This was not spoofed at the ADS-B layer. It was just spoofed to adsb exchange. (While typically a feeder contributes to multiple sites, this one didn't.) eg:
Yea, this is more like vandalizing Wikipedia than spoofing or interfering with safety-critical systems. It's juvenile, but probably not crashing any planes. It'll get reverted, and then presumably the adsb exchange website will tighten up their security.
Juvenile times call for juvenile measures. In case you haven’t noticed, the US is being run by a bunch of arrested development high school bullies. Juvenile is one of the only languages they understand.
And is Vance or Trump watching Flightradar24 in their free time? And if they did, would they even get mad at this and not find it funny? And if they did get mad at it, would they do anything at all? If they did something, would it be anything desirable or just trying to retaliate at whoever drew this?
I had also posted this story earlier, then deleted it once I learned that. However, I did find this interesting doc about real ADS-B spoofing, which does not appear to be very easy:
As other commenters noted, this is almost certainly not RF spoofing, just sending bad data to an aggregator (ADS-B Exchange) over the internet.
This instance of spoofing is notable for being the first that I know of that wasn't primitive vector art or text, but a raster image!
In that area of Florida multiple receivers would have picked up actual ADS-B broadcasts. ADS-B aggregators do have various anti-spoofing measures, but they're not impossible to circumvent.
The only case of actual RF spoofing of aircraft transponder signals that I know of was actually done by the U.S. Secret Service, which interfered with passenger jet collision alert systems (TCAS) by apparently broadcasting bogus signals near Ronald Reagan National Airport (KDCA): https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/aviation-flights-whi...
Just because I don't often get a chance to talk about this, I'll mention that there was a malfunction/accident/bug that caused what you might call spoofed signals to go out around Long Island and New York. Really interesting case where it seems that an FAA system wasn't handling magnetic declination correctly, which led to it generating false TIS-B targets that were rotated 13 degrees from real aircraft positions, from the radar antenna point of view: https://x.com/lemonodor/status/1508505542423064578
(TIS-B is a system that broadcasts ADS-B-like signals for aircraft that are being tracked by radar but either don't have ADS-B Out or otherwise might not be picked up by other aircraft with ADS-B In, e.g. maybe they're at a low altitude.)
There have been a couple other incidents with the TIS-B system. E.g. this apparent test near Dallas in 2022 that generated dozens of false targets in an interesting pattern: https://x.com/lemonodor/status/1481712428932997122 There was a similar incident around LAX several months later.
whoa, i saw your initial tweet about this, but never saw your follow up that confirmed the magnetic declination association. the convergence back to the ground radar is brilliant. nice find.
(Of course if you were spoofing ADS-B RF signals you wouldn't necessarily need to be anywhere near the spoofed locations. Just like with GPS spoofing.)
Surely the receiver would run plausibility checks on the received messages and reject spoofed locations that are physically impossible to receive by said receiver?
But even if that was the case, is there any value for a receiver to be receiving those? Surely those messages would be picked up by a receiver closer to the transmitter anyway. I think the value in spoofing rejection is greater than the probability of a transmission reflecting from beyond the horizon and not being already being picked up by a local receiver.
I agree with this. Hopefully they're able to track down who did this. To upload to ADS-B Exchange you need an account. But it's not that difficult to get one. I'm not sure what kind of information they may be able to get on it. As you say the person who uploaded this may not be anywhere near there. The aggregators probably should have heuristics like if only one feeder in an area with a decent density of feeder coverage uploads an anomalous track, it should get flagged.
> Hopefully they're able to track down who did this.
Why? Was anybody harmed?
Hopefully they don't find out who did this. There was never any danger, and without this kind of joke, the world would be less fun.
(Obviously it should be harder to fool critical systems, so this served also as a warning, but if you want to attack such a system, a real bad guy would do this in more subtle ways.)
