube play­ing through the PC, this works re­li­ably un­til I open an AliExpress page in Firefox or Chrome (other browsers untested).

Shortly af­ter load­ing the AliExpress home­page, au­dio from my phone would stop play­ing. Closing the AliExpress tab fixes it im­me­di­ately. Muting the tab/​Fire­fox/​Win­dows does not help, and there is no vis­i­ble video, mu­sic, or other me­dia play­ing on the page.

This seemed sus­pi­cious enough to in­ves­ti­gate.

Looking for hid­den me­dia

My first thought was an au­to­play­ing prod­uct video or ad­ver­tise­ment, so I checked for the usual sus­pects:

<audio> and <video> el­e­ments

calls to HTMLMediaElement.play()

ac­tive Media Session meta­data

me­dia re­quests

em­bed­ded frames con­tain­ing me­dia

None of these showed any­thing use­ful. There were no au­dio or video el­e­ments, no me­dia play­back calls, and nav­i­ga­tor.me­di­aSes­sion.play­back­State re­mained none.

A clue was that the prob­lem did not be­gin im­me­di­ately. It ap­peared af­ter the page had been sit­ting idle for sev­eral sec­onds. I in­stru­mented the page be­fore load­ing it and watched the Web Audio API in­stead of only look­ing for con­ven­tional me­dia el­e­ments.

The ba­sic idea was to wrap the AudioContext con­struc­tor and record when­ever a page cre­ated an au­dio-pro­cess­ing con­text:

const OriginalAudioContext = win­dow.Au­dio­Con­text;

win­dow.Au­dio­Con­text = class ex­tends OriginalAudioContext {

con­struc­tor(…args) {

su­per(…args);

con­sole.log(“Au­dio­Con­text cre­ated”, {

state: this.state,

stack: new Error().stack

});

}

};

I also wrapped AudioNode.prototype.connect() so I could see whether any­thing was con­nected to the con­tex­t’s au­dio des­ti­na­tion.

That fi­nally found it, two hid­den au­dio con­texts!

During an idle cap­ture of the AliExpress home­page, the page cre­ated two AudioContext ob­jects. Both en­tered the run­ning state and both con­nected nodes to AudioContext.destination.

At the same time there were still:

zero <audio> or <video> el­e­ments

zero me­dia play() calls

no ac­tive Media Session

no au­di­ble sound

The con­struc­tor stack traces pointed to two scripts:

https://​as­sets.aliex­press-me­dia.com/​g/​AWSC/​uab/​1.140.0/​col­lina.jshttps://​as­sets.aliex­press-me­dia.com/​g/​AWSC/​fireyejs/​1.231.67/​fireyejs.js

https://​as­sets.aliex­press-me­dia.com/​g/​AWSC/​uab/​1.140.0/​col­lina.js

https://​as­sets.aliex­press-me­dia.com/​g/​AWSC/​fireyejs/​1.231.67/​fireyejs.js

The first con­text was cre­ated by col­lina.js, while the sec­ond came from fireyejs.js. Both sit un­der an AWSC di­rec­tory and ap­pear to be part of Alibaba’s browser se­cu­rity and anti-abuse tool­ing.

The scripts are ex­tremely ob­fus­cated, but enough names and op­er­a­tions sur­vive for AI to work out what the au­dio code is do­ing.

What the au­dio code does

Both scripts build a WebAudio graph re­sem­bling this:

Sawtooth os­cil­la­tor    -> AnalyserNode    -> ScriptProcessorNode    -> GainNode set to zero    -> AudioContext.destination

Sawtooth os­cil­la­tor

-> AnalyserNode

-> ScriptProcessorNode

-> GainNode set to zero

-> AudioContext.destination

The os­cil­la­tor gen­er­ates a known wave­form. The analyser mea­sures the re­sult af­ter it has passed through the browser’s au­dio im­ple­men­ta­tion, and the script reads fre­quency data from it.

