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.
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. 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
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.
> 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.
That is a very, very, very different statement than "I'm calling the FBI."
You're talking about should or shouldn't. The issue here is past that point: whether it's then right to involve people who are empowered to take away your physical liberty, and worse.
> That is a very, very, very different statement than "I'm calling the FBI."
Yes, but on an aircraft the captain is the dictator. They can do basically whatever they want within the confines of law and company policy - and honestly with enough seniority, which the captain on a transatlantic flight has a lot of - they can probably ignore company policy once or twice and get away with it and keep their job.
As far as I'm aware there is no law preventing the captain from deciding to go back because they don't like one of the passengers blasting their opinions to the entire aircraft. What the opinion is, its levels of subjectivity or objectivity, and whether or not it's popular is completely irrelevant.
I think if the captain doesn’t like you, what they say goes & it’s a federal matter.
I think the reason for the captain not liking you is secondary and could get him fired but it’s still: mess around in federal airspace, deal with the feds. Follow all instructions of all flight crew or you’re a criminal, regardless (I think).
Not actually the FBI though is it? Captain probably wanted to sound serious (mission accomplished).
Doesn’t even necessarily have to be the captain - refusing to follow instructions/direction of any member of the flight crew is a serious problem.
And yeah, if it was ridiculous or violated some other law or something they’d eventually have to deal with the consequences of that, but while in the air, what they say goes.
What an odd thing to fixate on . . . swap the pronouns around any way you prefer, and my statement remains correct. The captain is in charge of the aircraft and she is to be obeyed if you want to fly on her aircraft. She can refuse to accept any passenger for any reason. If it is a stupid reason, she may have a problem with her employer later, but nobody can overrule her in the moment.
Friendly reminder that not everyone's first language is English, and for a lot of people for whom it isn't, gender-neutral pronouns can be a pretty foreign concept and it's easy to forget about it. We just apply the natural gender that the word has in our language (such as a chair being feminine in both Portugese and French, so a lot of natives of those languages may mistakenly refer to a chair as "her" in English). I wouldn't go so far as assume the person you're replying to is sexist or whatever it is you're thinking just from the fact they referred to an imaginary captain as "he".
Yes. The captain has the authority, by law, to remove anyone (or everyone) for any reason. There is basically nothing the captain is legally barred from doing while the plane is en route.
A design flaw it only becomes due to people’s violent acts. If the goal is safety, we should spend more time helping people process their shit and less on raising shields. They only make people more angry. Everybody draws the line differently, but pushing your data on somebody else’s device without their consent is an intrusion, and as such I consider it to be an act of violence. We need to grow up and understand how to break cycles of violence, not push it further towards mutual destruction.
Why the “vs”?! All three acts are acts of violence. We can order them by our own judgment of intensity, but they’re still all violent. And as such also expressions of pain/hurt, which will lead to further expressions until it is finally seen and addressed. We all know this, but still act like we don’t.
No - someone dropping a picture to your phone when you have the ability enabled is not violence by any definition used by people with functioning frontal cortexes. Maybe it's good to remove the "Everybody" option, maybe it's not. Maybe it's good to make it auto-disable after 10 minutes, maybe it's not. Irrelevant.
But absolutely nothing will make a photo popping onto your phone a violent act.
You are actually giving away liberties when boarding a plane and I'm pretty sure this is even written somewhere in the contract between you and the airline that you agreed on.
No contract is allowed to take away what the law gives you. Either the law says "except on a plane/ship/etc." (which is plausible) or the contract is invalid.
Can you imagine how it would be if every contract you sign had a "I own you now, no backsies"?
That sounds like a technicality. You can absolute agree to not do something that would otherwise be lawful. You still have the same rights, but you have other restrictions on you. The two can exist concurrently.
On a commercial passenger plane it's frowned upon.
On planes in general, many people jump nude for their 100th skydive - the original and best video of this has been scrubbed from youtube, but a quick search shows others.
>>this is even written somewhere in the contract between you and the airline that you agreed on
What I wanted to say is that you'll never give up any civil liberties because of a contract alone. If the contract can take those away it's because a law never gave them to you in those circumstances in the first place, so you never had them to begin with.
I just wanted to make it clear that you cannot agree to give up something that the law gives you. If the law doesn't give you something, you have nothing to give up.
The law gives very few liberties. And the places where people think it give liberties, it is actually just banning laws from being made around liberties.
Freedom of speech is the peak of this. People think it means "I can say whatever I like wherever I like". But that's not what it is. The government cannot make laws curtailing speech (though, it does... enforcement and interpretation don't line up with the original intent). You can, however, sign an NDA which curtails your speech. A business can kick you out for saying something they don't like. An employer can fire you for saying "poodle" one too many times.
And that's what we are dealing with around airlines. They absolutely can kick you off the plane and ban you for almost any reason. For what you say, wear, or because they don't like how tall or short you are.
The law really only protects a few things. Your race, your gender, your religion. Everything else is fair game for a private institution to discriminate against. They can kick you off a plane because you are a journalist. They can kick you off because you won't quarter soldiers. They can kick you off because you don't submit to a search of all your property.
Right, those other people (well, their devices) are asking you (well, your device) what your (device's) name is. You're not telling them until they ask. They need to leave you alone!
Not only do the people have no way to leave, the owner of the place also has no practical way to make people leave, like they would for example in a restaurant. At least once the plane is in the air.
And the captain has to ensure the safety not only of the flying machine but also of the cabin. So I can absolutely understand the move here and the need to forbid everything that could incite violence in the cabin.
Anyone willing to start a fight over a tacky WiFi name should be committed. Seriously, what an insane thing to do. It's such an easy thing to not be bothered by. It sits in the background, invisible, and you're... just letting it live rent free in your head? There's so many more annoying things to flying than someone's dumb personal hotspot name.
Can we just recognize how crazy of a scenario this is?
The argument is that if I'm responsible for the safety of a very heterogenous group of people in the cabin of my airplane, I will assume that those people are already stressed and will probably act even less rational than they normally would. And that's all that matters in that moment.
> If they're that crazy you put them in a hospital because clearly they need help
I think the point here is the captain is responsible for an isolated pocket of humanity in a cabin. That captain is to take that cabin way up in the air, move it a lot, and get it back down safely.
And not all of the risks are about moving the cabin. Many of the risks are within the cabin and while some dickhead getting uppity at the pub will get collared by the police, it is a totally different problem while in the air.
So, while in the cabin, don't try to fuck around and find out. No one wants to find out anything. They just want to get to the other end of the trip.
Define crazy. Because you sound crazy to me. The point of view depends on where you sit. Some other people maybe want to put you in prison, for your „craziness“. Care for what you wish.
> I will assume that those people are already stressed and will probably act even less rational than they normally would
They turned what most passengers considered at most tasteless into a real threat worthy of returning to base. How can this possibly help with the stress? If this was to reduce stress, it was disproportionate and backfired in a major way.
Why are airlines adding to every part of that stress but drawing the line at a device's BT name?
Everything about flying is getting worse. The process of buying the tickets full of shady practices and dark patters, the check-in, the boarding process, the cabin luggage getting smaller for the same type of ticket, the ever more cramped seats, the removal of the old amenities like free food or snacks. They are all getting more terrible and adding stress. From what I can tell from my own ticket purchases with the same airlines in the past, the prices kept up with inflation over the past decades but the services have fallen far behind.
Do people get kicked out for offensive t-shirts and tattoos? How about bad cologne, good cologne, bad BO, or just for being so ugly that it's offensive?
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.
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.
1. In what way is it a risk to the plane? Or is the idea that we should not attempt to evaluate whether pilot's decisions are objective and reasonable? Is there some objective rule being used? (Or if an objective rule can't be stated, is it more like the pilot's feelings or mood about the passenger(s) at any particular moment?)