The FCC and the FAA are two federal agencies that really don't want to mess with, so I hope for their sake they didn't actually spoof it. (.... I wish there were an FBB as well)
Seems like it wasn't actually spoofed radio signals, but spoofed data collection uploaded to adsbexchange. Still seems unlikely to make the FAA happy, but not as bad. I assume air traffic controllers aren't relying on adsbexchange?
There are non-radar towers that don't have scopes. They may have a traffic display, or maybe not. They might choose to use a public ADS-B aggregator site because it gives them situational awareness, but they don't use it to provide radar services to aircraft. That's my understanding from listening to a lot podcast episodes with air traffic controllers, anyway. I think it's an unofficial, non-FAA approved kind of thing that can make their jobs easier.
> They might choose to use a public ADS-B aggregator site because it gives them situational awareness
I do not understand what the upside is, aside from saving a tiny amount of effort and cost -- they could get the same data with more reliability by just running their own ADS-B receiver, without having a dependency on a third-party.
Upside may be just that the equivalent first-party system doesn't exist or performs worse? ATC tower isn't a SCIF, they probably get their real-time news from Twitter like everyone else, too.
> they could get the same data with more reliability by just running their own ADS-B receiver, without having a dependency on a third-party.
Setting up an ADS-B receiver is indeed very cheap. Less than 100$. That's what many people, both aviation enthusiasts and ham radio operators, do for fun.
The problem is, do that on an airport? You'll now need permits to install the antenna (needs to be covered in the lightning protection system and even if it's just a passive receiver probably someone needs to sign off on an antenna being added). Fire code means you'll need approval and specialized people to run the cable (you need to drill holes in fire walls). Maybe there's some law or regulation requiring approval or causing a paper trail (e.g. in Germany, all electrical appliances have to be isolation-tested and visually inspected every two years by an electrician). Doing that the proper way is an awful lot of work. And by that point, someone will notice "hey, a Raspberry Pi? An RTL-SDR stick from eBay? No way that is certified to be used in a safety critical environment", killing off the project or requiring a certified device costing orders of magnitude more money.
In contrast, a privately owned laptop, tablet or phone with the Flightaware app? No one will give a shit about it unless someone relies on FA too much, causes an incident and that is found out.
Imagine your boss doesn’t like you looking at ADS-B sites because it’s not data from an FAA approved system but as long as you’re discreet and not actually breaking a reg they don’t yell at you. Then they come in and see that you installed an antenna, RTL-SDR, and raspberry pi in the tower.
I always thought that coverage of those receivers was so dense by now that you'd have multiple reports of each aircraft but apparently that's not the case.
It may not be a surprise to you but it is a surprise to me because there are many other characters that he could be a fan of , he's literally giving Putin top billing here, right next to a picture of what seems to be him and his granddaughter.
I really recommend you read Bob Woodward's four most recent books, starting with Fear[¹] . They give us a fascinating look into Trump's mind, and we get frank discussions from Trump and the people around him about how he not only idolizes strong men like Putin and Kim, but wishes he could be more like them if it weren't for the limits on his power and weak people around him (i.e. more feared/respected by his subordinates, able to command them with an iron fist, etc.).
[¹] The title of the book comes from Trump remarking to Woodward that "Real power is – I don’t even want to use the word – fear."
That word works two ways: it shows that Trump would like to be feared, but he's not, it also shows that he's probably very scared, especially of the people he's sucking up to.
If you get the DF17 frames and extract the airborne position messages Type Codes 9–18.
Then CPR decode them into latitude/longitude....plus plot enough spoofed positions so the point cloud forms a QR code like raster on the map, then scan the rendered pattern...you get a URL to the unredacted Epstein files.
Actually spoofing ADSB radio signals could very well land you in prison with a $100,000 fine. The FCC is very eager to find and fine you for these kinds of stunts.
Spamming flightaware is much less severe, but still... it's not cute to mess with life-safety critical infrastructure.
No real 747 flew this. It was a prank using impossible flight data via ADS-B spoofing. Ground-based “software-defined radios” (SDRs) broadcast fake transponder signals to trick ADS-B Exchange. This works because both the ADS-B & AIS systems use unencrypted, unauthenticated data.
