Good news: the fedgov won’t be pulling the plug on that hurricane-tracking satellite data after all. Via The Register:

The US Navy has announced plans to continue distributing satellite data needed for hurricane forecasting, months after authorities said the data stream was to be turned off.

Better news: they’re still bad at lying.

In a statement, a US Navy spokesperson said: “The center [FNMOC] had planned to phase out the data as part of a Defense Department modernization effort. But after feedback from government partners, officials found a way to meet modernization goals while keeping the data flowing until the sensor fails or the program formally ends in September 2026.”

“Modernization effort.” So much for all that “cybersecurity” talk; the only apparent cyber-angle to this story was the gov’s failure to prevent people from accessing the data. Once they realized that they were burning a lot of political capital just to make weather geeks expend a bit of effort on decoding…

The bad news: we still don’t have any idea why the fedgov wanted to do this in the first place; they’re still blatantly lying, and no new info has emerged to rule out any of the malicious motives they might have.

P.S. Inb4 future weather satellites come with stronger encryption, so the fedgov can actually block that kind of amateur data access and keep playing gatekeeper…