2. But if someone believes it's reasonable for pilots to turn planes around based on whether someone is wearing a pro or anti Biden/Trump shirt, etc. wouldn't the better solution for airlines to just proactively ban clothing, stickers, etc. with countries' flags, candidate names, political slogans, etc. rather than having pilots turn around planes midflight based on a whim(?), costing hundreds of people large amounts of time and money?
Part H:
Safety – Whenever refusal or removal of a Passenger may be necessary for the safety of such Passenger or other Passengers or members of the crew including, but not limited to:
5. Passengers who are barefoot, not properly clothed, or whose clothing is lewd, obscene or offensive;
Is the point here that clothing containing a pro or anti Biden or Trump, or have a countries' flag, or be a US military uniform, should "pose a risk to his plane", and so airlines should be proactively banning such things from being allowed onboard? Or how does it answer the grandparent and great-grandparent's comments questions about why such thing should "pose a risk to his 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
Exactly
> as what if there are other people on the plane who feel strongly in the other direction?
But it is absolutely batshit insane that we would punish the person with a tacky device name. You are punishing the wrong people. Punish the people who think it is okay to start a fight over something that is so easy to ignore.
This is such an insane thing we're doing. We're policing the behavior of functioning adults because it might upset dysfunctional adults? Why the hell are we creating a society that protects crazy people? It's absolutely insane
1. Does the pilot need anything but his personal biases to claim that poses a risk to the plane?
2. Because any rational person understands that we need to coexist in a society with a spectrum of political opinion, and that a fucking access point name doesn't cross the boundary between safe and dangerous to society.
3. Because doing it for one and not the other is obviously biased and arbitrary and demonstrates that it's not an actual danger to the plane, it's just some asshole with a bad day choosing to exercise his authority over someone whose politics he dislikes. To severe consequences to both that person and everyone else on board the plane. That's not a society you want to strive for.
> One that is actively hostile to millions of Americans
No it isn't. You can read that implication into it, but it's not "actively hostile" in the way that an "F... X" statement is, for any X, and it's a sign of how slanted the discourse is that you would consider them equivalent.
> 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.
If you are in any way harassing people by shouting through the plane for example, I agree. But the SSID of a WiFi network isn't that. No one is forced to continually read the list of available hotspots over and over again. There is nothing special about the fact that it's on a plane here.
But that isn't what they did. And even if they did, sympathizing isn't being a terrorist yourself. Law enforcement has nothing to do there, unless you're in a totalitarian state.
It's actually even simpler than that. The airplane isn't just a "private business, and you shouldn't mess with their space". They're protected and empowered by broadly ratified conventions (which includes virtually every country in the word), starting with the Tokyo Convention:
> The convention [...] recognises certain powers and immunities of the aircraft commander who on international flights may restrain any person(s) he has reasonable cause to believe is committing or is about to commit an offence liable to interfere with the safety of persons or property on board or who is jeopardising good order and discipline.
> 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.
Its not private space. Its public because they sell tickets. Its like going to any other event, and I don’t think there’s a constitutional exception to free speech on airplanes where you can’t express your opinions.
I'm not sure if you are saying one can or can't express opinions on airliners.. but I do want to point out that the "contract of carriage" of most airlines is more restrictive than you might find for a ticketed event like a concert. You might want to read the one for United, just for fun (especially if you fly). https://www.united.com/en/us/fly/contract-of-carriage.html Rule 21, item H 16 even indicates that you can't smell bad. YMMV, but it is pretty far from a "public" space as I define one.
Your passport is inherently political. Uniformed service members boarding first is inherently political. The choice of language the crew is able to communicate to passengers in is inherently political.
If I can ignore seeing your neglected toenails tangled haphazardly around the sandiest pair of adidas flip-flops you possess, you can kindly ignore the SSID "Electronic Frontier Foundation", Karen.
> Actually, I don't think it's a good idea to bring your politics into a an enclosed pace like this
Ah yes, the classic "your politics," but of course the person having this opinion's politics are perfectly fine, because they're the "normal" person with the "normal" politics, not like that crazy person who thinks some randos shouldn't be the subject of genocide. How dare they!
I believe the idea is that no one should be declaring their political beliefs loudly in such an environment regardless of how “normal” they are. I’m not sure broadcasting a WiFi endpoint meets my threshold for “loudly”, but otherwise I tend to agree.
Maybe, but you know as well as I do that if the SSID were "God Bless America," "Support our Troops," "Fuck George Bush," "I'm glad Hitler is dead," "The South will rise again," or any number of things that there would be no incident.
I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not, but what exactly is your vision of HN "without politics"? It's very hard to avoid because so many technical things have overlap with politics, and lots of technical decisions have political implications. HN currently loves talking about all things AI, and that's probably one of the biggest political topics out there.
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.
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.
There is no more succinct way to describe a Zionist than by using the word Zionist. To assume anyone who says "Zionist" means "Jew" is to make an unnecessary leap in bad faith.
A lot of people shout 'Free Palestine' before doing some vigilante violence (shooting in DC, firebombing I'm Boulder), so wouldn't that make security officials jumpy?
The whataboutism of Israel being more 'evil' doesn't mitigate the security threat.
Eh, most Nazis that use the words interchangeably really do use them interchangeably. Like, they'll talk about the Jews controlling everything in one sentence and say it's Zionists pushing cultural Marxism or whatever the next.
You realize that calling everyone who criticizes an ongoing genocide an antisemite isn't workable, right?
> This is not a free speech issue. This is a safety and consideration for others issue.
Do you think we're talking about a device named "bomb"? We're talking about a device named "Free Palestine, F Israel". Those are two different situations. How can you even claim the latter is a physical threat? I also don't care if it said "F Palestine". Neither is a credible threat on the plane or the passengers.
The only issue I can see that causing is a fight. And anyone that is willing to start a fight because someone has s stupid device name should be committed because they're insane. That's crazy amounts of petty.
I get my lighter through in Brazil all the time and a friend of mine got giant scissors through in Buenos Aires. It’s entirely a choice to freak out over nothing.
In most of the world you’re allowed to do outlandish things like have a beer at the mall. Or walk outside with one.
>even a tiny probability that it might be a threat has to be paid attention
What if it had been named "Teddy Ruxpin is my friend", but the pilot doesn't know whether that's a secret code for "I'm going to release aerosol sarin nerve gas on the plane"?
Should he react to all messages as if they are threats, because no matter how small the risk is, more than zero is too much?
If you can't know whether something is a threat or not, the only reasonable response is to treat it as a non-threat. Anything else leads to absurd outcomes that make it harder to protect from real threats.
>The right to free speech does not mean the right to ignore the predictable effects
What are the predictable effects for the scenario in question? Please enlighten us, because most of us are apparently unable to predict those ourselves.
> What if it had been named "Teddy Ruxpin is my friend", but the pilot doesn't know whether that's a secret code for "I'm going to release aerosol sarin nerve gas on the plane"?
I'm unable to find any connection between Teddy Ruxpin and sarin gas online, so I don't see why a pilot would make such a connection. Am I missing something?
> If you can't know whether something is a threat or not, the only reasonable response is to treat it as a non-threat.
Have you ever been in a position where you were responsible for the safety of several hundred people?
> What are the predictable effects for the scenario in question?
That not turning that Bluetooth device off when told to was going to end up delaying the flight.
> That not turning that Bluetooth device off when told to was going to end up delaying the flight.
This thread is discussing the “Free Palestine, F Zionists” WiFi hotspot and the threat to turn it off within 30 seconds or face the FBI. Which is explicitly not a threat, whereas “BOMB” in the context of a plane is more obviously a potential threat.
I don't see that as necessarily true. I can imagine many situations where F INSERT NAME OF ENTITY would be considered threatening. If they had F the captain of this plane, would the captain be wrong to feel threatened at all?
Threatening is not the same as an actual threat. If someone stood up on a plane and yelled “bomb”, the default implication is that there is a bomb present.
If someone gets up and yells “F the captain”, it is reasonable to be fearful that they might act on that sentiment, but the statement itself is not a threat; not an expression of intention (or in the former case, presence of an object that is intended) to inflict evil, injury, or damage.