It’s only “other” at the very last point. Go earlier in the track and it shows as “ADS-B”, but every historical real flight in this plane is MLAT (it doesn’t broadcast its precise position but it can be inferred from receivers)
ADS-B is packet data telemetry broadcast unencrypted and unauthenticated by aircraft on 1090MHz.
Anyone can receive it, and many do. FlightRadar and others have networks of people with receivers that forward all received packets to central servers.
The aircraft self-report location, heading, altitude, etc, so anyone can transmit packets making ghost planes.
I am somewhat surprised nobody has stashed an ADS-B spoofer near ATL or AMS that just broadcasts tracks of A380 tail numbers crossing the runways perpendicular at 500 ft AGL or something. They have primary radar, sure, but I imagine there would still be a temporary disruption until people figured out what was going on.
I think this is the first case I’ve seen of ADS-B spoofing in the wild.
EDIT: this was spoofed reports to the data aggregators via the internet, not broadcast on radio waves. I’ve still never seen or heard tell of RF ADS-B spoofing.
Probably is not causing traffic issues. With that said I'm sure a number of TLA's are looking into it already, so whoever did it has hopefully took a number of infosec steps not to get caught and questioned.
> I’ve still never seen or heard tell of RF ADS-B spoofing.
Probably because the required expertise, effort, risk, and reward ratios don't work out. You can cause a minor disturbance that isn't particularly visible and in exchange get investigated by the FBI. Seems about as wise as attempting to graffiti the front gate of a military base.
Most planes broadcast their position using ADS-B, and some websites collect these signals and visualize them so you can track flight paths. Somebody broadcast a fake flight path that draws a picture of JD Vance on these sites: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=adfdf9&lat=26.678&lon=-...
To expand on that, those websites mostly operate on random volunteers self hosting a (starting price) fairly cheap receiver and antenna with an open source stack that feeds the ADS-B data to the website operator in exchange for nothing or free "premium" benefits.
The spoofer could have just sent them fake location information drawing an image using latitude, longitude and altitude for color (in the default view flight paths have different colors based on the altitude of the plane at that point in time).
They could have built an antenna and actually broadcast this data, but that would be a lot more effort and most likely some form of crime.
ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) is a protocol for planes to publish their positions, so help with the whole "not crashing into each other" thing. The data is mostly for pilots and air traffic control, but it is publicly available, and there's a number of sites that track the data so that you can see what planes are overhead or whatever.
Someone spoofed Airforce One's transponder, had it declare itself as "VANCE 1", and then fly a pattern to display the meme. Or lied to one or more of the major sites, pretending to be listening in on the ADS-B signals. It's unclear. Regardless, it's a very funny hack.
It’s basically the modern radar system as in it supplies the data air traffic controllers see on their screens. Civilian ATC doesn’t really use actual radars any more.
That said, TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) does not operate on flight data reported by ADS-B.
I believe this was "spoofed" only in the sense that a particular provider/online platform accepted data via an API that was abused to draw this on that platform only. Searching around it seems it was not found if you looked on other platforms, so it might not even have been a crime. I believe they didn't emit any real "signals" just took advantage of an API that should probably be better secured.
At worst it'd be a violation of the site ToS - it's a crowdsourced community data based system, and not any sort of an official, important system. The account doesn't seem to have been banned, so maybe the admins are just rolling with the joke.
I think the API is secured? The entire premise is that a volunteer creates an account and uploads ADS-B telemetry. Detecting falsified data is a separate matter.
Agreed with other commenters that nothing was likely actually broadcast, but if it was it would definitely be highly illegal and you’d have feds knocking down your door pretty quickly. They don’t joke around with illegal transmissions like that.