The gain is set to zero, so the user should not hear any­thing. However, the graph is still con­nected to the sys­tem au­dio des­ti­na­tion. Connecting it to the des­ti­na­tion causes the browser to ac­tively process the graph, even though the fi­nal vol­ume is zero.

This is very dif­fer­ent from an au­to­play­ing video. There is no me­dia el­e­ment for the browser’s nor­mal tab mute con­trol to stop. As far as the page is con­cerned, it is per­form­ing live au­dio pro­cess­ing.

In my case, that ap­pears to have been enough for Firefox or Windows to keep the Bluetooth au­dio path ac­tive, pre­vent­ing my mul­ti­point head­phones from switch­ing cleanly back to the phone.

This looks like fin­ger­print­ing

The WebAudio test is not the only mea­sure­ment in these scripts. Inspection of the bun­dles found code that queries or mea­sures:

can­vas ren­der­ing and to­DataURL()

WebGL ren­derer in­for­ma­tion, ex­ten­sions, and shader pre­ci­sion

au­dio os­cil­la­tor and analyser out­put

screen and view­port di­men­sions

de­vice pixel ra­tio

hard­ware con­cur­rency and de­vice mem­ory

in­stalled browser plu­g­ins

sup­ported au­dio and video for­mats

WebRTC be­hav­iour

browser per­for­mance tim­ing

mouse, touch, fo­cus, and scroll events

de­vice mo­tion and ori­en­ta­tion

prop­er­ties com­monly as­so­ci­ated with browser au­toma­tion

There is also code for se­ri­al­is­ing and en­crypt­ing re­sults, mak­ing re­quests to Alibaba teleme­try ser­vices, and send­ing data with fetch() or send­Bea­con().

This is a fairly com­pre­hen­sive browser and de­vice fin­ger­print.

Audio fin­ger­print­ing works be­cause small dif­fer­ences in browser ver­sions, op­er­at­ing sys­tems, au­dio li­braries, and hard­ware can pro­duce slightly dif­fer­ent re­sults from the same gen­er­ated sig­nal. It is not nec­es­sar­ily enough to uniquely iden­tify a de­vice by it­self, but it be­comes much more use­ful when com­bined with can­vas, WebGL, hard­ware, tim­ing, and in­ter­ac­tion data.

Edit - tom­rit­tervg, a fire­fox de­vel­oper, has done a fur­ther dive into what is be­ing fin­ger­printed with the WebAudio: https://​rit­ter.vg/​blog-we­bau­dio_al­ibaba.html

Edit - tom­rit­tervg, a fire­fox de­vel­oper, has done a fur­ther dive into what is be­ing fin­ger­printed with the WebAudio: https://​rit­ter.vg/​blog-we­bau­dio_al­ibaba.html

I can­not see what AliExpress does with the re­sult­ing data af­ter it reaches their servers. It may be used as a per­sis­tent de­vice iden­ti­fier, but it could also be one in­put into a fraud or bot-de­tec­tion score.

Why AliExpress would want this

AliExpress has plenty of rea­sons to dis­tin­guish nor­mal shop­pers from au­to­mated or sus­pi­cious clients as well as track­ing users brows­ing habits. The site has to deal with ac­count takeovers, fake ac­counts, scrap­ing, au­to­mated pur­chas­ing, pay­ment fraud, re­view ma­nip­u­la­tion, and abuse of coupons or new-cus­tomer pro­mo­tions. They also, like most large busi­nesses, make use of large datasets of user be­hav­iour to bet­ter mar­ket prod­ucts and ser­vices.

Cookies are not es­pe­cially re­li­able for this pur­pose be­cause they can be cleared, copied, or re­placed. A fin­ger­print made from many in­de­pen­dent browser mea­sure­ments is harder to ma­nip­u­late con­sis­tently.

Interaction data can also help de­ter­mine whether a browser is con­trolled by a per­son or au­toma­tion. From AliExpress’s per­spec­tive, this could re­duce fraud and al­low trusted cus­tomers through with­out show­ing a CAPTCHA every few pages. Not that Aliexpress shies away from their AI gen­er­ated CAPTCHAs.