>I'm unable to find any connection between Teddy Ruxpin and sarin gas online, so I don't see why a pilot would make such a connection.
And I'm unable to see the connection that you're imagining in the original post. What is it? Can you explain it to me? Is the threat here in the room with us now?
> Should he react to all messages as if they are threats, because no matter how small the risk is, more than zero is too much?
No. But he should treat messages that are blatantly intended to provoke others as such. If someone on the flight is going out of their way to cause trouble, kicking them off is the smart move.
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.
I would be a bit more charitable in assigning motive for the pilot's actions.
Airline pilots are morally and physically responsibile for the lives on their aircraft. This necessitates respect for their authority.
Like other professionals, they must compartmentalize personal beliefs and professionalism.
Playful antics and silly BS, whether it be for the lulz, politics, or anything else, is a disrespectful act of defiance to the individuals you entrust to deliver you safely to your destination.
They are the final authority in flight, and have broad discretion they must exercise prudently with a bias for risk aversion.
I've known 2 airline pilots. They are the most even keeled people I've ever come across. Literally, the coolest and calmest people.
The system (should) weed out anyone who would act unprofessional, like letting their political beliefs cloud their judgment.
It's interesting that you know what the pilot was doing and why they were doing it. Anyways, there's zero chance the pilot will be fired. Pilot unions are incredibly powerful and go to bat to protect their members.
And Nixon followed through with countless post-WW2 policies, practices, and acted on concerns that stemmed specifically from that conflict. The Cold War and all related funding being an easy example.
I’d also be very wary of recency bias when looking at the extremist fringes of religious and political situations that have been ongoing for centuries. We might feel a couple decades is a long time, but in conflicts all parties can veto the other parties subjective interpretations.
Hey look, that person may have discovered that the introduction of Bluetooth on mobile phones somehow prevented future hijackings from being listed on Wikipedia with those keywords they grepped for. Let's not count out this water-tight approximation of commercial piloting procedure. Just think of how many incidents have been similarly prevented around that specific regional conflict by reducing legroom, shrinking overhead storage, and innumerable TSA back-of-the-hand bad touches.
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.
The right of free speech is not wholly encompassed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In fact, it's the other way around, it's because the right of free speech is recognized as a universal, natural right then the US Federal Government is not permitted to make a law suppressing speech. The First Amendment does not create the right. The right is there, naturally, whether or not the United States or its constitution or government exists. The First Amendment merely explicitly states that the government isn't permitted to impede that right.
Using the existence of the First Amendment to narrow free speech as a right to what the government is permitted to do and nothing else is a severe perversion of both the document and the beliefs of the framers.
In short, "it's a private entity doing it" is an incredibly poor defense of behavior that suppresses speech. It's like how young children will defend their rude or offensive behavior with "it's not illegal." The reason that's an unconvincing argument is that it's an incredibly low bar. The world is full of behaviors that may not be so universally offensive or outrageous that people have explicitly written down that nobody is every allowed to do that thing. It's actually a very small range of possible behaviors that that covers.
The only reason that there isn't a general law barring private parties from restricting the speech of others is (a) one's right to free speech does not necessarily negate another's rights in the same or a different area, (b) one's rights do not entitle one to the use of things owned by others against their desires, and (c) any such law could be used by the government to indirectly suppress other rights.
The narrow nature of the First Amendment is not to be taken as an implication that the right is narrow. It's an admission that the law cannot perfectly protect human rights.
> The right of free speech is not wholly encompassed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
And there are other human rights besides the right to free speech, which have to be balanced. One of them is the right to safe travel. That means people who are responsible for the safety of a planeload of people have to err very strongly on the side of being safe rather than sorry. And mature adults are suppposed to recognize that fact and not insist on exercising their free speech right everywhere they go, to the detriment of other rights.
How about taking the full quote, and defining the terms in that full quote? Otherwise you’re just straw-manning based on cherry picking.
Threats in airplanes, post 9/11, land different. “Free D.C., Fuck Americans” says something different to fellow passengers than “Free D.C.”.
Not crazy, not bonkers. Yes, a threat. And in an airline context: they are all treated as credible… that’s why your shoes get checked, and water gets stopped, and babies banana smoothies get confiscated because of potassium content.
Plus, there’s a red line from the PLO and hijackings through 9/11 to the current state of airline security. That’s not neutral, and not incidental, for an airline that knows recent history.
The First Amendment is academic in a country where foreign visitors are expected to hand over their social media history just in case there's criticism of Glorious Leader and the Great Country He Leads.
And Great Leader recently asked social media sites to provide details of critics.
The ship has sailed. The plane has crashed. The party is over.
There may be survivors, but right now it's too early to tell.
The first amendment is indeed concerned only with the US government’s interaction with the matter, as is appropriate, but that does not imply it’s without other limitation. Your list is very broad and covers a wide range of common sense limitations—like, say, that you don’t want somebody in your vehicle harassing you.
Anyway, airlines are hard because the basic problem is they’re public necessity still halfway regarded as private business. It’s also an unnatural situation that many people be forced to share such little space in “public”, and we’d likely have a different constitution were it always the case.
I don’t think this one will be addressed by principle from on high.
That's nice and all, but you're not in the United States when you're on a plane in the air over the ocean. In this particular case, because United Airlines is a US airline, US law will mostly apply, but I'm sure you get the point.
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?
Not very likely, imo, that they did it specifically for the flight. More likely they named it weeks or months ago and just now boarded an airplane.
> Does naming WiFi hotspot to reflect one’s political views achieve anything?
Does action-less speech achieve anything? Advertising, PSAs, political campaigning, etc. all indicate its value in attaining mindshare. Moreover, freedom of expression is liberating for people.
If they aren't actively harming people nor threatening to do so with their words then that's their right. Can by tacky or in bad taste, why's that matter? It's not harming anyone and is a bad WiFi name even meaningfully annoying?
Yes, I would. Because it’s just words. Beyond that, it’s words you don’t even have to look at. You would be choosing to repeatedly read the list of WiFi networks.
Currently signalling support for Palestine is common online. In videogames in my country (Spain) every third player has some such signal (flag or phrase). It's not a serious protest, it's a sign of belonging to group x (whatever group x is), something teens in particular are big in signalling. It's not a big deal and reacting operationally as if it were is a huge security error.
It seems to be just bored, edgy teenagers. Probably "acting out" in one of the few ways they can. (They can't vote but they already have solved every political problem in their head. Ahh youth.)
> 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.
This. Many people are unaware of just how much authority a captain has; Failing to follow their instructions is (basically) a felony. It's best to just not mess around on an aircraft.
PIC authority is strictly limited to in-scope items, this very obviously wasn’t in scope unless it was e.g. causing other passengers to behave in an unruly manner.
It's not about a special status of flight captains. Same can be said of e.g. a store manager acting in-place of the owner. It's a matter of one being on someone's private property, instead of on public property.
Hi, when I was in flight school it wasn’t explicitly stated but certainly heavily implied that as pilots were not allowed to trespass passengers and kick them off the plane mid-flight.
If you have information to the contrary, I would like to be made aware because occasionally I have ended up stuck for hours in the air with unpleasant passengers.
> 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.
> 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).
I don't know why you've decided to explain what is a Hasidic jew in that way (or at all). However I hope you can at least understand in retrospect why describing a religious group as people who all follow some negative behavior is promoting hate towards all members of that group, regardless of their actions.
You're completely wrong. What I wrote was based on my own observations and just to illustrate that those guys seem quite radical and absolutely would heavily object to offensive hotspot or bluetooth device names.
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.
Except that this exact thing is the exact thing being censored everywhere around US.
Second, you know full well such name is not a threat, neither passive no active. The reason for that being not allowed is not a threat or abundance of other options. It has nothing to do with any of that. It is just a continuation of the above strategy.
That's not even necessary. The fact that it could create panic is enough.
And by the way, a terrorist is (by definition) someone who wants to incite terror in others. So any person knowingly broadcasting "we will all die” is a terrorist already.
