Comment by neilv
21 hours ago
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 extremely seriously, for extremely good reasons. A miscommunication can trigger a lot of life-critical emergency mode sudden effort and stress for people. Effort and stress that is occasionally extremely necessary.
It made sense, once I thought of it.
In this particular case, it sounds like it wasn't the teen's fault, nor even a teen being slightly edgy. Just an innocuous product that broadcast a very unfortunate name over Bluetooth. Not something most people would've predicted would be a problem.
Yet, under the circumstances, with the information available, it also sounds like personnel were correct to follow the processes that were designed to prevent terrible disasters.
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.
To add more credence to your point, let's not forget this beautiful line in TFA
This is clearly not a threat. I'm not trying to make a political statement and not going to say what side of this issue I'm on, but whatever your side is you have the right to express it. There's no threat in this WiFi name. You can, and should be able to, name your WiFi hotspot anything. Even any "Free <X>, Fuck <Y>" forall X,Y. Being on the plane doesn't remove your right to free speech and there's no clear and credible threat in this statement.
We've just grown accustomed to security theater. Don't forget, this security theater has resulted in more deaths than 9/11 ever did[0,1,2]
[0] Indirectly. The friction in air travel leads to more people driving, which is objectively a more deadly form of travel. We're talking several orders of magnitude, so even a low percentage of people shifting from air travel to car means substantial numbers. That means your risk of dying or being injured in a car crash also increases because it means more people are on the road. It's not a function of how good of a driver you are, it is a function of how good of a driver they are. So you really do want more people flying
[1] https://www.govexec.com/management/2012/11/tsa-killing-us/59...
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=677549
> Being on the plane doesn't remove your right to free speech
The First Amendment only prevents the government from penalizing your speech. It doesn't stop a private company (airline) kicking you off an airplane for something you said or did.
The PIC (Pilot In Command, aka Captain) is the final authority for the safe operation of the flight (14 CFR Part 91.3). If the Captain determines that a threat exists, they are empowered to do pretty much anything reasonable to deal with the threat. Turning the plane around and landing is certainly in the realm of "reasonable".
Whether you or somebody else who is clearly not an airline captain feel the original actions constituted a threat is pretty much irrelevant.
Signed, airline captain.
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Actually, I don't think it's a good idea to bring your politics into a an enclosed pace like this where people are forced to be a captive audience, notwithstanding that I agree with theparticular sentiment expressed.
> you have the right to express it
Out in public sure. In an airplane you're in someone else's private space (ie the airline's) and everyone is not only confined with you in minimal comfort, they have no way to leave. Trying to 'own' the space in this context is a dick move. If I'm a traveling passenger I don't want to be subject to your political ideas/religious sentiments/music preferences/sporting affiliation or whatever else. Besides the irritation it may or may not inflict on other passengers, it's an unnecessary burden for the flight crew, who are going to have to field any complaints about it.
In short, please stow your rights in the overhead container or in your checked baggage and respect other peoples' right to be left alone.
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> 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 contexts they are going to err very strongly on the side of being safe rather than sorry.
> Being on the plane doesn't remove your right to free speech
This is not a free speech issue. This is a safety and consideration for others issue. The right to free speech does not mean the right to ignore the predictable effects that saying certain things is going to have in certain contexts. We're all supposed to be responsible adults who understand that we can't push our pet issues everywhere we go.
> We've just grown accustomed to security theater.
Easy for you to say since you're not the one responsible for the safety of a planeload of people. This is not a "security theater" issue either. You don't have the right to trumpet your pet issue everywhere you go.
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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 had them those days.
Also, most of the incidents ended up being fairly well handled and there weren't many casualties. But if I were a pilot and I were getting paid regardless of turning the plane around or dealing with a possibly fatal multi-day saga, I'd likely just turn the plane around too.
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You definitely don't have the (implied) constitutional right to much on an airplane. Why not wear no shirt, a balaclava and hold up a flag above your head - go ahead and try it. As soon as the plans lands, something terrible will happen to you. In some destinations, even worse things.
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this is one of those "if you see something, no you didn't" times. It seems to me like the fault lies more with the reporter.
Does naming WiFi hotspot to reflect one’s political views achieve anything? I am not against free speech or expression of freedom, just wondering if such “protests” (assuming that is what this is) have any affect at all?
