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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

#601
post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is trying to sanewash totally insane levels of risk aversion. To add more credence to your point, let's not forget this beautiful line in TFA | During this incident, 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. This is clearly not a threat…

> This is clearly not a threat. To you, who made up the scenario and specified that it's not a threat, sure, it seems that way. To the pilot of an airplane full of people whose safety he is responsible for, even a tiny probability that it might be a threat has to be paid attention to. In real life you don't get to specify what "clearly" is or is not the case. People have to make judgment calls, and in certain context…

There’s no way a reasonable person would interpret that as a threat, it feels like you’re playing silly games trying to widen the Overton window by sanewashing an obviously unreasonable reaction.

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

#602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No this was before chatgpt launched

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

#604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings Just greping for 'Israel' or 'Palestine' gives 13 incidents, the latest occurring in 2000. It's a quite large share of the hijackings on the list, much more so that I'd have imagined de novo . Reading through a few of them, most of the hijackers had a fair bit of mental instability (duh?). So, I could totally see them naming a bluetooth something crazy if they…

> the latest occurring in 2000 26 years ago. That is not a current thing and isn't relevant.

The latest was 9/11 and that is still quite relevant to us today.

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

#605
post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will the captain likewise call the FBI if some knuckledragging mouth breather with three ex-wives and a flag tattoo on his groin has an access point called 'Make Murucuh Great Again'? That would make me uncomfortable on the flight, and it's also one-hundred percent a political statement. One that is actively hostile to millions of Americans, and many more people outside of it.

If the captain thinks it poses a risk to his plane, why not?

I think GP's point is that it's not a risk to the plane? Or in what way is it a risk to the plane? If passenger(s) are wearing a super pro or anti Biden or Trump shirt or Bluetooth/SSID name, is that a risk to the plane, as what if there are other people on the plane who feel strongly in the other direction? But if someone really is OK with pilots turning around flights because of such shirts, etc., then wouldn't the better solution for airlines be to ban clothing, stickers, military uniforms, etc., that have countries' flags, candidate names, political slogans, etc. on them? As if someone believes that turning around planes over it is reasonable, better to address that 'problem' even before taking off and costing large amounts of money and time for hundreds of others, instead of based on the whim(?) of a pilot hours into a flight.

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

#607
post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would have been your estimated odds, of a plane hitting twin towers out of malice, a day before 9/11 happened. Lower than walking outside and finding the winning powerball ticket and getting struck by lightning. It's not an impossible thing to happen but it is so unlikely that I don't go around letting the idea dictate anything about my life. It doesn't matter that I know this has happened to somebody, that's…

I agree with you. Acts of terrorism are black swan events. Question is do we as humanity have the stomach to not act on low probability cues and eat the one off consequences. I don't think we do. I think the only way to play this is to ensure that terrorism against us continues to be only rare, unorganised black swans and not an act of any organized and motivated entity. Coming back to this case. Say this was an oper…

  > Now the pilot and the airlines are made a bunch of scapegoats.
Crazy that we let this happen.

  > is the society we live in.
The society we live in is one we make. If we let crazy things happen, crazy things happen.

There's so many real and big problems in the world. We don't seem to care about those things and we end up fighting about the name of a device? Something that is trivial to go about your day ignoring?

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

#608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know for certain if you change the setting General > About > Name in an iPhone it changes what everyone sees when they look at their list of available Bluetooth devices. > I assume other Bluetooth devices are the same, no? No. The iPhone is allowing you to configure what name it broadcasts. But you cannot just tell another device what to broadcast. That device must have its own mechanism for changing its name. Fo…

> Third-party peripherals usually do not have this functionality. What do you mean by ”usually” here? I’m certain all the regular name brands, eg JBL Bose Sonos B&O etc enable the device itself to be configured with a user set name via their app. I’m certain because I’ve used them and done so.

Many of the cheap unbranded/OEM'd ones seem to just use their MAC address, which is (supposed to be) unique.

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

#609
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…

What do they call a software crash? Rapid unscheduled termination?

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

#610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's certainly not true in many European countries This suprised me. I’ve hunted for polling and can find plenty showing a plummeting opinion on Israel, but little on internal polling about a Palestinian state.

Polls are interesting. They depend exclusively on people willing to respond. Let me give you an example of how they don't tell the whole story: In the USA, there are many, many firearms. And there's also a small but very vocal cadre of people who would like to disarm the people. In light of this, if a pollster calls and asks for your opinion on guns, and/or inquires if you have any, a common response is to hang up wi…

Is the person hanging up pro or anti gun rights?

I get that they aren’t counted but it’s hard to guess their stance.

Similarly, it’s always interesting to compare polls to electoral results. The correlation seems to be drifting.

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