Personally I do not want a shop­ping home­page silently ex­er­cis­ing my graph­ics, au­dio, WebRTC, hard­ware, and mo­tion APIs, etc, to track my be­hav­iours, es­pe­cially if it has such an an­noy­ing ef­fect as block­ing my mu­sic. Per­haps if AliExpress was­n’t block­ing my mu­sic I never would’ve looked into what the site was do­ing.

Blocking it with uBlock Origin

I tested block­ing the two iden­ti­fied script fam­i­lies. With both re­quests blocked, the AliExpress home­page con­tin­ued to ren­der and no AudioContext ob­jects or des­ti­na­tion con­nec­tions ap­peared dur­ing the con­trol cap­ture.

In Firefox, I use the of­fi­cial uBlock Origin ex­ten­sion by Raymond Hill. To block the scripts open the uBlock dash­board, se­lect My fil­ters, and add:

! AliExpress AWSC fin­ger­print­ing scripts||as­sets.aliex­press-me­dia.com/​g/​AWSC/​uab/*/​col­lina.js$script,do­main=aliex­press.com||as­sets.aliex­press-me­dia.com/​g/​AWSC/​fireyejs/*/​fireyejs.js$script,do­main=aliex­press.com

! AliExpress AWSC fin­ger­print­ing scripts

||as­sets.aliex­press-me­dia.com/​g/​AWSC/​uab/*/​col­lina.js$script,do­main=aliex­press.com

||as­sets.aliex­press-me­dia.com/​g/​AWSC/​fireyejs/*/​fireyejs.js$script,do­main=aliex­press.com

Click Apply changes, close any ex­ist­ing AliExpress tabs, and open the site again. Existing tabs need to be closed be­cause block­ing a script does not shut down an au­dio con­text that it has al­ready cre­ated.

These rules are de­lib­er­ately nar­row. They block only the two ob­served script fam­i­lies and only when re­quested by AliExpress. I would not be sur­prised if this stops work­ing in the fu­ture, I’ll cross that bridge when it comes to it.

Because these scripts ap­pear to be con­nected with anti-fraud sys­tems, block­ing them may cause ex­tra CAPTCHAs or prob­lems dur­ing lo­gin or check­out. So far the home­page and or­di­nary prod­uct brows­ing still work, but I would tem­porar­ily dis­able the rules if AliExpress re­fuses a le­git­i­mate lo­gin or pay­ment.

Why I am block­ing it

The anti-fraud use case is un­der­stand­able, but this im­ple­men­ta­tion has real world prob­lems.

It runs on the gen­eral shop­ping home­page be­fore I per­form a sen­si­tive ac­tion. It col­lects a broad set of de­vice and be­hav­ioural mea­sure­ments, the im­ple­men­ta­tion is de­lib­er­ately dif­fi­cult to in­spect, and there is no vis­i­ble in­di­ca­tion that the page has started a live au­dio-pro­cess­ing graph.

It also pro­duced a very real hard­ware side ef­fect. A silent fin­ger­print­ing test was able to in­ter­fere with Bluetooth mul­ti­point switch­ing, while the browser’s mute con­trol did noth­ing!

If a hid­den an­a­lyt­ics or se­cu­rity fea­ture can take own­er­ship of an au­dio path strongly enough to change how ex­ter­nal hard­ware be­haves, block­ing it seems like a rea­son­able trade-off.

I also can­not prove how long AliExpress stores the fin­ger­print or whether it is used across other Alibaba prop­er­ties. The client code proves that ex­ten­sive fin­ger­print-like mea­sure­ments are col­lected and trans­mit­ted, but server-side re­ten­tion and iden­tity link­age are not vis­i­ble from the browser. Can you re­ally trust any­one on the in­ter­net to have your best in­ter­ests at heart?

