How a joke domain purchase turned into geopolitical warfare

In 2017, a cheese fortune teller named Mark VK5QI introduced the author to weather balloon hunting. The Australian balloon chasing community was small at the time, with only Melbourne and Adelaide radiosondes being tracked on a website called Habhub. As more radiosondes were tracked on Habhub, the site's admins introduced a default filter to remove weather balloons.

A joke domain named sondehub.org was registered, which redirected users to Habhub with a radiosonde-specific filter. However, Habhub was not designed to handle the large number of unique balloons launched daily. In 2019, the Habhub servers struggled, leading the author to start proxying radiosonde ingestion data through SondeHub.

By 2020, the author was building backwards-compatible APIs for the Habhub frontend and testing the Habhub frontend on their backend. They also started receiving open access to their data via S3 and running their own predictor used by several entities today. With their own predictor running, Mark developed a system called reverse predictions, which determines a rough launch location prediction by running the predictor backwards with wind data.

This system helped detect poorly documented launch sites and assign balloons to launch sites. Unfortunately, this also unintentionally mapped out artillery sites, prompting the author to delete launch sites on genuine requests. As SondeHub gained popularity, it attracted attention from various government agencies and aviation industries.

In 2023, the "China spy balloon" incident occurred, with the US allegedly using an AIM-9X Sidewinder to shoot down an amateur radio balloon. SondeHub experienced high traffic and support requests from .mil and .gov addresses. The author later discovered a single IP address generating repeated requests to their API, leading to suspicions of a private company using their backend for prediction generation.

They contacted this company, but their suspicions proved unfounded. The author remains concerned about the ethical and legal implications of their data being used for balloon warfare and the ongoing war in Ukraine.