Flying is already a stressful experience - between security checks, waiting for flights, unruly passengers, super cramped seats etc. Why add more stress? Either protest seriously at an appropriate time/place or just use the airport for what it is, to go to your destination. Why get cute with ineffective methods of protest like changing WiFi name? In the end, all it achieved was hours of delay and even more stress to passengers, right?
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> Being on the plane doesn't remove your right to free speech
While I agree with you that this was obviously a ridiculous overreaction, an air plane is not a public space. It's more akin to being in someones living room in that the pilot has absolute authority over whom to kick out for whatever reason. If they don't like your hair, they can have you escorted out by police if you don't comply. They won't do it normally because it's bad PR and their employer wouldn't like it, but they could. Not free speech amendment violated.
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> This is clearly not a threat. I'm not trying to make a political statement and not going to say what side of this issue I'm on, but whatever your side is you have the right to express it
Fully agree, however consider the hotspot being called "fuck israel" on a plane half full of Hasidic Jews (the ones refusing to board because they're still praying and knocking their head against the wall, and refuse to sit next to women).
Or the hotspot's called something about Allah and porkchops on a flight to S-Arabia.
Or something about "fuck PSG" when there's 20 hooligans on board (these guys destroy their own city even when things go right for them)
Freedom of expression yes but these things are completely misplaced in that context. It's unnecessarily provocative in a tight confined space. It's a recipe for unrest during the flight, something nobody wants and the captain is right to call out.
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I don’t disagree with you but it’s worth remembering your rights are very different onboard a crewed commercial vessel. As I understand it if a member of crew tells you to do something and you don’t do it, you’re in trouble.
It's not a direct threat but it is a passive one, it's also swearing and a contentious statement in a confined space where everyone needs to get along for the next N hours. They know damn well what the issue is but they're going to put their hands up and claim they're just expressing an opinion and they're not hurting anyone. It's childish behavior imo.
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> The friction in air travel leads to more people driving
Y'know, if America didn't treat intercity passenger rail like garbage, we wouldn't be having this problem...
I see what you are saying but then where do you draw the line? What if the wifi name is “fuck all pilots” - “united is doomed” or “we will all die”?
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> I'm not trying to make a political statement and not going to say what side of this issue I'm on, but whatever your side is you have the right to express it.
Maybe, maybe not. The Supreme Court of the USA has ruled that speech is not protected at all times and in all places. There are “time, place, and manner restrictions”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...
I have a hard time believing courts wouldn’t side with the captain here. All they have to say is they are in charge, perceived a threat to their crew, provided a chance for resolution, and ultimately played it safe. All of which are true.
Does, or should, free speech apply when you’re literally in someone else’s vehicle?
If you want to spew hateful dumb shit, go do it in the town square or on public property.
Airlines reserve the right to refuse serve to anyone at anytime for any reason and they’re not required to even give you a reason.
You’re literally their guest.
You do know that "zionists" is a code work for jews in general right?
A zionist is someone who thinks Israel has a right to exist.
Then I am a zionist and I am white as snow.
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>During this incident
In case you missed it, it was a different incident than the one we're discussing.
>You can, and should be able to, name your WiFi hotspot anything. Even any "Free <X>, Fuck <Y>" forall X,Y
Edgy idea, bro.
Not like a certain terrorist organization[1] with Palestine Liberation in its name[1] literally pioneered armed airplane hijackings for its cause, successfully[2] performing[3] quite[4] a few[5] of[6] them[7] back in the day.
> whatever your side is you have the right to express it.
You seem to have confused an airplane for a public square.
The captain of the plane determines the extent of your rights in-flight, taking many factors into account. Including the comfort of passengers.
You ain't got no "free speech" right to blast music on your Bluetooth speaker, and the same applies to edgy Bluetooth device names which everyone on board can see.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Front_for_the_Liberati...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawson%27s_Field_hijackings
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_426
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_840_(1969)
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_426
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Airways_Flight_255
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lufthansa_Flight_649
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1. Are super-organized, highly-capable, fully-sane terrorists the only threat? Or does the threat model include mentally-ill / personality disorder people, who might make mistakes, or taunt those whose job it is to stop them? Or include people of either kind, who create diversions? Or include people who make a statement in an unexpected way?