"The Government’s interpretation of the statute would attach criminal penalties to a breathtaking amount of commonplace computer activity,” Barrett wrote. “If the ‘exceeds authorized access’ clause criminalizes every violation of a computer-use policy, then millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens are criminals."
adsbexchange is a user-generated content platform where you can submit decoded radio signals to a common database. Sending fake data to adsbexchange is as much a CFAA violation as posting hoaxes to Wikipedia or a social media platform.
ADSB sites aren't any sort of official thing. You can send whatever data you want to them. Just because it's there doesn't mean it ever went over the air as an ADSB broadcast.
Assuming the FAA has the authority to enforce ADSB requirements (an open question post-Chevron), I can’t find any regulation saying non-aircrafts cannot transmit ADSB. Only ones saying aircrafts in certain categories must.
There’s probably some non-interference requirement somewhere (FCC spectrum licensing perhaps), but I’m not seeing it immediately.
All this is in the hypothetical that RF was transmitted, which as others point out it probably wasn’t.
A transponder in a car is not an "aircraft station" (§ 87.5), therefore it is not covered by aircraft "license-by-rule" (§ 87.18(b)), so transmitting would be operating without a valid authorization (§ 1.903(a)). https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D...
This is easily-prosecutable willful interference or possibly aircraft sabotage: ADS-B operates in licensed bands and uses an already highly-contended modulation scheme and transmission protocol.
Since most of these ADS-B collection sites are patchworks of unofficial/best effort, that seems like a great attack vector for nation state-level spoofing to interrupt flight planning, capacity planning, other tertiary air transport operations, and make civilians nervous. It's analogous to "hobby" code running key infrastructure of the internet without serious processes and auditing, testing, and verification.
It would be far better and more reliable to have the FAA do it by providing authoritative single source of truth as (selectively) open data rather than depend upon the whims / greed / sloppiness of an over-privatized utility. ATCs need and/or have this data anyhow, so in the future, it should be provided.
I find it absolutely crazy how I spent around 20 minutes trying to find the rough estimates and predictions with everything to essentially summarize into the same statement which you wrote.
Although I would consider that even reddit might not be enough to cause a death wall if the infrastructure behind it is organized.
There could be a software mis configuration option, I find it the most plausible option personally.
Most are from US or from a HN user: population, well technically switzerland iirc (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33450094)
But I don't know, I feel like there are definitely times where people create two accounts on HN or more or lose access of previous or want better names (I am thinking of creating a new account on HN myself) so assume half to go through ~2.5 million users
Over the span of one decade+ year though, a lot of people completely leave the forum and so I would consider frequent users to be around ~ 1 million
Then the people who are actually active a lot of days or are weekly active or monthly active and tonight's the night (dexter reference) that they open it,I would assume ~500k users
I would consider these ~500k impressions to be an average estimate on a really really impactful HN post on front page & they all might come through say ~24 hours.
I am being more generous and assuming 500k HN impressions on 3-6 hours timeframe then technically the server just has to handle like ~46 users/sec or ~23 users/sec
But even on a really high estimate we assume ~500 users/sec
But I have seen some benchmarks of websites/frameworks/languages which are able to handle 5k-10k requests as a really low to decent estimate depending on the task
I do feel like its something that I can architect ~500 users/sec on some hetzner box most likely at max for ~30-40 usd/month or using their smallest plan with cloudflare tunnels for around I guess ~2.99 euros or 3 euros per month
I feel like its definitely possible to survive the "HN wall of death" but any of my websites haven't gone and hit this wall but if anyone of your projects or anyone can anecdotally tell me something it would be interesting & we can discuss it.
Also I have seen this one person who was able to survive this HN wall of death on a literal 780 mb alpine server using lighthttpd. Which if we are assuming racknerd or dedirock or something can get to around ~7$/yr or ~6.70-ish$/yr deal from black friday & you can get such deals on websites like lowendtalk for quite a low price.