TL;DR

The AliExpress home­page silently cre­ates two run­ning WebAudio graphs from heav­ily ob­fus­cated Alibaba se­cu­rity scripts. The graphs gen­er­ate and analyse a wave­form as part of a much larger browser fin­ger­print, then con­nect through a zero-gain node to the sys­tem au­dio des­ti­na­tion pre­vent­ing the user from hear­ing any­thing.

On my setup, this ap­pears to keep the PC’s Bluetooth au­dio path ac­tive and pre­vents mul­ti­point head­phones from switch­ing back to a phone. Muting the tab does not fix it be­cause there is no con­ven­tional me­dia el­e­ment to mute.

Blocking col­lina.js and fireyejs.js with the two uBlock Origin rules above pre­vented the hid­den au­dio con­texts from be­ing cre­ated and means I can hap­pily lis­ten to my mu­sic with­out be­ing in­ter­rupted while brows­ing AliExpress.

Edit - There have been some great dis­cus­sions on Hacker News that are worth check­ing out: https://​news.ycombi­na­tor.com/​item?id=49372583

Edit - There have been some great dis­cus­sions on Hacker News that are worth check­ing out: https://​news.ycombi­na­tor.com/​item?id=49372583

Strap in, this story in­volves a cheese for­tune teller, the de­part­ment of war, and nearly every other gov­ern­ment de­part­ment in be­tween.

Strap in, this story in­volves a cheese for­tune teller, the de­part­ment of war, and nearly every other gov­ern­ment de­part­ment in be­tween.

In 2017 (I think?) I was in­tro­duced to weather bal­loon hunt­ing by Mark VK5QI. At the time the Australian bal­loon chas­ing com­mu­nity was small. Only Melbourne and Adelaide ra­dioson­des (the trans­mit­ter on weather bal­loons) were be­ing tracked on a web­site called Habhub - high al­ti­tude bal­loon­ing hub. This site was de­signed for am­a­teur bal­loons and not me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal weather bal­loons.

Over time more and more ra­dioson­des were tracked on Habhub and even­tu­ally Habhub ad­mins in­tro­duced a de­fault fil­ter that re­moved weather bal­loons by de­fault. A query pa­ra­me­ter could be added to the URL to re­move the fil­ter and on 12th of May 2018 son­de­hub.org reg­is­tered with a sin­gle pur­pose - a URL redi­rect to Habhub with a ra­diosonde spe­cific fil­ter. To be clear - this was more of a joke than a de­ci­sion to run a ra­diosonde track­ing ser­vice. You’d go to son­de­hub.org and it would redi­rect you to hab­hub.org. That was it.

However Habhub was never de­signed for so many unique bal­loons each day. By July we de­cided to start prox­y­ing ra­diosonde in­ges­tion data through SondeHub. This al­lowed us to cap­ture more data as well (no longer rate lim­it­ing our selves). This went to a seper­ate OpenSearch clus­ter, how­ever at this stage we did­n’t use or ex­pose this data. I was us­ing this more as a toy - to play around with dif­fer­ent Amazon Web Services (AWS) ser­vices and an­a­lyt­ics plat­forms.

By 2019 the Habhub servers were re­ally strug­gling - aprs.fi as well. We re­alised that we needed to run our own ser­vice and our ini­tial plan was that we would build new APIs, and even­tu­ally new fron­tend. We then started get­ting in­for­ma­tion re­quests from gov­ern­ment agen­cies re­gard­ing ra­diosonde data. For ex­am­ple we re­ceived a re­quest re­gard­ing an in­sur­ance claim about a ra­dioson­des hit­ting a horse, caus­ing it to bolt through a fence. One of the rea­sons for this is be­cause un­like of­fi­cial soft­ware at the time, our sys­tem tracked the ra­dioson­des all the way to the ground.

Also in 2019 we de­tected a drop in ra­diosonde launches. This lined up with the GPS rollover date - we thought our soft­ware was bro­ken how­ever it turned out to be is­sues with Vaisala’s equip­ment which pre­vented launches from oc­cur­ing. Funnily enough our soft­ware han­dled the rollover ok.