2. Did the captain, flight control, and everyone else who needed to decide, have definitive information that the report was only an innocuous Bluetooth advertisement for an innocuous consumer device, and somehow knew that no other threat was going on? If not, then I'd commend whomever decided to follow protocol, and err on the side of inconveniencing a lot of people, rather than risk tragedies that the protocol was designed to prevent.
Landing the plane because of something that could be interpreted as a bomb threat without waiting to be sure it was intended that way seems like a precaution on the far end of reasonable, but still reasonable.
Demanding that people disable Bluetooth does not seem reasonable. If there's an actual bomber, tipping them off that you're reacting to their threat might lead them to set off the bomb early. Similarly, demanding that someone shut off the "Free Palestine, F Zionists" WiFi network or the flight crew will call the FBI is counterproductive; if that's cause to call the FBI, just call them. A warning lets the person cover their tracks.
For the record, "BOMB" is probably cause to call the FBI and "Free Palestine, F Zionists" by itself almost certainly isn't, but is something to mention when calling them about "BOMB".
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The thing that surprises me is they flew back to Newark for almost 90 minutes. It doesn't make sense to me.
(1) Either you believe the threat is credible and you put it down at the nearest suitable airport in the least amount of time. Say Sydney at about 200km to your west, or FSP at 150km in the direction you're going (not a great fit, but doable). In both cases you could probably land within 20 minutes, a bit more if you aim for Gander (Fun history for that airport, great as an emergency diversion).
(2) or, you believe the threat is not credible. At this point you might as well continue the flight. Flying 90 minutes back does not seem (to me) to meaningfully reduce the risk if someone is actually planning to trigger a bomb anyway.
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> I'd commend whomever decided to follow protocol
Protocol would be quietly diverting to the closest airport. They didn’t do that. They chugged back to Newark. After making a visible scene on the PA. This was a hissy fit.
Literally no pilot ever has been able to know that no other threat was going on.
> Are super-organized, highly-capable, fully-sane terrorists the only threat? Or does the threat model include mentally-ill / personality disorder people, who might make mistakes, or taunt those whose job it is to stop them?
I want to think the answer is both. But I cannot think of an example where #2 has actually happened in history resulting in injury or death.
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A minor grammar nit. Its commend whoever decided to follow protocol, not whomever. You choose the case of who(m)ever based on its function in the dependent clause not the clause’s function in the sentence.
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I don't think a threatening name would be unheard of in a hijacking scenario. Someone calls saying they have a bomb on board, and as evidence there is a Bluetooth device called "bomb," showing they have an accomplice on board. They then make demands. This scenario doesn't seem unreasonable in light of pre-9/11 hijacking attempts.
Yes, this was a huge reaction to something that was almost certainly benign, but "almost certainly" isn't an acceptable risk for 100s of people in an explosive flying cylinder. It truly sucks, there maybe can be better procedures, but "100s of people majorly inconvenienced" is better than "100s of people dead in fireball."
The really crazy thing is they returned to the origin instead of the nearest airport. If it was really an emergency they would have got out of the air at the nearest runway of suitable length instead of flying all the way back. Just theater.
You word "kind" unzips to three distinct categories:
1. failing hard: Is $trigger_word in the context of an attack, or is it innocuous? Failing hard then assessing the context question later is at least a simple system to design and implement safely. And an adversary can't pentest it. I mean they can, but they'll fail hard every time no matter the context. And that is very expensive for the attacker.
2. failing soft: throw away your too large container of liquid. I'm not sure what this liquid container rule prevents. In any case, an adversary can pentest this as often as they can buy a ticket, and they'll just blend in with all the other grumpy passengers forced to throw out their containers of liquid and continue on through security.
3. don't touch the spaghetti makefile: add a specific rule about removing shoes after the relevant attempt at an attack. Also, let's keep it for decades because no politician wants the liability of having voted to remove a TSA rule in the case of a future attack.
Conflating these all under a single "brainworm" category tells me you are exactly the kind of person who shouldn't be in charge of designing a secure system!
You're responding to a comment in a neighboring, but close reality. In this reality, it wasn't a dropped application request or even an account signup failure. Instead, it was a highly legible, public decision. This was an expensive choice.
There's no mystery to an attacker. Now it is known to all that trigger words are part of airline security SOP. Attacker tradecraft will be refined.
> Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"?
The bomb aboard Pan Am Flight 103 (the Lockerbie bombing) was hidden inside a Toshiba 'BomBeat' RT-SF16 radio.
