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Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

bloomberg.com

21–30 of 166 posts

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#21
post #17

Another case of a rambling article burying the lede. I skimmed the article and still can't figure out why we're weeks away from a point of no return. Is the search going to be called off? Is there a transponder that's going to give out? Why can't the journalist just put the important information up front , instead of a bunch of irrelevant crap about someone's sleep deprivation?

In the fifth paragraph, it says "Without fresh clues, the hunt should end about June, when four ships are due to finish combing the seas off western Australia." I imagine that the news would be quite boring if every article were written as a bullet-point list of points. Sometimes people enjoy reading a story, not just a two minute summary.

That's just bad journalism. The first few lines should be who-what-when-where-why. Then you fill in the details and backstory at length.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#22
post #17

Another case of a rambling article burying the lede. I skimmed the article and still can't figure out why we're weeks away from a point of no return. Is the search going to be called off? Is there a transponder that's going to give out? Why can't the journalist just put the important information up front , instead of a bunch of irrelevant crap about someone's sleep deprivation?

I believe the "weeks" figure is related to this quote: "Without fresh clues, the hunt should end about June, when four ships are due to finish combing the seas off western Australia, Dolan said."

I saw that part. I guess to this journalist, "weeks" really means "four months".

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#23
post #6

[deleted]

Even if it were water proof, it would only be so at a certain depth. The pressure asserted by the ocean would render it useless...and the density of the ocean above it would probably make the signal too weak.

While that's true at the very least (assuming that there really is a cheap worldwide GPS tracking available) the last known position would be much more accurate than in MH370.

That would make unnecessary the attempt to extrapolate the existing data (the pings) in order to infer the plane last location good location.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#24
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article's line, "In a world where a $100 smartphone can be tracked for free..." is dishonest. Services like Find My iPhone only work if: 1. The phone can determine its location via GPS, cell tower, and/or wifi positioning. 2. The phone has Internet access. (Cell or wifi.) As you might suspect, the south Indian Ocean doesn't have many cell towers or wifi hotspots. GPS signals don't penetrate water, nor do the freq…

It's only a little off. Services like Spot [ http://findmespot.com/en/ ] offer satellite tracking with updates every 5 minutes while moving for $100 for equipment and $100/year for service. Spot doesn't quite cover the whole world, but Delorme InReach does [ http://www.inreachdelorme.com/ ] for like $250 for equipment and $150 per year. Given how easily available this technology is to anyone with a credit card, it's…

The "$250M airliner" has the equipment, the issue is that Malaysia Airlines didn't pay for the service, no doubt they didn't imagine really needing it.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#25
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the fifth paragraph, it says "Without fresh clues, the hunt should end about June, when four ships are due to finish combing the seas off western Australia." I imagine that the news would be quite boring if every article were written as a bullet-point list of points. Sometimes people enjoy reading a story, not just a two minute summary.

That's just bad journalism. The first few lines should be who-what-when-where-why. Then you fill in the details and backstory at length.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#26
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the fifth paragraph, it says "Without fresh clues, the hunt should end about June, when four ships are due to finish combing the seas off western Australia." I imagine that the news would be quite boring if every article were written as a bullet-point list of points. Sometimes people enjoy reading a story, not just a two minute summary.

That's just bad journalism. The first few lines should be who-what-when-where-why. Then you fill in the details and backstory at length.

So what? This isn't a newspaper article, it is a nonfiction story. Bloomberg contains sections of their magazines written in your format; I always skip them. I prefer the long-form stories.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#27
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only a little off. Services like Spot [ http://findmespot.com/en/ ] offer satellite tracking with updates every 5 minutes while moving for $100 for equipment and $100/year for service. Spot doesn't quite cover the whole world, but Delorme InReach does [ http://www.inreachdelorme.com/ ] for like $250 for equipment and $150 per year. Given how easily available this technology is to anyone with a credit card, it's…

The "$250M airliner" has the equipment, the issue is that Malaysia Airlines didn't pay for the service, no doubt they didn't imagine really needing it.

Well when the person who ultimate trust is placed in violates that trust it isn't something many consider there any viable counters too. GermanWings suffered a loss from what likely was a similar reason, the difference being that this pilot didn't send the plane into the sea.

I am not sure there is a viable means to guard against suicidal pilots except to speed up the acceptance of full automation

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#28
Rest assured that this mystery will be solved. Petabytes of data? Please give it to Google so they can add it to Google Maps. The fact that we can't successfully crowd-source this search is indicative of our having very incomplete maps of the ocean floor.

Eventually (could be a hundred years but I expect less) there will be a swarm of autonomous submersible robots doing detailed scans. They will find all kinds of interesting things - including MH370.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#29
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't cell towers need to know your position to transfer you from tower to tower?

Nope edit: though I guess that fact that you are connected to a specific tower leaks location information

The "need to know your position" is a consequence of how they measure signal strength to allow handoff between cells, so you get overlapping coverage and each tower has a signal measurement for the same device.

A post I saw here a couple of weeks ago suggested a simpler method of reducing location tracking than ones I had been thinking of:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10985599

You would add extra RF spectrum overhead and a little bit of latency for making and receiving calls.

In general the basic thing that should happen to recover location privacy in mobile services is completely decoupling payment, device identifiers, and routing. Right now they are all linked or trivially linkable (your carrier sees you register with your IMEI and IMSI, and it assigns you a phone number -- rather than registering with a random per-session IMEI, paying for the service with a blinded digital payment token, and getting a phone number, if you want one, from a third party VoIP provider).

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#30
post #14
post #2

"In a world where a $100 smartphone can be tracked for free, the $250 million jet vanished." It sounds like Inmarsat is now making basic ping location available for free: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182223-inmarsat-now-givin...

That quote is disingenuous in the extreme. You absolutely can not track a $100 smartphone in the middle of the Indian ocean, for any price.

That's Bloomberg's comment not mine. Not sure where the sudden need to downvote is coming from. My point is that it's now a free service to track planes. It was possible to track MH370, for example, but it required a fee.
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