All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem • Hacker News Board

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#201

Post by pubnub » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 4:03 PM UTC

theandrewbailey wrote: post #22

krschultz wrote: post #2

I was flying from Dublin to Newark on Saturday on a United flight. At some point during our flight the entertainment system needed to be rebooted. When it came back up, the splash screen hit me with a huge amount of nostalgia. It was RedBoot with a kernel build date from 2004. Obviously this is the entertainment system and not something more critical, but it's telling. There is a huge cadence mismatch between softwar…

This is the Achilles heel of the entire Internet of Things and smart appliance trend, and I think this will bite everyone bad. After 50+% of these vendors go out of business in the next decade, their products won't get updated, and people will wonder why their "smart" TV can't watch movies from whatever replaced Netflix/new whizbang video service. They won't be as likely to buy any "smart" thing again.

Use https://resin.io/ yo

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#202

Post by caskance » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 5:56 PM UTC

urda wrote: post #200

caskance wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do those things, but you're not going to.

> You can do those things, but you're not going to. This is a 100% trash point. I have yet to see an unknown device on my network from a dumb screen, let alone any additional microphones or cameras on said dumb screen. I have also not seen or heard of any reports of it becoming a spying type device. You mean to tell me the dumb panel I bought, which is from a major manufacture with known tear downs and a ton of buyer…

No, because you're not worth spying on. Show me a unicorn. Please come equipped with a living sample and a detached horn before replying.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#203

Post by rcthompson » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 6:31 PM UTC

gcr wrote: post #174

kstenerud wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who will pay for that cellular connectivity? This is getting well into ad absurdum (a common problem on HN). Smart TVs are perfectly fine for the person who doesn't want a smart TV. Just don't use any of the smart TV features and don't connect it to the network. Problem solved.

Nobody thought Amazon would put a cell phone antenna into an eBook reader, but look what happened! :)

That's exactly the example I was thinking of as precedent.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#204

Post by netizzio » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 9:33 PM UTC

saryant wrote: post #114

netizzio wrote: post #84

It's interesting that the Wired article mentions the recent controversy about claims that aircraft systems can be hacked, but explicitly ignores the incident last week as having any possible relation to these events, where a bigoted employee denied a Muslim passenger an open can of Diet Coke because it "might be used as a weapon", while giving the passenger in the adjacent seat an open can of beer. The response from…

A few things about that: 1) The beer isn't free, the passenger paid for the entire can or used a 1K drink chit. 2) UA flight attendants are famous for making up rules and many try to avoid handing out entire cans of soda, and this one wasn't even a United flight attendant. 3) What on earth would that have to do with today's event?

Whether or not the beer was free has absolutely nothing to do with this. It's not about the beer or diet coke, but about the blatant bigotry exhibited by an employee against a passenger on a United flight, as well as inexcusable behavior by another passenger.

Similarly, whether or not this was a United flight attendant is also of absolutely zero relevance. They may have technically been an employee of Shuttle America, but were part of the cabin crew and a representative of United on that flight, working under the United brand and wearing United uniforms. Therefore, when United releases a statement making no apology for abhorrent behavior exhibited by their representative, it reflects directly on them.

It may have nothing to do with this event, just as Chris Roberts tweeting that he hacked into the in-flight entertainment system may have nothing to do with this event. It's merely interesting that Wired explicitly ignored the actions of United as having any possible relationship to this event.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#205

Post by urda » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 9:35 PM UTC

caskance wrote: post #202

urda wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can do those things, but you're not going to. This is a 100% trash point. I have yet to see an unknown device on my network from a dumb screen, let alone any additional microphones or cameras on said dumb screen. I have also not seen or heard of any reports of it becoming a spying type device. You mean to tell me the dumb panel I bought, which is from a major manufacture with known tear downs and a ton of buyer…

No, because you're not worth spying on. Show me a unicorn. Please come equipped with a living sample and a detached horn before replying.

> Please come equipped with a living sample and a detached horn before replying.

You cannot show up to a thread, a demand that a negative be proven. That's not how that works, and the burden of proof is on you.