In 2020/2021 we ended up do­ing was build­ing back­wards com­pat­i­ble APIs for the Habhub fron­tend and started test­ing the Habhub fron­tend pointed at our back­end. It mostly worked. We started re­ceiv­ing all the data rather than just par­tial data and pro­vid­ing open ac­cess to our data via S3. We even started run­ning our own pre­dic­tor - which is used by my en­ti­ties to­day.

With our own pre­dic­tor run­ning Mark de­vel­oped a sys­tem we call re­verse pre­dic­tions. This is where we take data from an al­ready launched ra­diosonde and use the wind model to run the pre­dic­tor back­wards which de­ter­mines a rough the launch lo­ca­tion pre­dic­tion. It works ex­tremely well. We could de­tect a bunch of ra­diosonde launch sites that were poorly oth­er­wise doc­u­mented along with start as­sign­ing bal­loons to launch sites.

Our first taste of deal­ing with the mil­i­tary

Then in 2021 we re­ceived an email

sen­si­tive/​mil­i­tary/… in­stal­la­tion. As such, we re­ally pre­fer that it is not ex­plic­itly marked on any map.

sen­si­tive/​mil­i­tary/… in­stal­la­tion. As such, we re­ally pre­fer that it is not ex­plic­itly marked on any map.

The thing is though that wind data is­n’t just used for pre­dict­ing the weather. It’s also used to cal­cu­late ar­tillery rang­ing. What we had started do­ing is ac­ci­den­tally map­ping out ar­tillery sites. We de­cided to keep re­verse pre­dic­tions but we delete launch sites on gen­uine re­quests.

The re­verse pre­dic­tion sys­tem has also de­tected many num­ber of mil­i­tary ves­sels in the ocean.

Lots more de­vel­op­ment hap­pened on SondeHub with fea­tures like web­sock­ets and MQTT for live feeds. We dis­con­nected Habhub back­end from our proxy and with grant fund­ing from ARDC we were able to setup a pro­to­type am­a­teur high al­ti­tude bal­loon ver­sion of SondeHub.

Eventually Habhub was shut­down due to a lack of main­te­nance and we rushed to­gether to mi­grate what we could to SondeHub.

$439,000 mis­sile vs party bal­loon

All was go­ing fine un­til the 2023 “China spy bal­loon” in­ci­dent. SondeHub had a lot more traf­fic - but our ar­chi­tec­ture made it fairly man­age­able.

Then Feb 11th 2023 the US al­legedly used AIM-9X Sidewinder to shot down an am­a­teur ra­dio bal­loon. That morn­ing I woke to high us­age alarms in my in­box. SondeHub had been linked to on the Washington Post. Our site man­aged to han­dled the ex­tra traf­fic rea­son­ably well.

Since then we’ve many sup­port re­quests from .mil and .gov ad­dresses. We’ve also had re­quests from avi­a­tion in­dus­try / air con­trol tow­ers.

In Dec 2024 - alarms in my in­box again. This time get­ting alarms for pre­dic­tions. Someone de­cided to smash our api. This seem­ingly starts hap­pen­ing every week.

Full scale in­va­sion

We turn on log­ging. The re­quests com­ing from a sin­gle IP. We had some sus­pi­cions that a pri­vate com­pany was us­ing our back­end to gen­er­ate pre­dic­tions. We poke their web­site to see - sure enough they are - an an­gry email to them. However they weren’t the prob­lem.

We ask some peo­ple.

Note that the pre­ci­sion of these points has been in­ten­tion­ally been re­duced. This data is also sig­nif­i­cantly old and does not show the en­tire dataset. This blog post has been de­layed un­til bal­loon war­fare was more com­mon knowl­edge.

Note that the pre­ci­sion of these points has been in­ten­tion­ally been re­duced. This data is also sig­nif­i­cantly old and does not show the en­tire dataset. This blog post has been de­layed un­til bal­loon war­fare was more com­mon knowl­edge.

Fuck. And Fuck Russia.