Or a nihilist, or a fatalist, or a pessimist, or an antinatalist, or a realist.
Don't go putting people into boxes. That's the path of persecution.
You have the inalienable right to say what you want on a plane, limited by what the government is allowed to prosecute. In a confined space, that is a bit riskier. That's a solely personal choice - no laws are being broken. The Captain has the right to ask you to conform or leave, but that's a separate issue.
People are being overly sensitive. A wifi name is not a protest. It does not disturb personal privacy and tranquility. It's about as offensive as an article titled "We’re All Gonna Die!" from your favorite news outlet - which by the way, is not an uncommon headline.
What if my wifi name was "peanut butter for all!" but unbeknownst to me and by some rare cosmic coincidence everyone on the plane was deathly allergic to peanut butter. Does that make me a terrorist? No! But I swear someone would try to drag me through decades of litigation regardless. These people seem to have divorced words and meanings from the mechanics of how the world works. Like, "this piece of paper says you shouldn't say this, so off with your head".
> The Captain has the right to ask you to conform or leave, but that's a separate issue.
It's not a separate issue, because the captain very likely will err on the side of caution if he has to decide whether you are a terrorist or a nihilist.
Then at put that person in jail, not the person with the tacky device name.
Do you hear yourself? You're saying we should be irrational because there's irrational people. That we should send people to jail because they might upset an irrational person? You're sending the wrong person to jail. Are you crazy?
You're interpreting a lot, as I didn't say any of that.
What I'm saying is that the decision whether or not something is considered a risk is completely at the discretion of the captain. And by accepting the terms of the airline when boarding the plane, you agree to follow the orders of the captain.
So if that captain says "turn it off", you turn it off. It's very simple.
But I give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don't want to understand for the sake of confrontation, so I'll leave it at that.
terrorist/terrorism are words that should be removed from anyone's vocabulary as they have lost their meaning.
Similar to woke/wokism, these have become words used by far right extremists and politicians around the world to name anything that is against their hatred and opinions.
Propaganda is a very important part of terrorism so I would not put that past them. Imagine the headlines if something like that does happen in the future.
In short, a Pascal's wager and a demonstration that it is not easy to have good things.
I think advertisements are socially acceptable and actually expected to be as blatantly offensive as possible. How would people react if it were "Boeing go boom. Fly Airbus now! Text 777 NOW for Airbus discounts."
> 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”.
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.
Depends on who’s saying it. Often times it’s obvious from the context that “Zionist” is just being used as a loophole, and pretending that the difference is then still important is disingenuous.
Someone writing “F Zionists” very likely does not make a distinction between Zionists and Jews.
The Jewish Council of Australia is not going to name their hotspot “F Zionists”. Ultra Orthodox Jews are not going to use swear words to express their view.
I’ll go as far as say that anyone who genuinely wants Jews and Arabs to live in peace side by side is not going to go about it with antagonistic one-sided rhetoric.
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.
The person you are replying to is all over this thread to such an extent that I think they should take their abundance of energy and apply it to becoming a commercial pilot so that they can ignore anything that aligns with their personal preferences.
>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.
And? What's your point? You're implying that a pro-Palestine WiFi network name could even slightly plausibly be interpreted as a threat to hijack an airplane? You can't be serious.
Also, the whole idea of being over backwards trying to stretch things into being interpreted as threats is absurd on its face. A threat is pretty much definitionally intended to be understood as a threat.
As a side note, why is it that in these discussions some people are so quick to equate anything critical of Israel with antisemitism, but we never see much push back in the other direction? I find your insinuation that expressing support for Palestine means you want to hijack an airplane to be wildly racist.
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".
- You have an actual bomb that's been slipped onto someone else's stuff that is cellphone triggered; perhaps when you get to UK cellular service, perhaps after cabin altitude + time, or whatever. Making the announcement doesn't hurt at all. You want to turn back in this case.
- You have a person who has a device with a name in bad taste, either because of humor or malice. Making the announcement doesn't hurt at all. You would rather not turn back in this case. They might turn it off.
- You have a person who is controlling the actual bomb on the plane. Making the announcement or turning back or even continuing -- it doesn't matter. Your moves are visible to them.
This was a teenager. Then again, there's a whole line of bluetooth speakers called "SoundBomb." And lots and lots more products named "Boom" (still, yes) in some way. There isn't any need for this to be anything more than a reasonable name for a speaker.
Now take your scenarios and weight them by their probabilities
- 0.001%
- 99.998%
- 0.001%
If you think I'm exaggerating here, you're right, but in the conservative direction. There are 44k flights in the US PER DAY. There have been 8 bombings, *since 9/11*[0]. 4 of those involved US craft (not all passenger craft either), and *0* of them succeeded. My numbers are an over-estimate if you take all 8 and count it against a single day of US flights. If we take those 8 bombs, across 24 years of US flights you get closer to 0.000002%, and that's still conservative.
I'm sorry, but the risk is just stupid low. There's only 2 lotteries in America that you have a better chance of winning than these absurdly conservative odds (no lottery if you use non-conservative statistics).
I'm sorry, but even if there were a dozen bombing attempts a year this would still be an absurdly safe activity given the shear volume of flights per day.
What would have been your estimated odds, of a plane hitting twin towers out of malice, a day before 9/11 happened.
I agree with your comments more often than not, I empathize with your annoyance, but if you play out the game theoretic consequences there are no non-annoying outcomes. I don't like it but that's how it is.
Low probability events with outsized consequences are very difficult to reason through. One potentially chipped thermal insulation ceramic tile, should we engage reentry or not. What are the odds that the tile did get chipped, what are the consequences if it did.
The only good way to play this is for a country to not act in ways that motivates potential acts of organized terrorism. That would leave only the positively deranged solitary cuckoo brains to deal with.
> 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 just statistics.
> Low probability events with outsized consequences are very difficult to reason through.
Are you afraid that a country is going to randomly drop a nuke on you? I bet you aren't. Same with a building bombing. Or a dirty bomb. Or any number of things.
Remember, I didn't say the odds are 0, I said these are extremely black swan events. In fact, there's a lot of more likely ways to die on a plane that are far more likely. If you aren't afraid of those, then your fear is fear, not reality.
> 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.
Another take: the likelihood of getting struck by lightening surely dictates what you do during a thunderstorm? In the same way that the likelihood (or lack there of) dictates how often you buy lottery tickets.
If we didn’t attempt to mitigate terrorist attacks at all, would they be as infrequent as they are now? I know that’s not really what you’re saying, but surely likelihood is extremely dependent on circumstances.
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 operational error by incompetent terrorists. The pilot reports the observation but does nothing. The bomb goes off. Now the pilot and the airlines are made a bunch of scapegoats. They are declared professionally incompetent and insurance cover is denied to their family.
I can well imagine current administration doing exactly that, throwing the pilot and the crew under the bus. The 911 first responders were and they weren't even in a position to prevent it. Maybe the pilot and crew can imagine that too and in that case they took a rational decision.
> 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?
Sure, which is why you tell people to turn the device off and only when that completely fails do you take greater corrective action.
I do think we overreact on security matters, but I do think it's reasonable to not head over the Atlantic with something labelled "BOMB" if you can't figure it out.
I think if you set the amount of security to zero you'd get more bombings. Before 1990 we had a 2-3 per decade. This may not sound like much, but given that we have about 0-0.5 airliner crashes with fatality per year, it would be a significant contribution.
Risk is not a synonym for the likelihood of something happening, but the likelihood and its possible effect.
For example, the risk of not wearing your seatbelt on the motorway is high because, even though most journeys will not require a seatbelt to stop any negative effects, if something bad happens it will become very high risk without the seatbelt.
Without the negative effect there is no risk, so it's not just probability.
What are the risks? That people die. Do you know how many people died of preventable things just today?