> Show me a unicorn.

If you're not going to be constructive here, just stop commenting.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#206

Post by wutbrodo » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 12:20 AM UTC

caskance wrote: post #198

wutbrodo wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps a more concrete definition of an analogous concept would make this clearer: Are you familiar with the concept of a prior distribution[1]? The point of a prior is that, before you get any of the evidence, you can still have some sense of how likely each event is. If you asked me whether a microwave with more features would be more expensive, I would feel pretty comfortable saying "yea probably". As mentioned d…

Like I said, that prior is wrong regardless about how comfortable you feel about it. The real question you should be saying yes to is whether a microwave with more USEFUL features would be more expensive. A microwave with the "feature" that "it has a 10% chance to self-destruct each time it finishes heating something" would cost less, since no matter how hard you try to spin that as a feature, a reasonable person wou…

On the increasingly minuscule chance that you're not just trolling (posterior probability!), it should be trivially obvious that what makes TV-smartness a "feature" but not stochastic microwave self-destruction is not some objective measure of usefulness, but rather the fact that only the former is marketed as beneficial with the reasonable expectation (on the part of the marketers) that some/many consumers will believe it.

If you truly don't understand this distinction, then this whole conversation (indeed, this entire posting/thread) is hopelessly beyond your comprehension.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#207

Post by caskance » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 2:30 PM UTC

urda wrote: post #205

caskance wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because you're not worth spying on. Show me a unicorn. Please come equipped with a living sample and a detached horn before replying.

> Please come equipped with a living sample and a detached horn before replying. You cannot show up to a thread, a demand that a negative be proven. That's not how that works, and the burden of proof is on you. > Show me a unicorn. If you're not going to be constructive here, just stop commenting.

I did not demand a negative be proven. The only one here who cares about proving anything is you. I was only using a rhetorical device to illustrate the absurdity of what you said. Sorry if that wasn't clear, I realize English is probably not your native language.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#208

Post by caskance » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 2:33 PM UTC

wutbrodo wrote: post #206

caskance wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said, that prior is wrong regardless about how comfortable you feel about it. The real question you should be saying yes to is whether a microwave with more USEFUL features would be more expensive. A microwave with the "feature" that "it has a 10% chance to self-destruct each time it finishes heating something" would cost less, since no matter how hard you try to spin that as a feature, a reasonable person wou…

On the increasingly minuscule chance that you're not just trolling (posterior probability!), it should be trivially obvious that what makes TV-smartness a "feature" but not stochastic microwave self-destruction is not some objective measure of usefulness, but rather the fact that only the former is marketed as beneficial with the reasonable expectation (on the part of the marketers) that some/many consumers will beli…

A bold claim coming from someone who thinks "It's not a bug, it's a feature" is successful marketing rather than a punchline.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#209

Post by teacup50 » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 2:57 PM UTC

cnvogel wrote: post #57

teacup50 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The security of such a thing assumes that: 1) The system can't be compromised through input data. 2) There's no other output mechanism by which an attacker could retrieve data (or watch the plane crash, which technically counts as output). I'm not sure I buy the idea for contexts where a genuine security airgap is required.

You normally use such a scheme to pass data from the more critical to the less critical system. For example in nuclear power plants (that's where I know this scheme from) your low-safety systems can use data acquired by a highly safety relevant system (e.g. to display the pressure, temperature and power generation of the reactor core without being able to influence the safety systems that primarily acquired the value…

Ah! Thanks, that clarification makes way more sense.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#210

Post by keeperofdakeys » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 10:28 AM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #2

I was flying from Dublin to Newark on Saturday on a United flight. At some point during our flight the entertainment system needed to be rebooted. When it came back up, the splash screen hit me with a huge amount of nostalgia. It was RedBoot with a kernel build date from 2004. Obviously this is the entertainment system and not something more critical, but it's telling. There is a huge cadence mismatch between softwar…

19 January 2038 will be a very interesting day, since that's when signed 32 bit unix time will overflow. I don't want to think about how much software would rely on that, especially critical embedded hardware.