(for time trav­ellers and peo­ple in the fu­ture - in 2022 started a “special mil­i­tary op­er­a­tion” - aka a full scale in­va­sion into Ukraine. The war con­tin­ues at time of writ­ing. Fuck Russia)

Suddenly my mind was filled with ethic and le­gal ques­tions. We also sus­pected they aren’t us­ing the API cor­rectly. However we did­n’t know how to get in con­tact.

We did even­tu­ally got some mes­sages out via a con­tact

“We work with mHAB’s as you know, but some other groups likely fly fixed-wing and use Sondehub to help them “surf” the sky to tar­get ar­eas.

“We work with mHAB’s as you know, but some other groups likely fly fixed-wing and use Sondehub to help them “surf” the sky to tar­get ar­eas.

“Sent this in Ukrainian to a few milchats and will see what turns up: “I wish every­one good health. If any­one knows of a deep strike team that uses a python script with some open source wind fore­cast­ing en­gine, please con­tact me di­rectly. They are caus­ing nu­mer­ous prob­lems with queries, which can lead to them be­ing blocked and they need to take ac­tion to be able to con­tinue us­ing the pre­dic­tion sys­tem.””

“Sent this in Ukrainian to a few milchats and will see what turns up: “I wish every­one good health. If any­one knows of a deep strike team that uses a python script with some open source wind fore­cast­ing en­gine, please con­tact me di­rectly. They are caus­ing nu­mer­ous prob­lems with queries, which can lead to them be­ing blocked and they need to take ac­tion to be able to con­tinue us­ing the pre­dic­tion sys­tem.””

I also quickly rushed to­gether a docker com­pose file so any­one could quickly run their own pre­dic­tor that was­n’t re­liant on us.

Meanwhile (and you might have no­ticed me ask­ing for AWS help on fedi) we con­tacted AWS as the source IP was from an AWS net­work. It was very im­por­tant how­ever to make sure the AWS sup­port did not shut­down ac­cess.

Our mes­sag­ing in­cluded:

It is in­cred­i­bly im­por­tant that the http re­quest data is not dis­trib­uted. It is also im­por­tant that the source AWS ac­count is not blocked, rate lim­ited or ter­mi­nated - loss of life could oc­cur.

It is in­cred­i­bly im­por­tant that the http re­quest data is not dis­trib­uted. It is also im­por­tant that the source AWS ac­count is not blocked, rate lim­ited or ter­mi­nated - loss of life could oc­cur.

Something that I thought I’d never have to write in sup­port emails. The mes­sag­ing was im­por­tant be­cause I did not want the ser­vice cut off, and I did not want the data to re­veal launch sites.

After a bit of wait­ing we re­ceived:

AWS reached out to me that a lambda func­tion of mine was flagged for po­ten­tially scrap­ing api.v2.son­de­hub.org and they told me to reach out to you to get this re­solved.

AWS reached out to me that a lambda func­tion of mine was flagged for po­ten­tially scrap­ing api.v2.son­de­hub.org and they told me to reach out to you to get this re­solved.

We emailed back and forth and pro­vided doc­u­men­ta­tion on how to run the pre­dic­tor lo­cally.

Office of the Secretary of War (Intelligence and Security)

In 2025 we re­ceived a re­quest for data from the “Office of the Secretary of War (Intelligence and Security)” (US). Generally if there’s mu­tual com­mu­nity ben­e­fit we’ll find, process and re­lease the data for free. However given this is was the Department of War and no ex­pected com­mu­nity ben­e­fit we de­cided they should pay for the data. I was hes­i­tant even work­ing with them, as I don’t re­ally want to help mil­i­tary, let alone the US - but since our data is pub­lic if we did­n’t do it some­one else prob­a­bly would. So my rea­son­ing shifted to, may as well ex­tract some funds to pay for SondeHub in­fra­struc­ture at the very least.

An in­voice was cre­ated and sent through - but never paid or fol­lowed up on. I have no idea why they were re­quest­ing the data or what it was about.

