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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

#351
> A Wi-Fi hotspot named "Free Palestine, F Zionists" prompted the pilot to issue a warning to the cabin, telling the passenger responsible that they had "30 seconds" to remove the name or the FBI would meet the aircraft.

That is just nutty. Are we now actively participating in the genocide?

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

#352
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not saying this as an ad hominem and simply to throw insults, but with the hopes that it will encourage you to change your behavior. The only thing this accomplishes is making you the kind of asshole who interferes with other people that are just trying to make their flight on time. You are not highlighting flaws in the security system. You are not taking a principled ethical stance against tyranny. You are just…

By taking a stand and inconveniencing the world around me, I hope to induce change for everyone. What’s the alternative? Lose track of my stuff or risk it being stolen?

No, you don’t.

You are being an asshole to prove a point. But I am going to assume that you are an intelligent person, and since you are, you know as well as I do that nobody you are treating this way is in a position to do anything about the situation. Nobody in line is going to empathize with your stand when you are disrupting their travel. You are doing this so you can feel high and mighty, but you know damn well it isn’t behavior that will induce change.

The alternative is to either a) allow others to pass until you witness your bag enter the scanner or b) accept that nobody is going to steal your stuff directly in front of law enforcement officials and just go through the scanner.

Stop acting like an asshole.

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

#353
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.

Genuine terrorism relies on the creation of fear and alarm in their target group... not just concealment.

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

#354
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were bragging that they could provoke this type of response as a result of having flown two planes into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon, killing thousands , and causing fear, panic, and self-sabotaging outsized reactions like pouring trillions into wars that accomplish nothing. Getting a dozen of their operatives arrested for an idiotic prank that just resulted in a handful of planes being turne…

There’s evidence that not all people involved in 9/11 knew they were going to die. Yet, they were still used effectively. Significantly less dedicated supporters are generally used as a funding source, but actual terrorist organizations have also used them for publicity events on the anniversary of attacks.

You are dodging the fact that getting a handful of planes to turn around is an act that induces frustration, annoyance, and insignificant costs at best. Not terror.

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

#355
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems pretty obvious to me that this situation was being treated more like a disruptive passenger issue than an actual terrorist threat of a real bomb. So more like the Minneapolis plane diverted to Wisconsin the other day because of an unruly passenger. They took everyone and their devices through screening after deplaning, and it sounds like they found the teenager who owned the device. That was the point of tur…

Terrorists doing completely stupid stuff, like naming a cellphone "bomb" that they plan to use to control a bomb is par for the course. Forgetting to turn off bluetooth is a plausible next mistake. Terrorists have a pretty long history of making these kinds of basic operational errors, and if you don't act like they may be real, you miss the opportunity to disrupt/prevent these operations.

Terrorists also work on creating alarm not just hiding their operations.

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

#356
Great, so next time people will have an app to flood the Bluetooth with all sort of names if they ever decided to ruin the trip, and just delete the app later, undetected. Hell, you can even mod a small Bluetooth tracker and put it in someone’s bag while loading the stuff.. this opens so many attack vectors, ancient regulations don’t work with latest tech.

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

#358

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.

Not about the UA flight, but the grandparent's first point. I can see how it's not simply superstition or theater. Critical info gets communicated either over fuzzy radio or 220 character ACARS messages. You wouldn't want to introduce into that context any spurious usages of phrases that would result in wasted time disambiguating whether a garbled transmission was referring to the Very Serious Bad kind of "crash" or…

The problem is that there isn't a simple canonical way to disambiguate, despite that being the obvious and superior solution.

Taboo is a shitty communication feature. Taboo demands active silence in a system with too much entropy for that to be feasible. It would be far superior to train everyone to say "good crash" (and respond appropriately) instead.

Words only have meaning in context. The whole point of instating a taboo is that you control the context. Rather than use that control to introduce danger to words, we should use it to isolate danger from words.

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

#359
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…

Anecdote: I worked with software for battery EV power-train diagnostics, one of our devs decided to add emojis to success and error messages. He added a fire emoji to one success message. When testers saw it they were afraid that the customer would think it was a thermal runway problem. Had to do a last-minute revision of the software before shipping the new version. I was already pretty anti-emoji / personal touch /…

> one of our devs decided to add emojis to success and error messages.

Was this LLM-driven development? I'm so glad that phase is over.

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

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you? ‘I support Palestinian Action’ is all I can think of and it’s the same length.

Does that actually get you arrested, or do you have to go to a Palestinian Action protest? Not that there's that big of a difference.

> Does that actually get you arrested

I can’t see that it ever has. Making it fractionally less ridiculous.

"Those attending should be aware that showing support for a proscribed organisation is an offence under the Terrorism Act, and we will not hesitate to act where the law is broken," said commander Claire Smart, who is leading policing operations in London this weekend.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp38z9lylddo

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