It treating every BomBeat RT-SF16 radio as if it contained a bomb would be a moronic reaction to that
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 referring to something comparatively trivial like the ticketing system being down.
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.
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That's such a poor argument. What is the alternative here? Just let anyone fly with a dozen devices with the names BOMB and CRASH hoping that an actual bomb doesn't go off? Systems and processes exist for a reason.
Your example of 150ml liquids has no connection to this security measure nor incident either. That's just a straw man.
I think there’s a safety issue that isn’t necessarily reliant on ‘bomb’ being an explosive device: it’s the impact on other passengers.
Planes traditionally have avoided certain kinds of movies and such to avoid creating panic in the cabin. Here every passenger is looking at their phone, and if one guy makes the obvious “there’s a bomb on the plane” joke, the captain/crew could be in a situation.
Crowd management is essential to crew safety and crowd safety.
> Just let anyone fly with a dozen devices with the names BOMB and CRASH?
That sounds terrible. Please get me the manager.
>Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"?
Yes
They're threatening to blow up an airliner or actually doing so to hit the news. 911 terrorists had blades, bomb jackets (whether these things are actual doesn't matter, saying you have them is enough), and eventually destroyed the tallest towers in NY and part of Pentagon and erased themselves while committing the crime
The point of terrorism is to be visible, dramatic and cause teror. It's not to get a stealth award for hacking the coupon system at the shop and get away with it
A bomb (real or not) planted by terrorists or hijackers is meant to be eventually known one way or another. It's the point
>The point of terrorism is to be visible, dramatic and cause teror. It's not to get a stealth award for hacking the coupon system at the shop and get away with it
I agree with you... that's exactly what makes this situation so ludicrous. I'm not sure that an ambiguous, vaguely menacing Bluetooth device name is really going to do the trick.
Indeed it's so dumb that even in the extraordinarily unlikely event that it really was intended as a threat, you can still quite safely ignore it. I rather suspect that if someone wants to make a threat they won't just throw up their hands in despair because nobody bothered checking their Bluetooth pairing settings page. They'll actually communicate their threat to someone in a less ambiguous way.
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> Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"? Do you think this behaviour has any meaningful true positives?
You seem overconfident. For one thing, someone getting a Bluetooth signal has absolutely no confidence the device is genuinely only a speaker. For another, it is entirely possible that a nefarious actor could screw up and forget to turn off a wireless transmitter.
Can you imagine if the threat was real and news came out that the Bluetooth device name literally said what it was? People right here would be mocking the personnel for being so stupid that they ignored literally what was written in front of them.
I don't think people would be mocking bombing victims
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What if it is not the terrorists naming them? What if it is a good samaritan trying to warn the pilot but this is the only way they can get a message out?
> What if it is a good samaritan trying to warn the pilot but this is the only way they can get a message out?
Then you quietly divert to the nearest airport. Asking for the speaker to be turned off on PA and then chugging all the way back to Newark makes it plain nobody was acting seriously.
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You watched too many movies.
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.
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.
This is explicitly mentioned in the article:
> Though some have questioned why anyone intending to blow up a plane would broadcast the word bomb, many terrorist acts have relied on the threat of a bomb as leverage during attempted hijackings or hostage situations.
It still makes absolutely no sense. First of all, this is not currently a bomb threat up until someone actually makes a threat. Second of all, in the event that somebody does make a threat, the existence of a Bluetooth device named "Bomb" doesn't make the threat any more credible or serious.
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> Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"?
If they knew it was a BT speaker, they wouldn’t have returned.
OTOH, who would name a bomb with a Bluetooth transceiver in a way that advertises its function. I’d use something like “pacemaker” so that nobody would ask me to turn it off.
If anything, this aversion has now made it clear that sneaking a device that can be made coin-sized into a bunch of passengers luggage would be sufficient to throw air travel into total chaos...
That doesn't seem like a smart precedent to set.
You can't compare a decision made in possession of all of the facts in a calm environment with full hindsight, with decision made in the moment with limited information and hundreds of lives on the line.
No sane terrorist will also call about a bomb on board, but those are taken seriously, too.
And as correctly mentioned by others, we shouldn’t be concentrating on an ideal game theory spherical terrorist in a vacuum.
maybe not, but a terrorist would call in a fake bomb threat to inflect terror; that's kind of the point.
> Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"?