Though these providers have comparatively low bandwidth if you actually want the cheapest somehow option and want to survive this HN wall of death. (these providfe around 1TB-2TB/month iirc)
Personally I feel like netcup (my preferred provider) / IONOS might be better options as they are still cheap while giving more lenient bandwidth or you can also find probably some really cheap high bandwidth black friday deals around the 7$/yr mark as well
I think I am getting off topic but I really like german hosting providers usually for the most part except the only thing I do hate a (little?) about them is that I have observed that they have a reputation of being exceptionally strict to the rules/some have the more ban first-ask-later approach which um might suck if your project is a little unconvential or quite frankly it can sometimes conflict with my morals as I always feel a little bit of hestitation around building around such system.
- https://globe.adsb.fi/?icao=adfdf9&lat=26.678&lon=-80.030&zo...
- https://adsb.lol/?icao=adfdf9&lat=26.678&lon=-80.030&zoom=14...
Relevant discussion on r/adsb: https://www.reddit.com/r/ADSB/comments/1qp3q9n/interesting/ where they note it's also absent on FR24, airplanes.live, and theairtraffic.com.
The adsb-x feeder map: https://map.adsbexchange.com/mlat-map/ They probably won't have a hard time identifying who contributed that data.
Juvenile times call for juvenile measures. In case you haven’t noticed, the US is being run by a bunch of arrested development high school bullies. Juvenile is one of the only languages they understand.
https://x.com/JoeBiden/status/1756888470599967000
Vance however is the real deal. May god/science help us all if Trump ever has his long overdue stroke.
https://www.icao.int/sites/default/files/APAC/Meetings/2025/...
This instance of spoofing is notable for being the first that I know of that wasn't primitive vector art or text, but a raster image!
In that area of Florida multiple receivers would have picked up actual ADS-B broadcasts. ADS-B aggregators do have various anti-spoofing measures, but they're not impossible to circumvent.
The only case of actual RF spoofing of aircraft transponder signals that I know of was actually done by the U.S. Secret Service, which interfered with passenger jet collision alert systems (TCAS) by apparently broadcasting bogus signals near Ronald Reagan National Airport (KDCA): https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/aviation-flights-whi...
(TIS-B is a system that broadcasts ADS-B-like signals for aircraft that are being tracked by radar but either don't have ADS-B Out or otherwise might not be picked up by other aircraft with ADS-B In, e.g. maybe they're at a low altitude.)
There have been a couple other incidents with the TIS-B system. E.g. this apparent test near Dallas in 2022 that generated dozens of false targets in an interesting pattern: https://x.com/lemonodor/status/1481712428932997122 There was a similar incident around LAX several months later.
But there’s so much wrong with the data: 50k ft at 80knots (ground speed!) in a 747.
Wait until you hear about Sporadic-E or Aurora. RF is a weird place full of natural phenomena making the impossible very possible.
Why? Was anybody harmed?
Hopefully they don't find out who did this. There was never any danger, and without this kind of joke, the world would be less fun.
(Obviously it should be harder to fool critical systems, so this served also as a warning, but if you want to attack such a system, a real bad guy would do this in more subtle ways.)
See https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/atc_html... for non-radar ATC procedures.
I do not understand what the upside is, aside from saving a tiny amount of effort and cost -- they could get the same data with more reliability by just running their own ADS-B receiver, without having a dependency on a third-party.
They could get uncensored data too - you dont want billionaires jets crashing into other planes because they didnt want to be tracked.
Setting up an ADS-B receiver is indeed very cheap. Less than 100$. That's what many people, both aviation enthusiasts and ham radio operators, do for fun.
The problem is, do that on an airport? You'll now need permits to install the antenna (needs to be covered in the lightning protection system and even if it's just a passive receiver probably someone needs to sign off on an antenna being added). Fire code means you'll need approval and specialized people to run the cable (you need to drill holes in fire walls). Maybe there's some law or regulation requiring approval or causing a paper trail (e.g. in Germany, all electrical appliances have to be isolation-tested and visually inspected every two years by an electrician). Doing that the proper way is an awful lot of work. And by that point, someone will notice "hey, a Raspberry Pi? An RTL-SDR stick from eBay? No way that is certified to be used in a safety critical environment", killing off the project or requiring a certified device costing orders of magnitude more money.