Or it's scary because it means we're going to go to war? Then why aren't we scared sooner? Be scared of the thing that causes people to want to blow up planes. It's not like they just wake up one day and a country decides it's going to blow up a plane. Our government spies off so many people and the result is we're still scared to get on planes? What a waste of money
As soon as you declare the possible effect to be effectively infinite in magnitude, you can justify any level of response to any level of risk.
That's not a sane way to do risk management. You have to be able to use common-sense human judgement as well as situational training.
And common-sense human judgement would tell you that, even if the possible effect is a plane full of people blowing up and that starting a war, the likelihood of that occurring because you didn't yell at a teenager to turn off a Bluetooth device is so infinitesimally small that it's not worth considering.
> Passengers on the flight arrived back in Newark just before 9:00 PM on Saturday evening, and were met by a significant contingent of local and federal law enforcement.
If you'll actually read the article, federal law enforcement was being called in this situation as well.
does landing a plane early due to a bomb threat seem reasonable? either there is a bomb, in which case landing early won't help, or there isn't, in which case landing early won't help
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 turning around.
They probably do have to treat it seriously just in the unlikely chance it turns out to be some mentally unstable person's way of legitimately making a terroristic threat. But it also needs to be treated similarly to a drunk and violent person who needs to be duct taped to their seat until they can get handed off to the authorities.
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.
The whole conversation is moot anyways. What's the actual odds of getting on an airplane that is going to be the target of a terrorist attack. I'll tell you, they're approximately 0. Far less than 0.0001%.
If you act like they're real you're just going to end up suffering alarm fatigue because the number of actual instances is just so astonishingly low.
Besides that, the terrorists win by creating fear. No damage is necessary. People being afraid to fly is the terrorist's main goal. To get you to think they could be anywhere and are everywhere. It's called a terror campaign because the literal goal is to create terror. Casualties are just a good way for them to achieve that goal, but far from the only way. We spend billions a year to fight a near non-existent threat.
> 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.
To qualify even for the 'far end of reasonable', you'd have to divert the plane. Returning to origin, especially when the origin is not one of the 10 closest airports and is in a much more densely packed urban area (with a much more harrowing approach) than any of those 10 renders this entire incident totally unserious.
There are real actual safety concerns to address in aviation. This doesn't make the top 1,000 list. It's wasted effort in a world where economy of opportunity is significant.
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.
I don't know what it's like to be a pilot, to be responsible for not just your own life and million dollar aircraft, but the hundred-so passengers onboard.
But I do know what it's like working in a draconian safety-crazy job where if you're caught not following a safety-related SOP you're basically fucked.
In this particular case, I think the point is less 1 or 2 but more point 3
(3) the contrapositive, where you continued the flight, it really was someone stupid enough to name the broadcast name of a bomb "BOMB", it goes off, and now you have to explain to the press "we thought nobody would be stupid enough to really name it 'BOMB'"
So you assume it's a low risk event, and tell everyone onboard to turn off their devices to remove the chance it's just someone making a bad joke or a coincidence, and then you end up with the outcome of trying to avoid having to say that in a press conference where everyone is already primed to think you didn't do enough.
That makes absolutely no sense. As the previous comment pointed out, turning around is not treating it seriously. If you are trying to save face in the extremely unlikely event that it is real, then the only thing you can do is head to the nearest airport.
1) If it really was a bomb and went off, the pilot wouldn't be there to explain to the press anyway.
2) How likely would a bomb's name really be "BOMB" vs anything else? If the latter is any higher, wouldn't it be reasonable to always turn around whenever the any other name shows up? In that case, all Bluetooth devices should be strictly banned in the cabin. But TSA is not doing that (not yet).
If someone is planning on triggering a bomb on a plane, and they haven't done so, you can assume they have a target you haven't reached yet. So going back is not only the safe option, but also the location the people & plane came from.
The only thing it protects is the target. If there is a terrorist on board and they expose the fact they are aware of the bomb, or the bomb is minimally capable, the plane is doomed whatever they do.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
That would not solve the problem. On a radio, you could have a moment of interference and only receive 'crash' when someone broadcasts 'good crash'. It is better to avoid certain words entirely. There is also no reason to use those specific words when you could describe, e.g. a software crash as a software problem, error, issue, etc.
> 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.
The individual victims were not the point of my comment. You see how the HN crowd calls it all security theater and mocks the TSA/airlines/etc. right now? Same idea, except regarding how stupid they are to miss what's literally in front of them, rather than how stupid they are to act on what's in front of them.
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.
>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.
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.
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...
> 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.
It doesn’t have to be an intentional threat to be worth responding to. One might reasonably think they’d stumbled on an (admittedly poorly executed) attack.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
“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.
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.
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.
Soooo it's fine to name all your variables slurs then? Like, yes, hyperbolic, but the contention was that the SWE community is overwhelming cis while het dudes from the US and we were making it unwelcoming to anyone else.
I haven't met anyone who is actually uncomfortable with the term "master," only people concerned about what others might think of them. It's not really being inclusive; it's just signaling inclusivity. Surely the time would be better spent, I don't know, volunteering to tutor underprivileged students or something? Or just living your damn life.
I have met several people who are uncomfortable with the 'master/slave' terminology. In my experience, those who do not experience much racism in their day to day lives do not find it offensive, and vice versa. Therefore, it is at least slightly offensive in my opinion.
Once I was explaining how my day went to an ex, and my day happened to involve the terms, and they were absolutely floored that those terms were still used. Then the whole conversation was about racism in tech, and that had significantly less aura than my story of how I fixed everything. Beware ye olde words, lest ye scare thein hoes.
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.
"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!"
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
According to the article, it was a Fitbit device belonging to a teenager...
Chances are, the kid selected that nickname for the device a long while ago and forgot about it, and was probably unaware that the device was using Bluetooth at all, and that they should turn off their fitness tracker when the announcement came through...
At the same time, some people in the comments under the article are more or less calling for the death penalty for the kid...
I wouldn't like to guess either way about this particular article, but it's possible many really are people. Certainly there were plenty of online commenters for news articles reacting in exactly this sort of way long before there were LLMs.
It seems very obvious to me that certain constituencies in online commenting are at all-time highs for loudness:
* police/prison/statist notions of justice
* auto industry / auto-first infra
* both pro- and anti-israel
* pro-IP / copyright industrial complex
There are a bunch more. Maybe it's a shift in actual human sentiment, but without evidence, I don't think it makes sense for that to be the first presumption.
Fortunately, we're gonna get this here web-o-trust thing going in the next 10 years or so and not have to doubt who the humans are anymore. Riiight?
> Awful joke. There have to be at least some consequences for the kid, like getting banned for flying United for 10 years.
Take a step back. You yourself describe it as a joke. Are you really saying that the quality of the joke ("awful") should result in the origin of the joke (a kid, even!) should be banned from a major air carrier for 10 years? Does this really seem like a proportional response?
And this doesn't even begin to consider another possibility: the device was named what it was named in a completely different setting, and the owner just forgot about it. That makes it not even a joke, just forgetfulness.
Was any of this a good idea? No, probably not, but people need to calm down.
> Was any of this a good idea? No, probably not, but people need to calm down.
I can understand the safety concern - and I think the decision to turn around was ultimately the right call. Especially given that they had called for people turning off BT for some time.
The fact that the device was not turned off suggests to me that the owner did not know they were the cause of this.
If they had done this by intent and were set on going through with it even after the turnaround was initiated, they would have also had the sense to drop the device into some other seat or leave it in the lavatory...
If it turns out they did this with full intent, there should be some _appropriate_ consequence
It sounds like a fantastic DDoS opportunity, you could shut down an entire nation's aviation just by putting a few tiny bluetooth transmitters in places that air passengers might accidentally pick them up. The attack relies entirely on the overreaction to non-threats by ignorant buffoons in positions of authority.
Personally, I think the airline and its policies should be publicly ridiculed. If we don't punish the airline for doing this, and make unequivocably clear that it did the wrong thing, that its "what ifs" are meaningless and bluetooth/wifi channel names are not a security threat, then this nonsense will just continue.
In general and long-term I agree with what you are saying.