Two comments.
If they did and no one took any action people would be asking for their (authority's) blood because they would look really stupid.
If terrorist are intelligent wouldn't they be doing exactly what is not expected of them.
This is modern version of Pascal's wager, a bad game theoretic outcome.
The pictures on the ground posted by some Redditors were even more ridiculous. What looked like over 100 police cars surrounded the airplane after it landed. If there was an actual bomb onboard why would the bomber wait for the plane to land?
It's as if multiple airline employees' and other officials' brains were simultaneously unable to process any sentence that starts with "If it was an actual bomb, then why..."
Instead, everyone applied the same rudimentary "IF [bomb mentioned in any context] THEN [take the most extreme actions written in the playbook]."
But it seems that those actions were in fact not taken, otherwise they should have landed and the nearest airport, which they didn't. So either the captain knew it wasn't an emergency (but then why did he do it) or he/she violated the protocol by delaying landing.
I wouldn't have thought so, but until now I didn't even realise that there were Bluetooth devices with configurable names.
Imagine the headlines though! (says your will boss, or bosses boss)
It's still stupid, but they are imagining the news:
> This guy said "it's probably fine" right before Flight 1337 explodes over the Atlantic.
Now personally I'd actually be willing to take that risk: the odds are so overwhelmingly in favor of it being a dumb prank; you might as well refuse to take a shower for fear of slipping on the soap.
But all it takes is one person up the chain of command to say "this would be bad PR" and you've lost your job.
> Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"? Do you think this behaviour has any meaningful true positives?
You know how they ask you if you have any contraband or if you’re a terrorist or whatever?
You’d be surprised at how many people get busted because they answer truthfully
> You’d be surprised at how many people get busted because they answer truthfully
Would I? For contraband maybe with naive tourists who just don’t know that what they’re carrying is considered contraband, but I would love a source on a single terrorist being caught because they confessed after being asked in a form.
I get your point, but I think that such high risk situations simply are not compatible with common sense, case by case decision making. As a consequence we need some extremely risk averse rules that everyone always follows, no matter how insanely risk averse they sometimes are and everyone in the situation probably knows it and agrees it’s insane.
Because the alternative is a nebulous fog of war where safety decisions are mood, situation, experience, and personality influenced when they shouldn’t be. And when accidents happen we only have difficult to interpret decisions to trace back to. The decisions have to be brainless and black and white.
Could the black and white rules be better? Maybe yes. Then let’s change them carefully.
But I do believe the rules should be black and white, and I personally in this light truly don’t mind I can’t name my Bluetooth device bomb, and I can’t say bomb or joke about having a bomb, no matter how obvious it is that I don’t have one, if that’s the current black and white rules.
Pilots are explicitly trained to deal with high risk situations and to think rationally. They have a Threat and Error Management(TEM)system. Additionally, the training includes unruly passengers and bomb on board response. Once a threat is determined they squeak 7700. Inform ATC using the words "bomb on board", begin immediate descent and divert to the nearest suitable airport.
> Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"?
Of course not!
That's what they'd name their bluetooth bomb.
Agreed. I’m glad I live in a normal country, last time I was in the US and Canada it struck me how truly insane it is.
Genuine terrorism relies on the creation of fear and alarm in their target group... not just concealment.
You can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater…
on the other hand someone could just be that stupid and if so at least you caught it, err on the side of caution basically
The approach to flight security is a great example of why regularly erring on the side of caution is a terrible approach.
“Forensic investigators, reviewing the black box communications, discovered that the pilots had identified and were aware of a device named ‘bomb’ on the airplane but elected to take no action.”
> Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"?
Yes. Not every time. But some of the time. Like imagine someone likes to stay organized and they have a bunch of bluetooth devices and gives them all logical names, speaker for speaker, keyboard for keyboard and bomb for bomb. They make a mental note to change the name of bomb before deploying it but then life happens and they forget to fix it.
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I have no desire to defend people's linguistic games that were extremely low value. I do not think these games pass a cost benefit calculation. But fighting against these memes also doesn't pass a cost benefit calculation.
Having said all that, turning a plane around is a meaningfully larger cost on everyone involved than having a commit/merge hook that tells you to rename a variable.
Engineers still say blacklist, even though I avoid it in my own communications, it's not the end of the world.
I've never heard of that before, is it common behavior?
