The fiber cut was to the Philadelphia TRACON facility, which is run by the FAA. Also, the FAA runs the towers at airports, unless it's a contract facility. No idea how the infra is handled at contract facilities, but I'd be shocked if it didn't follow FAA guidelines, such that the FAA is dictating the levels of redundancy available.
Also, there's a big difference between a small towered airport in a more rural area, and a major international airport with 10x or more the commercial traffic. So there's probably some difference of buildout depending on the facility usage.
Quick edit: looks like there were two fiber cut incidents recently, one at an airport last month, and the TRACON issue that happened 1.5 months ago!
don't do it! i just got rid of my set i purchased new in 2020. i'd rather have a washer/dryer that i have to replace every 5 years than the terrible function of both the washer and dryer. the washer i'll forgive a little being it was the front loader model, but their door seal is a terrible design and pools water, just reeked of mold all the time. i'll forgive it because it's a common front loader issue. the dryer on the other hand had failed heating element in the first few months. whatever these things happen, however the heating element on that model gets too hot. it would melt the synthetic lint onto the screen as it passed out of the main dryer body, which after a couple months would form these plastic stalactites on the grill that i would have to grind off every two months, because they would start shredding my clothes.
And with a 1-nit minimum brightness, iPad mini is even more suitable for dim environments, from users reading in bed at night to pilots checking their electronic flight bag in the cockpit.
As per other comments, my guess is somewhere between 1% and 5% of ipad mini sales are to pilots. It's gotta be significant or they wouldn't drop a line that in their main copy!
Turnstile is no longer effective. Anyone with a budget uses a real headless chrome instance and gets around it. You only need the spendy chrome instances to get the initial cookie, then you pass that to your workers and they scrape.
It’s really starting to suck. The worst part is these are coming from consumer vpn providers that we can’t just block (lots of real users paying real money on our service are vpn users) or they come from big residential isps. The whole residential relay thing is a hard adversary, since it’s spread across so many real users paying ips that you can’t whackamole it. I’d say 1% of residential ips are participating in a botnet (there’s prob some real numbers out there if I cared to look).
This is just going to push everyone harder into walled gardens. Web input biggest inbound but our content is our mote, we are going to have to turn off non logged in content viewing, which will have real business impacts.
I learned by doing an 8 hour soldering session, building an open source ECU for an older car. By the end it was easy! Fresh joints in a kit are easier than repair so it’s a better place to start learning temp control etc.
the numbers are much smaller than traditional search but they are trending up, and they convert at almost 2x the rate of organic search inbounds. sure you can play catchup later, but the trend is quite clear. if there's one thing the last two years have taught me, my prior heuristics on now vs future don't work in 2026.
I did just this. Using a $2k a year database from a smaller provider that isn't maxmind, claude and I built a pretty slick ASN based categorization system. I can categorize an ASN as a residential IP, a service provider, a legit crawler/scraper, etc. For anything that is suspicious, I dynamically use turnstile to gate access to our service. Turns out there's no ISP for any VPN, they just contract with a shitload of mom and pop shady colocation services across the world.
We collect signals that help determine good vs bad networks. For example, large amounts of requests to .php endpoints, large amounts of empty accounts from the same /24 subnet, etc etc. All these signals let us automatically determine risk, and then put up a challenge. Authenticated users never see the challenge even if they are on a risky network (VPN 99.9% of the time), unless the network has been identified as 100% malicious, then it gets a full block.
This was probably a total of 3-4 days of work, spread out over a couple months of iterative claude led hacking. I didn't know exactly what to build, but had some of the key architectural ideas in my head. Opus+Faable made easy work of it all, and ended up guiding some really slick improvements for performance.
I would say this has dropped about 20% of all traffic to our service, though it turns out turnstile is a massive target for bots, so replacing that with something custom is next on the list.
Contracting with their colocation facilities is exactly how that's supposed to work. If you don't actually operate a wide area network then you aren't supposed to be registered in these databases and have IP blocks. The exception is people who do anycast, but VPN companies don't.
You know all these guys just switch to residential proxies if they detect a site is blocking data centers, right? Because that's a very common thing to do.
Not sure what you mean by your first comment - there is no technical reason that I know of that prevents a VPN provider from having their own ASN and address space.
As for the latter comment....not sure what your implication is. Yes, bot/spam mitigation is whackamole, but there are consequences for not playing the game of whackamole. Luckily residential proxies are few and far between so far, but they will grow in popularity. When they do, and I can't get by with the occasional individual residential IP ban, we'll come up with other methods to handle.
Luckily the signal is strong with vulnerability scanning, which makes it pretty easy to automate. The only reason to put up whole ASN mitigation (captcha/turnstile, outright bans) is just efficiency. Nothing stopping individual IP banning. The scrapers are the tricky ones, since they more easily hide in legit traffic. However legit traffic has patterns that scrapers do not emulate (at least for a service like ours with millions of pieces of user generated content that's easily walkable), so you can still pull out the signal. It's just a little trickier.
That’s not the pattern I am seeing, but I might be outside the norm. The majority of bot action (scraper, spam) comes from vpn providers by a long shot, ignoring (Chinese ASNs, Indian mobile ISPs etc). I see very little consumer isp action except cheap international providers, which are still swamped by vpn traffic.
Also, there's a big difference between a small towered airport in a more rural area, and a major international airport with 10x or more the commercial traffic. So there's probably some difference of buildout depending on the facility usage.
Quick edit: looks like there were two fiber cut incidents recently, one at an airport last month, and the TRACON issue that happened 1.5 months ago!
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