I assume this was a new/unknown situation. (On the other hand, the article links to other similar stories, so maybe I am cutting them too much slack).
If "electronic device names" are of concern, there should be an established protocol to deal with them. Especially if this keeps happening.
IDK, this was pure technical incompetence by rubes that can barely operate a smartphone. The delay relies entirely on these supposed "adults in the room" overreacting.
> If it turns out they did this with full intent, there should be some _appropriate_ consequence
Sure, if evidence is uncovered of the guy say telling his friends "haha, I'm gonna make them turn the plane around", I can get behind the baying for consequences.
We're nowhere near that. There's plenty of non-nefarious ways this could all have come about, and people need to put down their pitchforks.
Are you really trying to equate murder with naming a Bluetooth device and that a child should have their life ruined on the same scale as if they were equivalent in impact or intent, with little knowledge of the actual situation or intent?
Weird how you want kids to be punished for stupid mistakes. If you drive, you probably put more people lives in danger last week than that kids fitness tracker. When you speed, you put lives in danger (statistical fact, none of that “but I am good driver crap”) — will you ask for the death penalty if a cop sees you going 1mph over?
Or do you only want strong punishment for others as is usually the case with such opinions?
There is something deeply stupid about assuming that naming your bluetooth device "bomb" is a real threat, let alone that it's going to be a real bomb. Reminds me of all those post Columbine "zero tolerance" policies where kids were punished for marginal doodles of guns. Or the "twitter joke trial". It's as is people are string matching for threat shaped words, not the semantics of a threat.
Mind you, this gets harder when powerful people have got in the habit of making mostly-joking threats on social media themselves.
I’ve never understood this logic. If we want to treat people who are under 18 as adults in certain legal circumstances, then we should just establish a new age or set a concrete exception based on the law violated. Making special exceptions on a case by case basis where people have to argue about it, especially when it demonstrably affects certain demographics more than others, is a terrible way to operate.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say you probably don’t have kids. If your teenager got in trouble for a messed up “joke” like this and the result was a criminal proceeding where they’re tried as an adult you’d be (rightfully) crying that it’s too much.
Also what does columbine have to do with this? Unless your implication is that any kid around the age of 17 should be treated as a potential school shooter.
> Throw the book at him, he should have known better.
What book!? The book of laws that outlaw jokes in bad taste potentially made years ago, outside the context of air travel altogether, only to be forgotten about and accidentally brought into the context of air travel where one can conceivably think of laws that make those jokes problematic?
Pretty absurd stuff. Obviously if FAA safety first is going to apply not to aviation employees but to something that is easy to DOS attack as the consumer this doesn't work.. They could at least implement a policy of scanning Bluetooth and similar beacons at security gates though. More theatre, more fun at least doesn't mean more turning around.
> Hard to imagine at least one person didn’t see the device name and immediately brush it off as entirely unimportant.
There are hundreds of BT devices everywhere that people waiting for a flight hang out. Without automatic scanning for the specific purpose of catching weird names, it'd be near impossible for the weird name to ever show up for anyone except the owner. And most devices don't advertise their BT name unless in pairing mode, so no, it wouldn't show up in the security screening either.
So, how did it eventually show up?
Owner's phone goes off/airplane-mode, watch starts advertising; someone else wants to connect their BT headphones and sees the name of the watch?
There are way fewer Bluetooth signals active at once on an airplane then there are in an airport. There is also the entire duration of the flight for it to be discovered. Also take in to account that most people are not fidgeting with their device settings when they are walking around an airport, they are trying to get through security and get to their gate. Once you are on a plane that’s when you usually stop and start setting up your devices, such as connecting headphones.
Here is the reddit thread where passengers were live replying. I don't seem confirmation of what the Bluetooth device name was. There is one comment in there claiming the following:
"Wife is on the plane. Guy had a speaker named bomb. He just confessed to it. He said he named it forever ago and forgot about it. He’s 16 years old. Wife’s friend is sitting next to him as they are questioning him."
It’s seems like they just reported this initially as “four letter word” and then a media outlet later assumed it was bomb. It seems more likely it was a UE Boom, which has boom in its default Bluetooth name.
If that’s the case the teen likely just owned the device and didn’t knot it was turned on. It’s rather long battery and it’s not obvious if it’s on or not.
Yes I have a speaker of the same brand, bluetooth ID is Boom4 as it is the model name. I have no idea if it can be changed, if it can, probably only through an app only a minority of users would have had installed anyway (I don't).
Aditionally the order given by the crew (turning off bluetooth) would have done no results as most people would simply assume turning off bluetooth on their smartphone/videogame console/laptop and wouldn't know how to do that on anything else.
The comments ont that link are completely crazy, I read about jail time or even death penalty.
I thought it was strange the airline didn't disclose the actual word, how could that be sensitive? Covering up what was a clear overreaction in hindsight seems to fit. Best to let people blame the teenager.
This decision almost certainly came about because of people thinking what action was least likely to get them fired. Any rational person would realize the odds of an actual bomb are so close to zero you would need to start worrying about the sun spontaneously exploding if you were worried there was a bomb. The problem is that if you ignored it your boss could say you ignored a bomb threat and fire you.
Also if they really thought there the plan was going to explode any moment they would have ditched in the ocean or at least diverted to the nearest airport. They didn’t because there was no danger except to their jobs.
If they were really worried, they probably would have diverted, yes. But ditching in the north Atlantic is something no pilot is going to do unless they are 100% sure there is a bomb that's going to go off, because people are probably going to die either way.
> 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 kind of does, that an attacker can rely on something a small as a Bluetooth name to cause disruption based on employees following policy out of fear of being fired.
I kind of get that a device named BOMB made the plane turn back.
However, I don't understand this part:
> flight attendant told passengers over the PA system that they "must turn off Bluetooth immediately," or else the aircraft would have to turn around.
If there's a BOMB, turning off Bluetooth won't make it much safer. I mean, a turned-off bomb is probably safer than a turned-on bomb, but it's still a bomb.
Pilots: "Phew, BOMB is now turned off. It's absolutely safe to continue flying. Thank you for your cooperation, passengers and terrorist(s)."
Nobody in the chain of command thought this was a real emergency situation.
The point of turning Bluetooth off or having to turn around the aircraft was to follow the airline's rules on terrorism, which likely tell them to abort a flight route if there's any symbol that could be interpreted as a bomb.
The captains were risking their jobs if they didn't follow this stupid request. This is a good case for getting common-sense exceptions to checklist-style rules.
It was not about whether to turn back or not but rather to identify whether the device is in cabin or not. If it disappears after being asked, they do not need to empty the cargo hold when searching for the device after landing. They were going to turn around regardless.
Every commercial cabin has a designated Least Risk Bomb Location (LRBL) Once a bomb is determined to be in the cabin they can move it to that location. Funny to think of them actually finding a Fitbit with that name and then moving it there. Then procedure would be to stack up luggage to absorb blast energy.
it's not the case that the pilot has to think like you, it's that every passenger on the plane would need to. The pilot has unlimited discretion and every interest to keep the passengers on the plane calm, or act preemptively and land as soon as possible.
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.
You forgot to add the cherry: they refuse to publish the "four-letter-word" as if we're stupider than they are and will never precisely figure out the puzzle. This story is equally as stupid as it is frustrating.
I'm confused why people keep calling it a speaker when the article states it was verified by multiple sources as a Fitbit that the kid gave the name bomb. Nowhere in the article was a speaker mentioned.
People are wont to stick to their pet theories even after they’ve been contradicted by facts. The idea of a Bluetooth speaker named “boom” filled the initial vacuum and became a meme that won’t die.
> A redditor who's wife and her friend were on the flight said that the 16yo boy next to wife's friend admitted to naming his speaker "Bomb" long enough ago that he had forgotten he'd named it that. Wife's friend got to hear the questioning
That is also stated clearly in the comments.
Reddit really wants to run with the default speaker name theory, though.