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Totally different situation. People are removing those words as a sign of respect and a very small number of people are chasing down those that don't because it implies an open lack of respect.
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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 / fun features / easter eggs in professional software. But having to pull a 2-hours overtime to crank out a new release definitely settled me on the side of never again.
edit: To be clear no one actually thought it was a problem, but our QA were very much serious about reducing any potential for confusion when dealing with >1million USD machinery.
> To be clear no one actually thought it was a problem
[1] Susan Kare https://kare.com/ at EG8 (2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jlb77dDHIXQ&t=273s
"I designed this image [unhappy Macintosh] and this bomb because I was told they would never be seen by anyone! So I thought I could be a little irreverent. But unfortunately, that was not the case."
"The programmers truly thought at the time that they would be deeply hidden. I know that right after the Mac shipped we were in our software area and a call came in fielded through Apple and it was a woman who was using MacWrite, and it had crashed, and she was afraid her computer was going to blow up! So, I felt kinda bad!"
Transcript from http://jimrattray.net/blog/2014/7/1/on-designing-an-iconic-b... .
Whether you think emojis are ok or not, there are times and places.
That’s not a time and place.
Yeah. If I'm trying to debug a problem and keep running into error messages, the emojis would drive me up the wall.
I know, I was against it when he added it, triggered a 5min discussion and I was "whatever, sure"...
> 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.
Over? Hello person from the future, may I ask when this phase ends?
No this was before chatgpt launched
Similarly, I worked on in-flight user-facing software, and we were allowed to use a “plane pointing downwards” icon to denote arrival time, because the connotations to crash were too strong.
No one believed that the icon would make the plane crash, but it’s about creating an environment that makes people feel as safe and comfortable as possible. You don’t want people freaking out when they’re locked in a small metal tube in the sky.
JFC, we have coddled people way too much. People have cordoned themselves off into perfectly manicured little boxes so they lose the fucking plot as soon as they see something unexpected.
I've heard of stuff like this but I think it's fading. I remember tuning into in-flight radio a few years ago and hearing "love when you hit the ground, girl." If anything, I find the loosening strictures unimpressive, somehow - as though the collective brainpower to enforce them is dissipating.
If the "terrorists" had changed the name of their bluetooth speaker, as asked, would they have been correct to proceed?
If it helps to prevent “terror” on a flight, then yes.
I remember once a colleague receiving a call about a non-functional test environment during his commute, and he wanted to tell the ops person to restart all the processes. I think fellow passengers in his bus were not comforted to hear someone say over the phone "yeah, kill them all".
Now wait for manufactures introducing mandatory flight mode on devices (with Apple leading the way) that “trusted partners”, like airlines will be able to force-activate themselves.
I read somewhere years ago of panic ensuing when a pilot greeted a colleague on the radio with "Hi, Jack". Whether it happened for real or not, the idea of a simple word causing fighter jets to scramble is just crazy although fully understandable in the world post 9/11.
What do they call a software crash? Rapid unscheduled termination?
Aviation aside, it is worthwhile remembering that IBM traditionally had a whole other jargon vocabulary for computing. A 'crash' was an ABEND, an abnormal end.
They call it a FLOP (Functional Loss Of Performance, or something like that), I was told on a tour of an FAA ATC computer facility.
I used to work with a small Aviation-related software company. There it was really not like this, the boss made jokes about it. On the other hand engineering-wise things were done really differently: no branches, fail fast, only e2e tests etc. Probably the rift between small companies and corporate culture also applies here.
The French ministry of foreign affairs (state department) have been giving advice to traveller for decades
There was a time when their advice for travels to the US of A was to not tell TSA or law enforcement that you had a bomb in your bag, as it wasn't funny anymore and they would not take it as a joke
I was in New York for a conference 4 years ago, I was discussing with someone a previous project I had worked on in the UK that was a tool for companies to forecast certain risk scenarios "...you know like a building flooding or blowing up"
There were suddenly a lot of unhappy faces looking at me. I guess some folks are still a bit sensitive about that...
Aviation documentation in general is expected to use special, constrained variant of english (Simplified Technical English) where one of the requirements is that every word has preferably only one meaning, and there's a standard dictionary of those meanings that were selected.
Similarly there are various things like Aviation English for actual live comms, though they have less specifity, not to that level.