In contrast, a privately owned laptop, tablet or phone with the Flightaware app? No one will give a shit about it unless someone relies on FA too much, causes an incident and that is found out.
We now have to both identify obama judges, trump judges and trump bootlickers.
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=adfdf9&lat=26.678&lon=-...
There it is. Someone running a fake feeder uploaded fake data. No spoofed signals were actually sent over the radio.
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
I think it's part of his strategy of getting on Putin's good side.
What's next? Pol Pot? Stalin? Kim?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/us/politics/trump-north-s...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8OG3U66X9w
[¹] The title of the book comes from Trump remarking to Woodward that "Real power is – I don’t even want to use the word – fear."
https://maps.app.goo.gl/fjqtAa2qgcWsJvFfA
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=adfdf9&lat=26.680&lon=-...
Then CPR decode them into latitude/longitude....plus plot enough spoofed positions so the point cloud forms a QR code like raster on the map, then scan the rendered pattern...you get a URL to the unredacted Epstein files.
Everthing seems to be domestic terrorism in the US these days.
Spamming flightaware is much less severe, but still... it's not cute to mess with life-safety critical infrastructure.
Yassified Vance, which a Republican congressman actually created and posted as a legit fan edit is also very funny: https://x.com/KatAbughazaleh/status/1841491297145634831
Oh I thought that was the angry little man, what's his name... Ben Shapiro! (Google knew what I meant.)
hugged but someone caught it: https://archive.is/VrEtg
Anyone can receive it, and many do. FlightRadar and others have networks of people with receivers that forward all received packets to central servers.
The aircraft self-report location, heading, altitude, etc, so anyone can transmit packets making ghost planes.
I am somewhat surprised nobody has stashed an ADS-B spoofer near ATL or AMS that just broadcasts tracks of A380 tail numbers crossing the runways perpendicular at 500 ft AGL or something. They have primary radar, sure, but I imagine there would still be a temporary disruption until people figured out what was going on.
I think this is the first case I’ve seen of ADS-B spoofing in the wild.
EDIT: this was spoofed reports to the data aggregators via the internet, not broadcast on radio waves. I’ve still never seen or heard tell of RF ADS-B spoofing.
(IIUC they did not actually transmit data, just fed it directly into an ADS-B receiver, but transmitting would've been trivial at this point)
Can you tell me more about the fake signals? Who sends them? Why? How often?
Probably because the required expertise, effort, risk, and reward ratios don't work out. You can cause a minor disturbance that isn't particularly visible and in exchange get investigated by the FBI. Seems about as wise as attempting to graffiti the front gate of a military base.
The spoofer could have just sent them fake location information drawing an image using latitude, longitude and altitude for color (in the default view flight paths have different colors based on the altitude of the plane at that point in time).
They could have built an antenna and actually broadcast this data, but that would be a lot more effort and most likely some form of crime.
They didn't actually "broadcast" anything. This was created by uploading fake data to absexchange.
Someone spoofed Airforce One's transponder, had it declare itself as "VANCE 1", and then fly a pattern to display the meme. Or lied to one or more of the major sites, pretending to be listening in on the ADS-B signals. It's unclear. Regardless, it's a very funny hack.
That said, TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) does not operate on flight data reported by ADS-B.
Viewable on FlightRadar24, etc
on HN, mostly
I think the API is secured? The entire premise is that a volunteer creates an account and uploads ADS-B telemetry. Detecting falsified data is a separate matter.
Also Adsbexchange has had some… history:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ADSB/comments/10l2euc/adsb_exchange...
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/26/ads-b-exchange-sells-up-cont...
"The Government’s interpretation of the statute would attach criminal penalties to a breathtaking amount of commonplace computer activity,” Barrett wrote. “If the ‘exceeds authorized access’ clause criminalizes every violation of a computer-use policy, then millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens are criminals."
adsbexchange is a user-generated content platform where you can submit decoded radio signals to a common database. Sending fake data to adsbexchange is as much a CFAA violation as posting hoaxes to Wikipedia or a social media platform.