> long enough ago that he had forgotten he'd named it that
Actually sounds a lot like "that was the default name but now that everyone's making a big deal about it I'm assuming I must have named it that". I wouldn't assume that this "confession" means that reddit's theory is at all incorrect.
Witnesses are terribly inaccurate sources of information, unfortunately.
(Not to say the alternative also couldn't be the case)
Renaming a Bluetooth device like a speaker permanently for everyone (as opposed to a nickname you give it in your phone or whatever) is difficult if possible at all and usually requires firmware or hardware changes, unless the option is given by the device or its companion app (which is very rare).
So your assumption seems the most likely. I highly doubt a 16 year old kid is firmware hacking a cheap speaker just to rename it for a "joke"
It’s commonplace for Bluetooth speakers to allow changing their Wi-Fi name (SSID) using the related app. Everyone being able to identify each other’s Bluetooth speakers is exactly one purpose of that.
Bluetooth speakers don’t typically have WiFi or SSIDs. The Bluetooth advertising name is changeable on some newer higher end devices, but the vast majority of cheap speakers do not implement this from a practical standpoint. Changing the name on your device only changes the alias that you see, at least on most devices, but it might be possible to hook that on some OSs ?
An, sorry, yes, I confused with Wi-Fi for some reason. Nevertheless, they allow changing the name they broadcast, in the sense that other devices that see it for the first time see the changed name.
Most BT speakers have a battery, which means it has to be in carry-on luggage. Why it would be powered on is the question, but this could have happened inadvertently by getting knocked around in a bag.
I'm so confused. We're all commenting on an article that explicitly says it was verified by multiple sources to be a Fitbit. The kid named his Fitbit Bomb. Why are so many people saying it was a speaker? Did they change the article?
For the vast majority of “dumb” devices, it is not possible to rename the Bluetooth advertising name. You can assign a local alias to the MAC of the device so that it shows up to -you- as a custom name, but with the exception of host devices like phones or laptops, it is unusual to be able to change the advertising name.
I own a bluetooth speaker from the Boom brand and it has obviously the model name as bluetooth ID.
Changing it would require installing an app that I don't really want to for obvious reasons. Additionally some bluetooth device never really turn down completely and still advertize their bluetooth ID via BLE so the teenager in question may not even have realized he could change anything and the commands given (turn off bluetooth) were completely stupid as it wouldn't change anything if people turned down their smartphone bluetooth.
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].
That was an unrelated issue from an audit that had been done before the heist.
One of the theories right after the heist was that the thieves where former security guards. France had just laid of most of the museums security, the alarm triggered just fine, there just wasn't anyone left to respond.
My girlfriend and I were staying at her sisters apartment one Christmas (while the sister and her partner were away). They made homemade kombucha which gave the apartment an overpowering smell. You couldn't escape it anywhere in the apartment, particularly the kitchen. On the first night of arriving while lying in bed my girlfriend wanted to connect to the wifi but we didn't know the password. I guessed it first attempt, and yes it was kombucha
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.
The court of public opinion would probably be upset an actual bomb made it through the security theatre while their water bottle did not. If there was actually someone intending to actually bomb the plane, giving them the entire flight back to the origin airport decide to go through with it or head back to the waiting authorities would not go over well in the court of popular opinion either.
> 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 idiots. Whether due to power tripping or CYA, who knows, but I’m not surprised this happened on United.
I don't think it's as silly as people are making out. It at least proves a passenger is in control of the device, rather than it being stashed / hidden in the cabin. A device in the cabin not owned by any passenger broadcasting a signal is definitively more suspicious than one with a passenger in control. We don't know what their next step would have been - they might have asked everyone from row X to Y to turn their bluetooth back on to narrow down the search etc. They probably didn't expect that anybody would fail to respond to the first instruction.
You can't really turn off most BLE devices with internal batteries, off means low power mode nowadays. Some of them are still discoverable on wireshark when they are 'off'.
It could've been in checked luggage and turned itself on from the movement. No way for the passengers to get to it. Unfortunately it didn't turn itself off (although if it did, and then later turned on again, that would've been even worse.)
> Nope. Look at the flight track. They went all the way back.
Good point, I was thinking they were over the ocean and that was naturally the closest airport, but it looks like they could have landed in e.g. Nova Scotia in a shorter time period.
Not being able to ignore the speech/writing/transmission of a passenger is reasonable. Not being able to ignore the speech/writing/transmission of the manufacturer of a device on the plane is unreasonable.
Wifi SSID? Passenger speech, since those are typically changed by the user. Bluetooth GAP/GATT device name? Manufacturer speech, since those are often not changeable by the user.
I expect pilots called company, and risk assessment made the decision. Pilots can and do make flight safety decisions, but operational control is an airline decision.
You can't rename most Bluetooth speakers. "Bomb" was the name the selling brand gave the speaker.
By making everyone turn off their Bluetooth, the kid whose speaker had turned on probably couldn't even see the device broadcasting the name. People linked to one by a company made Hellotec but Hama has a similarly named device, and plenty of other speaker manufacturers try to make a pun out of "boombox" by naming their devices "bomb" (iJoy, ZEB-MUSIC, and presumably other such brands).
Maybe if someone asked the passengers if anyone knew about this "bomb" Bluetooth device the kid would've remembered, but in this case I can't blame them. On the other hand, asking passengers if they know something about a bomb is probably the quickest way to cause a panic.
The entire thing seems like a ridiculous overreaction. What kind of terrorist would call their bomb "bomb"? This is "Al Qaeda Free WiFi" all over again.
When you rename a Bluetooth device from your phone, does that affect the name it broadcasts, or only the label applied in the list of Bluetooth devices in the phone?
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? Otherwise how do you distinguish which one of the three million Bluetooth devices within range is your friends Bluetooth speaker you’re trying to connect to?
Some devices come with apps that include proprietary renaming features. Those devices can be renamed.
Your iPhone's rename feature won't change anything for other devices. Maybe Apple is smart enough to sync the renamed device to other Apple devices as well, I don't know about that, but it certainly won't change what the other passengers on your phone see.
You can distinguish Bluetooth devices by their MAC address, that's usually how the rename mapping works.
iPhone BT settings also let you rename devices, but I think that's just a local setting, not like the BT spec has a rename feature. Not sure cause uh, my iPhone broke. But for sure there are speakers that have their own apps that let you rename them.
> 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.
For example, many Apple wireless peripherals can rename themselves after your user account once you connect them at least once. That has to be a function of the peripheral though, it's not performed by the device you connect it to (past telling the peripheral the new name, of course). Third-party peripherals usually do not have this functionality.
> 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.
Almost nobody install apps of their bluetooth device.
People buy the speaker, charge it and turn it on, pair, play music, throw the packaging away, that's it. Usually the bluetooth name refer to the brand and model which is much more convenient to know which one you are connecting to than giving it a silly name.
I wouldn't expect most people to know they can do it in the first place and even those who do like me don't bother most of the time.
I've never had a bose device that allowed this - is that new? And for JBL, it's only the latest gen (or maybe starting with gen 3?) that started allowing it.
As for other brands I own: Jlab, jawbone, pyle, and anker don't seem to have any such functionality that I can see.
So it's far from ubiquitous, sufficiently so that it makes no sense to presume that a bluetooth name is a message from a passenger and can be understood to have any intended meaning.
I don't see why people are hung up on this. Imagine even just 2 or 3 of the same model "JBL SpeakerName" nearby, how would you know whos is whos? Renaming is common.
You would know which one is the desired one because only the desired one would be in pairing mode at that moment. Obviously a collision (if I can say that word) is possible, but unlikely enough for most purposes.
I own zero Bluetooth audio devices with rename functionality. I don't think it's common at all. Especially in the "cheap, obnoxious Bluetooth speaker" category.
My phone will show me a different name for a "renamed on phone" Bluetooth device, but all other devices in the area won't.
+1 on this for my Soundlink, but it's important to mention it has to be through the Bose app itself. I don't think you can rename devices from a pairing device's native bluetooth settings?