Other tid­bits along the way

It has­n’t just been the mil­i­tary that we get emails from. Occasionally cit­i­zens who find ra­dioson­des end up con­tact­ing us (often we don’t know how they even find us), along with a range of other or­gan­i­sa­tions.

National Transportation Safety Board (US)

In September 2025 the NTSB con­tacted us. My first re­ac­tion was to search for news sto­ries.

do you have in­for­ma­tion on any bal­loons in the Utah are be­tween 1200 and 1300 UTC on 10/16/2025

do you have in­for­ma­tion on any bal­loons in the Utah are be­tween 1200 and 1300 UTC on 10/16/2025

We pro­vided our data but also started hear­ing some ru­mours about a pos­si­ble plane / weather bal­loon col­li­sion that was re­ported via ACARS. While none of the bal­loons tracked by SondeHub lined up, we did for­ward some in­for­ma­tion that a Windborne bal­loon was in the area. Windborne later con­firmed this was the likely col­li­sion and have made sev­eral changes to their sys­tem to pre­vent fu­ture is­sues.

We have a num­ber for you to call when you’re ready to copy

Please con­tact us as soon as prac­ti­ca­ble with more in­for­ma­tion… Contact our Operations Manager at

Please con­tact us as soon as prac­ti­ca­ble with more in­for­ma­tion… Contact our Operations Manager at

This was a re­ally strange in­ter­ac­tion for us. A tower(?) op­er­a­tions su­per­vi­sor was re­quest­ing in­for­ma­tion about bal­loons in the area. The bal­loons in ques­tion were me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal weather bal­loons. Not launched by am­a­teurs. We had to ex­plain that they are nor­mally sched­uled, not con­trolled, and fall (probably, not a lawyer) within Part 101.D of FAA regs. Along with that we did­n’t have con­tacts or reg­is­tra­tion de­tails of these launches.

We have a lot of Aircraft in the sky that don’t want to get too close to one of these bal­loons! Is there any way to co­or­di­nate more di­rectly with the con­trol­ling en­tity, or to have them give us mis­sion de­tails and con­tact in­for­ma­tion ahead of time? It sounds like you guys have a big op­er­a­tion, I don’t know if this is a one off event or if you have sys­tems in place to com­mu­ni­cate these things

We have a lot of Aircraft in the sky that don’t want to get too close to one of these bal­loons! Is there any way to co­or­di­nate more di­rectly with the con­trol­ling en­tity, or to have them give us mis­sion de­tails and con­tact in­for­ma­tion ahead of time? It sounds like you guys have a big op­er­a­tion, I don’t know if this is a one off event or if you have sys­tems in place to com­mu­ni­cate these things

Explaining to the FAA that weather bal­loons ex­ist was­n’t on my bingo card.

Hit and run

On 2/5 around 8pm was there a bal­loon lo­cated in Anamosa Iowa?

On 2/5 around 8pm was there a bal­loon lo­cated in Anamosa Iowa?

Someone re­cov­ered a ra­diosonde from a prop­erty but ran into a build­ing along the way. They left with­out leav­ing a note. The prop­erty owner con­tacted us for help to lo­cate the per­son.

Jam, tasty tasty jam

There’s a great site that uses ADSB data to track GPS jam­ming called gp­s­jam.org. We’ve also been de­tect­ing not only a lot of GPS jam­ming but also GPS spoof­ing. I al­ways find the pat­terns in­ter­est­ing. I’ve been pre­sum­ing that the pat­tern is ei­ther for mak­ing the im­pacted tar­gets eas­ier to iden­tify or to crash the ve­hi­cle in a spe­cific way?

The cheese for­tune teller and other job ti­tles we’ve seen over the years

Probably the most in­ter­est­ing job ti­tle we’ve had the plea­sure of read­ing in an email is from Jennifer Billock, Freelance Writer and Author, Certified Tea Specialist, Cheese Fortune Teller. Jennifer wrote an ar­ti­cle for STNDRDS about weather bal­loons which is out­side our usual places of ex­po­sure.

During this time we’ve seen many job ti­tles and sub­jects, I’ve started col­lect­ing them.

