Curious what the MITRE budget was. CISA funding for the CVE program isn't specifically broken out but "tens of millions of dollars per year" is what I've seen, which seems excessive, despite the CVE program being important.
TBH there's enough of a "planespotting" hobbyist community who would love to have good quality camera footage of takeoffs/landings to probably finance great quality cameras at all major airfields covering all the runways/ramp areas/etc. just from ads from streaming. Also insurers (I actually work with a bunch of the guys at Lloyd's syndicates who do hull insurance for aircraft; I can ask them in a few weeks how much this data would be worth to them. For ramps, it would be "who backed into my aircraft while it was parked" issues. I worked on an airbase where someone drove a pickup truck into a super high end "one of two" high altitude long endurance drone, destroying 50% of the US Government surveillance capability in theater for about 4 months...)
I wonder if you could get an additional market of "plane X taking off from/landing at airport Y at time of day Z in weather W at time of year U" clips for TV/movies, or if they already have enough of that stock footage.
I love that museum; try to visit whenever I'm nearby.
During Covid, the new director of the museum changed policy substantially -- primarily focusing on original artifacts, rather than the "displays" which had been built before to illustrate concepts (when something wasn't available, or where the original artifacts weren't impressive or illustrative enough). As someone fairly familiar with the field, seeing the actual objects is much more worth a trip than seeing a museum display illustrating a concept which I could see better in a wikipedia article or a book.
Both approaches work for museums, but I'm glad his one changed. The most striking thing for me was seeing the actual computers used in SIOP and nuclear war initiation a couple decades earlier (fairly run of the mill high end DEC Alpha boxes).
Fentanyl contamination/adulteration seems like a sufficient reason to not use any street drug active in greater than microgram quantities. (If I were a parent, I'd probably prefer to give "good" drugs to a kid who was unavoidably going to do them vs. trust their friends/etc. to find safe ones, although there's obviously horrible moral hazard there. I have no idea what the right answer is.)
I know both of them somewhat (I was in Ilya's YC batch!) and I'm completely inclined to believe this article/statement to be accurate -- especially since it matches what the federal courts accept as true.
Crime is bad. Don't do crime. I wouldn't put an ex-massive-thief in charge of discretionary defensive security for something, but the computer security has a long history of using the knowledge and expertise of former thieves/etc. to improve security, so I'm hopeful there will be a way he can contribute positively to society once he gets out of prison.
The requirement in the contract is nowhere near that specific. Contact info validation is sufficient for almost all registrars. It's possible a given registry has higher standards, or maybe one registrar got some order to be more thorough, but great reason to avoid given this is a commodity and there are actually good alternatives. (I broadly like Tucows and Cloudflare)
Namecheap is on my NO NO NO list, along with GoDaddy (and a bunch of others). Google Domains was also on this OH GOD NO list, but thankfully Google did the Google thing and killed the product.
Most of my domains are on Namecheap since the times when wikipedia's domains were there. Hopefully, my low-key personal domains are of no interest to anyone...
Wow.I book a lot of flights, often waste a huge amount of time find the best flight, and would use this for a lot of the easier bookings. I was amazed at how well it works (in the simulator).
Google Flights is really the last Google product I routinely use -- happy to have an alternative!
> often waste a huge amount of time find the best flight
Would you trust that this would book you the "best" flight? Every user has a different definition of "best" – cheapest, shortest, fewest stopovers, shortest stopovers, airline preference, lounge preference, seat preference, time of day preference...
Personally I find Google Flights gives me the right amount of detail and I book flights I'm happy with.
Yeah, I'm kind of surprised by all the uniform praise in the comments - NOT saying it's not a cool tool, it's definitely very impressive and the author's done a nice job, but I could never really see myself using this. Mainly just because flights are super expensive, I can't see myself trusting a bot to make the best choice instead of spending 10 minutes of my own time to potentially save a lot of money. I guess it's a different world when you're a super frequent flier (or when your company is paying, of course).
