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A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements

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Re: A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements

#291
A lot of technical (practical?) speculation here, anyone any thoughts on the actual content or original source of the recording? To me it sounds like Buddhist chants like from those Buddha machines[0] or possibly some type of throat chanting. Can someone shazaam it? :)

[0] https://www.errorinstruments.com/a-51153210/new-synthe-noise...

Re: A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements

#292
post #198
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The medical intercom jack is often in the middle of the cabin (on equipped aircraft). Flight attendants can plug in an aviation headset with a very, very long cord, and the pilots patch it into one of the radios in the cockpit. This allows the flight attendants to talk to a doctor on the ground while they're physically next to a passenger's seat.

> Flight attendants can plug in an aviation headset with a very, very long cord... This allows the flight attendants to talk to a doctor on the ground while they're physically next to a passenger's seat. That is pretty damn cool.

Aeronautical engineers think of everything.

Re: A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements

#294
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A new social media marketing strategy?

Marketing? "Come fly our planes and experience the PA ghost?" I feel like that would only target a very small percentage of potential customers.

It's getting shared on Social Media. People talk about it and likely never experience it. It's the same principle with the "creepy clowns" a while back.

https://mediashower.com/blog/how-clowns-did-the-heavy-liftin...

Re: A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements

#295
post #12
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not the alien soul crystals that enable flight trying to break free?

I'm glad you brought that up because (no joke) nobody can actually explain how aerodynamic lift works, much less how a plane can fly upside down: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/no-one-can-explai...

Randall Munroe finally explained it: https://xkcd.com/2678

Re: A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements

#296
post #266
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of when a security researcher discovered that, in addition to some serious security flaws, certain Siemens PLCs had monkeys hidden in their firmware: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/08/serio... According to the researcher who found it, "they didn’t think it was very funny.” I love easter eggs myself—classic Apple software in particular had a lot of these, and I really miss finding them—…

I looked up the story behind the "Bluets and Granola Bars" easter egg. Apparently, the System Error Handler, part of the boot ROM, used to display a popup that said "Welcome to Macintosh" at startup, before the operating system loaded. However, in System 7.6, this was replaced by a new splash screen with the Mac OS logo, and the old "Welcome to Macintosh" message in the system resource file was replaced with the Gran…

That's really interesting. I didn't know the intricacies behind that.

Re: A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements

#297
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've flown American six times in the last ten days, and four of the flights had chaos with the entertainment system. No groans or heavy breathing on the PA, but flight attendants had to "reboot the system" once or twice every flight.

I once captured the Linux boot screen of a United Boeing 737 infotainment system. Apparently I still got that photo. OCRed text for lols: video capture buffer0 40b37460 video capture buffer1 40a8dd60 wideo_capture buffer2 409e4610 geode_: gamma black+csccorrection VAL2: Registered "NSC Geode V4LZ UBI driver" as char device B1, 224 VAL2: Registered "NSC Geode V4L2 Capture driver" as char device 81, geode_v: Unknown st…

Some of the time is because they have a single board computer, and only licensing the BIOS. You'll know if that's the case if after the boot, you see it purposely set the time to something arbitrary, but dating back to the 90's. To the flight entertainment, the date doesn't really matter. For the licensing however, it does.

Also elsewhere in the boot, you might notice they tend to be 80486 CPU emulation boards from Cyrix. They're not fast at all, but for what they do, they don't need to be.

Also, if you took video instead of a pic, there are a few interesting IP addresses might scroll by as the media program gets initialized.

Re: A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've flown American six times in the last ten days, and four of the flights had chaos with the entertainment system. No groans or heavy breathing on the PA, but flight attendants had to "reboot the system" once or twice every flight.

They might be doing that out of caution just to keep it from being exploited. Sounds like something management or the Flight Crew might decide is a band aid if one tries it and it works then everybody starts doing it. Knee jerk reaction but sounds like they’re stumped.

If you watch the whole boot, they purposely set the date to the 90's. I think it is because they don't want to pay the license for the BIOS. You can see some text about that license scroll by as well.

I've seen it often, and somewhere on an old PeeCee buried in the darkest areas of my home office, I have a video of the whole sequence.

Re: A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements

#299
I'm late to the game BUT just in case someone sees this: Not so long ago they found that deep fake voices don't emulate the shape of the mouth and throat very well, and therefore it's easy to tell if a clip is a deep fake, or real.

They should be able to run these sounds through the same software to see if it properly emulates a throat and mouth or not.

Re: A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plugging in a Bluetooth transmitter into a user-accessible port and using the system as intended is "hacking" now? Sure, passengers weren't intended to use that port, but from a system perspective the system is being used as intended with no interference or exploitation. I'm not sure this system can even be "hacked" short of disassembling parts of the plane and tapping into the communications wiring.

Legally speaking in the US “hack” generally means using any computer system you weren’t given access to. So yes this is legally a hack in the way it’s used by the media, it’s also a hack of in the normal since of the word regardless.

It's literally only the media, and not the law enforcement, that use the term "hack." The word "hack" probably doesn't even exist in any criminal code.

Law enforcement use phrases like "unlawful access to a protected system" and whatnot.

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