Assuming the FAA has the authority to enforce ADSB requirements (an open question post-Chevron), I can’t find any regulation saying non-aircrafts cannot transmit ADSB. Only ones saying aircrafts in certain categories must.
There’s probably some non-interference requirement somewhere (FCC spectrum licensing perhaps), but I’m not seeing it immediately.
All this is in the hypothetical that RF was transmitted, which as others point out it probably wasn’t.
Whatever transmitter you're using would not be type-accepted for operation on the 1080 MHz or 978 MHz band. (47 USC § 301)
Additionally, RF operation with the intent of willful interference is inherently illegal. (47 USC § 333)
Also does impersonation necessarily qualify as interference? Naively, I'd expect interference to refer to jamming.
This is easily-prosecutable willful interference or possibly aircraft sabotage: ADS-B operates in licensed bands and uses an already highly-contended modulation scheme and transmission protocol.
It would be far better and more reliable to have the FAA do it by providing authoritative single source of truth as (selectively) open data rather than depend upon the whims / greed / sloppiness of an over-privatized utility. ATCs need and/or have this data anyhow, so in the future, it should be provided.
How do less neoliberal European countries do it?
> It's analogous to "hobby" code running key infrastructure of the internet
I have some bad news my dude lol
Although I would consider that even reddit might not be enough to cause a death wall if the infrastructure behind it is organized.
There could be a software mis configuration option, I find it the most plausible option personally.
Most are from US or from a HN user: population, well technically switzerland iirc (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33450094) But I don't know, I feel like there are definitely times where people create two accounts on HN or more or lose access of previous or want better names (I am thinking of creating a new account on HN myself) so assume half to go through ~2.5 million users
Over the span of one decade+ year though, a lot of people completely leave the forum and so I would consider frequent users to be around ~ 1 million
Then the people who are actually active a lot of days or are weekly active or monthly active and tonight's the night (dexter reference) that they open it,I would assume ~500k users
I would consider these ~500k impressions to be an average estimate on a really really impactful HN post on front page & they all might come through say ~24 hours.
I am being more generous and assuming 500k HN impressions on 3-6 hours timeframe then technically the server just has to handle like ~46 users/sec or ~23 users/sec
But even on a really high estimate we assume ~500 users/sec
But I have seen some benchmarks of websites/frameworks/languages which are able to handle 5k-10k requests as a really low to decent estimate depending on the task
I do feel like its something that I can architect ~500 users/sec on some hetzner box most likely at max for ~30-40 usd/month or using their smallest plan with cloudflare tunnels for around I guess ~2.99 euros or 3 euros per month
I feel like its definitely possible to survive the "HN wall of death" but any of my websites haven't gone and hit this wall but if anyone of your projects or anyone can anecdotally tell me something it would be interesting & we can discuss it.
Also I have seen this one person who was able to survive this HN wall of death on a literal 780 mb alpine server using lighthttpd. Which if we are assuming racknerd or dedirock or something can get to around ~7$/yr or ~6.70-ish$/yr deal from black friday & you can get such deals on websites like lowendtalk for quite a low price.
Though these providers have comparatively low bandwidth if you actually want the cheapest somehow option and want to survive this HN wall of death. (these providfe around 1TB-2TB/month iirc)
Personally I feel like netcup (my preferred provider) / IONOS might be better options as they are still cheap while giving more lenient bandwidth or you can also find probably some really cheap high bandwidth black friday deals around the 7$/yr mark as well
I think I am getting off topic but I really like german hosting providers usually for the most part except the only thing I do hate a (little?) about them is that I have observed that they have a reputation of being exceptionally strict to the rules/some have the more ban first-ask-later approach which um might suck if your project is a little unconvential or quite frankly it can sometimes conflict with my morals as I always feel a little bit of hestitation around building around such system.