It reminds me of the Carvana ads that called out home delivery for cars. Like, it's definitely neat, and I'd love to skip scummy dealerships, but convenience is wayy down my list of priorities when I'm dropping that much money on something.
Worth noting: if you don't specify a time of day in your search, you will see the cheapest flight on that day.
Bots can analyze several thousand flight options (which even the sim does) in a few seconds. So odds are it catches a deal someone might otherwise miss.
Also, because BonBook searches direct w/ airlines, it sees inventory not shared with Google (and regularly has better fares).
Interesting, the last one is pretty surprising. I kind of just assumed all airline booking systems (Expedia, Google Flights, Kayak, whatever) all used the same underlying service - maybe SABRE or something, but that's a total shot in the dark. Would love to hear what the difference is, assuming you're comfortable with sharing!
Can share a bit of background: (TLDR; airlines want to keep more profit so are witholding some fares.)
A system called GDS (Global Distribution System) was built in the 60s as a data transmission standard. Was used by airlines to publish fares (among other things). But it was complicated so aggregators (Sabre, Amadeus, Travelport) were born to ingest all this published data and make it easily searchable.
When travel went online in the late 90s, Online Travel Agents (OTAs) were using this data, and since then most new OTAs have too. (An example; Expedia's first patent minimized GDS searches per customer request, saving them $$).
But, because OTAs take a cut and airline margins are thin, IATA (group of airlines) came up with a new system called NDS (New Distrubution Standard) in mid 2010s. Since its an XML standard that anyone can consume direct, airlines have been trying to push everyone onto NDC by simply not publishing certain tickets via GDS, requiring OTAs to book X% of tickets via NDC and even removing inventory entirely.
Some examples: American trying to go full NDC recently but getting pushback and Turkish Airlines pulling out of Sabre.
Is there a reasonable way for me to consume this data directly? I'd love to be able to pull a big pile of flight prices and mess around with the data, but I'd prefer not to pay big money or have to register as a travel agent or anything.
My partner books a lot of travel for people who travel a lot, and while some of this is broadly true, I think the devil is in the details. They get a lot of preferences from people who arguably should only care about their time, but in reality also have comfort preferences.
When you say that shortest/fewest stopovers/shortest stops are all synonyms for efficiency, this is true, but also misses human factors. Some people prefer a single flight at nearly all costs, some people prefer to have shorter flights with stopovers even if the total time spent is slightly longer. Ask someone if they'd rather have a 45 minute stopover or a 1.5 hour stopover and I bet most would choose the latter, despite taking more time.
> time of day?? Easy, just add it to your request (works in sim too).
This also misses the fact that everything is about tradeoffs. I'd like a flight after 9am, the tool tells me that will be A$500, oh yeah, you know what I don't mind flying at 8:30am for A$200.
I think for a tool like this to work beyond a specific audience of optimisation nerds who only care about their time, it needs to treat everything as negotiable, and then present sensible alternatives outside of spec. Sacrifice time for lower stress, sacrificing seat preference for sooner flight, sacrificing airline preference based on price, sacrificing destination based on availability.
Being close to someone doing this job, and having travelled a fair bit of long haul over the last few years, I know that "efficiency" is very nuanced with personal preferences, that most people don't give even a fraction of the required information to be able to actually do this well and back and forth is necessary.
I wish you all the best of luck, if you can make it work, great!
I would use it for flights where the best flight is pretty obvious, or in cases where satisficing is fine. I'd tbh mostly use it when OTHER PEOPLE ask me to find a flight for them.
I'd also use it to quickly book flights on my preferred airlines because I have free changes/cancellations on those, so the value of getting something booked immediate and then refined later (and possibly rebook) is fine.
Definitely a lot of value in a drone/balloon/etc. fleet to 1) restore communications using satellite + mesh 2) overhead imagery for direct support of rescue/recovery/rebuilding 3) supporting rescue (and later recovery) operations by finding phones and sending messages in broadcast, etc. Augments what can be done from satellites or manned aircraft already.