And yes, this is related to being clear and understandable both when communicating something live (you might have to dictate from a manual over the radio!) but also over native language barriers
For the curious, it’s AST-STE100.
https://www.asd-ste100.org/
I managed to download it!
Feeling very proud. That compsci degree finally paid off
This reminds me of the story I read of someone trying to take a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorimeter#Bomb_calorimeters onto a flight, in the pre-9/11 era. Fortunately he was allowed to after some questioning, but it did raise some eyebrows. I imagine trying to ship one of those would also arouse some attention.
The abbreviation "BoM" (bill of materials) is commonly used in engineering. It's also pronounced just how you might suspect. I wonder if it's consciously avoided in sectors like these.
I've definitely made the effort when traveling for work to always say "Bill of Materials" if I'm doing any work in an airport.
So if your name is Gunnar, no chance in breaking into the industry?
There's a story (apocryphal or not) that does the rounds among mathematicians: two young PhD students in differential geometry (or topology in some variations) on the way to their first conference. They're eagerly discussing as they board their flight: "… and then, you blow up the points on this plane …" :-)
I can appreciate the concern over these words among the flight staff.
But at the same time in the wake of these type of incidents and seeing how they are responded to, if I were a group that wanted to harm economic interests I'd invest in malware that I'd spend years silently spreading and then at some future date flip to a mode where infected devices detect when they are likely to be in-flight via GPS data and have them randomly change wifi hotspot and bluetooth identifiers to 'bomb' to inflict chaos and economic damage across a system that is apparently incapable of dealing with that.
I don't blame people who are responsible for the lives of others for overreacting in a one-off situation, but such overreaction could be weaponized.
Sorry but this just sounds like complete lunacy
Here's the thing. If you're going to forbid a bunch of words and names for bullshit security 'reasons', you're going to have to be clear and up front about it.
Just like how we are clear and up front about water bottles, knitting needles, bottle openers, and nunchucks being forbidden in carry-on baggage. We clearly sign all that shit, we don't just keep that list secret.
Put up some wall-sized placards listing the words and device and product names (or the kinds of names, we don't need to be pedantic) that you are not supposed to use in airport, so that there is no confusion on the matter. Just because this is obvious and unwritten in your cultural context doesn't mean that international travelers who may not speak the language well are going to be aware of all the unwritten bullshit rules.
> In this particular case, it sounds like it wasn't the teen's fault, nor even a teen being slightly edgy.
Told to turn it off and refused to do so. Why are you defending the selfish little prick?
Refused, or unable? It might have been in the luggage compartment, or they just might not have known how.
Could also have been a prank played on somebody who wasn't even aware
This presupposes knowing that a fitbit uses bluetooth. As I understand it, there are also models (e.g. Fitbit Charge) which cannot be turned off anyway.
Plus there is an overall assumption here that the owner of a Fitbit knows that the device nickname is visible to anyone, and not just themselves.
These things are certainly not at all obvious in an app-centric bluetooth device context.
I don’t buy it.
I understand protecting people’s sensibilities by avoiding these words. That part makes sense. Same basic politeness as not using curse words in my variable names.
But to turn an entire flight around because of a Bluetooth device name? How does that make any rational sense?
Look at it from a Bayesian perspective. There’s some probability P that there’s a bomb on a random plane. Now, given that a specific plane has a Bluetooth device named “bomb,” what is P for that specific plane?
I argue that P is unchanged. I’d be interested if anyone disagrees with this assessment.
Given the probability is unchanged, why do anything?
I don’t think even the people involved believed there was any danger. They had closer airports they could have diverted to. Going all the way back to Newark makes no sense if you actually think there’s an increased chance there’s a bomb on the plane that might detonate at any time, or a hijacker who might decide to make an attempt, or any other threat.
Going back to the origin airport instead of a closer one is what you do when there’s some mundane problem like the weather being unsuitable at the destination, or a non-critical equipment failure.
So how does this make any rational sense? It doesn’t. It’s performance. Everyone wants to be seen Taking Things Seriously. Nobody is permitted (either explicitly by rules, or implicitly by social expectations) to say “somebody is being a real jerk, but there’s no point in diverting.”
It was not only because of the name. I think a big part of the turn around was the non compliance by the passengers. They were asked to turn off all Bluetooth devices but did not.
The device was probably in checked baggage. Or in an overhead compartment where the owner would have been seen and socially ostracized for removing it.
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