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United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert

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Re: United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert

#221
post #178

I once consulted on some aviation-related software (not the safety work prominent on my resume), and a company announcement came through, that you must never use a few specific words commonly heard in software development. The two no-no words I recall were "crash" and "bomb". Don't write them in code or documents, don't say them on the phone or videoconf, etc. Those terms have senses that people in aviation take extr…

This is trying to sanewash totally insane levels of risk aversion. Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"? Do you think this behaviour has any meaningful true positives? This is the kind of brainworms thinking that has people throwing our their 150ml liquids out at TSA and taking their shoes off.

If the terrorists goal is to create maximum fear and confusion, why not?

The staff's primary concern probably was not an actual bomb, but a prankster intentionally trying to create panic with elderly and technically illiterate.

Re: United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4. A normal level of risk aversion in one of the most risk averse industries If airlines ignored every threat that was “probably not” a real threat, they’d ignore all of them. It’s better to inconvenience a few thousand passengers than it is to kill a few hundred.

There was literally no threat.

They did not know if it was a threat or not. Hindsight is everything.

Re: United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can, we just have to pay the $0.05 per articles to do it, and some articles aren't even worth the $0.05.

I wouldn't mind paying $20/month to https://wikinews.org to help them build a system that indexed news from different sources, threw the links at an LLM summarizer and used as a draft submission to wikinews.

It would be interesting to see some kind of future where reporters get paid per fact they feed into the system, and then the system just outputs a coherent list of what happened without any fluff, or opinion.

The hard part would be figuring out the worth of each submission. LLMs might be able to assign a price based on the importance of the fact submitted? and then subscription fee people pay is paid to the contributors. I guess you could also have people rate the inputs and base it on that. (what the readers found important.)

Re: United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert

#224

I pine for the day when news is this: - Flight 767 returned to airport after seeing a bluetooth device named "BOMB" - After asking all passengers multiple times to turn off all devices and not getting the "BOMB" to go away, they flight had to return to the airport where officials were waiting to search the plane. - This was not intentional, but a product that calls it self "BOMB" https://hellottec.com/product/bomb-po…

FYI Reddit "s" links require login, an unnecessary burden. For your purpose here a direct link would have sufficed: https://old.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/comments/1tse6mq/ua_...

I don't have a reddit login and was able to view the link just fine.

Re: United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is trying to sanewash totally insane levels of risk aversion. Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"? Do you think this behaviour has any meaningful true positives? This is the kind of brainworms thinking that has people throwing our their 150ml liquids out at TSA and taking their shoes off.

If the terrorists goal is to create maximum fear and confusion, why not? The staff's primary concern probably was not an actual bomb, but a prankster intentionally trying to create panic with elderly and technically illiterate.

I'm sure whichever fictional panic you've imagined would've been far more serious than the one caused by this absolute overreaction.

Re: United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is trying to sanewash totally insane levels of risk aversion. Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"? Do you think this behaviour has any meaningful true positives? This is the kind of brainworms thinking that has people throwing our their 150ml liquids out at TSA and taking their shoes off.

If the terrorists goal is to create maximum fear and confusion, why not? The staff's primary concern probably was not an actual bomb, but a prankster intentionally trying to create panic with elderly and technically illiterate.

Maximum fear and confusion by stirring up the elderly on the plane? I'm sure more of that was accomplished by announcing it and then needing to turn the plane around.

Re: United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert

#227
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re a terrorist, I’m pretty sure you can think of dramatically more consequential things to do than cause a handful of planes to potentially divert. That’s a wildly pointless prank for something that will invariably wind up with you being arrested. Why do that when you could simply attack people waiting in the security line? That would actually cause terror and shut down an entire airport for days.

A saboteur might want to cause disruption without violence against people, and such cases would still likely be labeled terrorism.

[deleted]

Re: United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree from a logical perspective. However if the plane blew up and it came out that some passengers had posted online that there was a “bomb” blue tooth device and they didn’t turn around… the court of public opinion would be pretty harsh. This was more or less their only choice from a liability perspective.

> if the plane blew up and it came out that some passengers had posted online that there was a “bomb” blue tooth device and they didn’t turn around This story is just stupid. If you actually think you have a bomb onboard, you divert to the nearest airport. (And if you think you discovered a bomb accidentally left discoverable, you don’t ask for it to be please turned off.) The pilots and crew knew they were being idi…

And if you think you discovered a bomb accidentally left discoverable, you don’t ask for it to be please turned off

That was the most hilarious part for me.

Re: United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert

#229

Which bomb would advertise itself as such.. this is something I’d expect in the movie Airplane!, not something to happen in real life.

You would think so, at the same time we live in a world where the £80 million Louvre heist was made possible by the fact that their surveillance system's password was "Louvre" [0].

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/louvre-secur...

Re: United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert

#230
post #156

This is a hilariously stupid reaction to a stupidly hilarious decision made by a speaker manufacturer. And also a new vector for a ransom-attack on the Bluetooth namespace in certain environments via malicious BLE advertising. The worst thing that could have happened here was for someone to take this seriously.

I’ve seen multiple comments referencing this was the default device name… did I miss something in the article or is that sourced from elsewhere?
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