[SEC=🌶️🌶️🌶️]

Naval Air Warfare Center — Aircraft Division Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Aircraft (MPRA) Program

Acquisition Program Manager Integrated Processes Branch HQ AFRL/XPOP

Upper Air Quality Assurance Meteorologist Observing Systems & Operations, Data & Digital Group

Senior Advisor for Safety and Quality

Meteorologist Weather Forecast Office

Manager Upper Air Network

General Manager Observing Systems and Operations and Chief Engineer

Meteorologist National Weather Service

Field Research Manager, Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes

Video Journalist, Visual Investigations - NY Times

Senior Meteorologist, National Transportation Safety Board

Operations Supervisor U.S. Department of Transportation/FAA

STNDRDS Freelance Writer and Author, Certified Tea Specialist, Cheese Fortune Teller

Meteorológiai fe­jlesztő (met.hu)

SUNY Oswego Lab Technician Atmospheric and Geological Science

SpaceBalloon Project

Any many more

The weird

Most or­gan­i­sa­tion and ven­dors are will­ing to work with us. This is be­cause chas­ing ra­dioson­des re­moves them from the en­vi­ron­ment and pro­motes cit­i­zen sci­ence. I asked “Meteolabor AG” for one of their ra­dioson­des so that we could con­firm com­pat­i­bil­ity. This is what I re­ceived back.

Official re­sponse from Meteolabor AG: For strate­gic rea­sons, we do not pro­vide any data or sam­ple de­vices. Our trans­mit­ters shut down af­ter a cer­tain pe­riod of time, at the lat­est when the bat­tery ca­pac­ity is ex­hausted. This is due, among other things, to strate­gic con­sid­er­a­tions. We are aware of the so-called waste prob­lem.

Personal com­ment: I would per­son­ally like to draw at­ten­tion to mil­i­tary ac­tiv­i­ties, par­tic­u­larly in the Middle East, which re­sult in sig­nif­i­cantly (exponentially) more waste and toxic sub­stances be­ing re­leased into the at­mos­phere and left ly­ing around in the en­vi­ron­ment — or en­ter­ing the food and wa­ter cy­cles In ad­di­tion to mil­i­tary op­er­a­tions, count­less “missions” are cur­rently be­ing flown over Europe with the aim of leav­ing “contrails” in the sky [rather “chemtrails”]. I know their pur­pose; I know what NetZero is sup­posed to achieve, and what de­car­boniza­tion and CO2 re­duc­tion are in­tended to ac­com­plish. I am well-in­formed about the cli­mate hoax. Start there! The peo­ple to talk to are politi­cians, NGOs, and very wealthy old white men.

Official re­sponse from Meteolabor AG: For strate­gic rea­sons, we do not pro­vide any data or sam­ple de­vices. Our trans­mit­ters shut down af­ter a cer­tain pe­riod of time, at the lat­est when the bat­tery ca­pac­ity is ex­hausted. This is due, among other things, to strate­gic con­sid­er­a­tions.

We are aware of the so-called waste prob­lem.

Personal com­ment: I would per­son­ally like to draw at­ten­tion to mil­i­tary ac­tiv­i­ties, par­tic­u­larly in the Middle East, which re­sult in sig­nif­i­cantly (exponentially) more waste and toxic sub­stances be­ing re­leased into the at­mos­phere and left ly­ing around in the en­vi­ron­ment — or en­ter­ing the food and wa­ter cy­cles

In ad­di­tion to mil­i­tary op­er­a­tions, count­less “missions” are cur­rently be­ing flown over Europe with the aim of leav­ing “contrails” in the sky [rather “chemtrails”]. I know their pur­pose; I know what NetZero is sup­posed to achieve, and what de­car­boniza­tion and CO2 re­duc­tion are in­tended to ac­com­plish. I am well-in­formed about the cli­mate hoax.

Start there! The peo­ple to talk to are politi­cians, NGOs, and very wealthy old white men.

Which is… cer­tainly some­thing.

Onwards