Otherwise, I trust many folks in an HN comment section would reminisce on stories from their earlier years, where they'd rename the Bluetooth devices around a densely-populated area to cause mischief.
They did not calculate with the stupidity of some people. I don't blame them. There are just too many mind blowing ways of stupidity to be able to account for all of them. Also it's not their fault other people decide to ground a plane for no reason.
Wait so they thought there was a bomb on board but if they “turned it off” they’d keep flying? or they knew it wasn’t a bomb but turned around anyway to teach everyone a lesson? i’m not sure which is worse
Which would violate FAA regulations if it was powered on (as it obviously was):
"When portable electronic devices powered by lithium batteries are in checked baggage, they must be completely powered off and protected to prevent unintentional activation or damage."
How exactly do we know it was in checked luggage vs carry on luggage compartment.
Without tools, its not exactly easy to point-point a Bluetooth signal. Nor are passengers meant to be roaming around the aircraft whilst in flight (i.e to access carry on luggage compartment and turn it off).
What's to prevent terrorists from going through TSA, waiting in the scanning line when everyone is still going through, and then planting a bluetooth device into someone else's bag? I never open my carryon once I have packed it.
This reminds me of the SNL sketch where TSA employees had no answer for someone bringing two separate bottles of 3.9 ounces onto the plane.
I'm sure Sean Duffy, of Real World and now Sec of Transportation, will fix this.
Nothing. TSA is a joke. At first, the security theater arguably had a legitimate psychological purpose. The airline industry nearly collapsed after 9/11 because people were so scared of filing. But that was a generation ago—the psychological trauma in the aftermath of 9/11 dissipated ago. But we’re still stuck with the TSA because in the meantime it turned into a massive jobs program.
We’d be better off spending TSA’s $8 billion budget on paying people to dig holes and fill them back in.
I don't see any evidence of TSA being a jobs program. Their mission and the agents executing it appear to be toward flight security. I'm certain there are many counterexamples of misguided policies and agents exhibiting incompetence. But the general direction of the agency is to screen passengers prior to entering secure airport areas and this is generally successful.
In Australia, you place your carry on luggage onto a tray and it passes through an xray machine, at the same time, you walk through a metal detector. Takes about 30 seconds depending on the line.
It still feels incongruent with the reality of the situation in my opinion. I can hop on a bus with 200 other people, or on a train with literally 0 security carrying whatever I want in a bag with no staff nearby either.
That's basically how it is in the US, except that sometimes there aren't enough machines so the lines are long, and it's the spinning scan thing rather than a metal detector. Usually no line in major California airports when I've gone. NYC is hit-or-miss. Just did a transfer through LHR and the security line was insanely long.
It used to be much worse though. I think the new machinery has made the difference.
The bus/train is different because they're harder to weaponize. Everything we got was a response to the 9/11 attacks.
I agree with you on train and somewhat bus but cars are extremely easy to weaponise and dirt cheap. Any terrorist trying to hijack a plane and not simply using a car (with or without extra explosives) is an idiot.
Essentially terrorism isn’t about spreading terror, because they are so laughably ineffective at it.
These kinds of measures are always reactionnary to prior events. For example in Spain you do get your bag scanned (but I doubt scan operators are sufficiently trained to spot anything of importance anyway) at train stations before embarkments and also any governmental/official/administrative office because Spain has a history of bombing (mostly by ETA).
The US requirement is that passengers on flights to the USA have been processed in conformance with US regulations _and_ since that processing have not had any contact with passengers processed otherwise. It's not in itself a stupid rule but does make the US rules contagious, since either other airports re-build to keep the US-bound and other passengers segregated or they have to apply US rules to all.
This hit Auckland International badly: it had a lovely open atrium with a garden but the rules forced a forest of partitioning walls since passengers were transferring from smaller airports that couldn't quickly adopt the US rules.
I often fly from Milan Malpensa airport, and I’ve noticed there are two separate security areas: one for people flying to the US or Israel, and one for everyone else. I’d always wondered why this was the case, and now I get it.
Not to the same extent though - for example I can't remember if I ever had to take my shoes off (maybe there was a couple of months where we had to do it back after the attempt happened in December 2021?), so I was pretty shocked to go to the US for a work trip in 2019 and have to do that. Here in Australia there's no liquid limit in carry on for domestic flights.
Nowadays I don't need to remove shoes in the US. I vaguely remember times it was randomly required or not, not sure when, and back when it was always required. I'm not TSA precheck or anything. But yeah we have the liquid limit, which always seemed like the one dumbest thing to me, maybe even a way to sell drinks.
Unless it has changed for a while the TSApre lines don't make you take off shoes and belts vs the regular lines. I also think they stopped making TSApre tahe laptops and iPads out of bags. But it may also have to do with equipment upgrade cycles and what was deployed to which lines.
It's not just security theater. It shifts the attack vector entirely. Instead of airplanes as weapons that could be used to kill thousands, terrorists can blow up a few hundred people.
Those checkpoints are only there to provide a soft target instead of letting it be a plane.
I agree. Sure you can still get weapons through screening, in fact I've accidentally done it twice with like 4" pocket knives, but not sure what the odds are. A lot of the "security theater" argument seems to be annoyance at having to go through TSA, cause what's the alternative, just barely screen people like before?
> Instead of airplanes as weapons that could be used to kill thousands...
As pilots had been screaming for for years prior to 2001, cockpit doors have been reinforced and locked, and cabin procedures have changed so that those doors are rarely unlocked. [0] This happened shortly after the WTC bombings that totally destroyed the buildings. This means that the only people who can get control of an aircraft are the crew of that aircraft.
The first of the two things that stops "another 9/11" had a one-time monetary cost and was done twenty five years ago. The second was the murder of everyone on board three airliners by hijackers. Prior hijackings were a diversion and an annoying delay. Now that "hijackers will kill you all" is on the table, hijackers will be outnumbered ten or thirty to one and will not succeed. Remember that the plane intended to crash into the Pentagon crashed in a field somewhere because its passengers heard about the ones that hit WTC and -correctly- determined that they had absolutely nothing to lose.
> ...terrorists can blow up a few hundred people [at a checkpoint].
The fact that this doesn't happen indicates that even a jetliner with a flimsy, unlocked cockpit door wouldn't be used as a weapon to kill thousands. Murder -let alone mass murder- is vanishingly rare. By and large, people simply don't want to kill or injure each other... they just want to go about their business.
To support this point, I'd like you to tell me when was the last time you heard about a cell-phone-battery-bomb? You may remember those from back when Israel's military booby trapped the batteries of phones that they believed were going to be delivered to many members of the opposing military... and then set off those bombs all at once. Shorty after the bombings, Bunnie Huang [1] did some thinking and came to the conclusion that not only is it pretty easy to fabricate such remotely-triggerable bombs with like five-figures [2] worth of perfectly ordinary equipment that is entirely legal for anyone to have, if one built such a bomb with the explosive force of a hand grenade it would be [3] undetectable to a TSA CT scanner operator, and -because batteries are sealed- entirely undetectable to explosives swabs.
If The Terrorists Are Constantly Out To Get Us, why haven't we seen these bombs? It has been what, three years or so since those very clever booby traps were distributed to and used against opposing forces? Where are the domestic bangs and booms?
[0] One expects that airlines did not wish to do this because its cost was greater than zero. I wonder how the cost compared to the destruction of three airliners, two skyscrapers, all the deaths and cleanup, and twenty five years (and counting) of security theater.
[1] Huang is a fellow with fairly substantial commercial electronics design and fabrication experience
[2] USD
[3] ...in part because of the variance in battery construction from manufacturer to manufacturer and even from model to model...
Why would a terrorist want to plant a Bluetooth device on someone else's bag when all it would accomplish is a minor delay of one flight and would result in a prison sentence after security camera review??
Remember: Kim Jong-Un’s brother was not killed directly by North Korean goons. They hired two women they convinced they were working on a prank show to spray him with the poisons.
After reviewing the video tapes the police concluded that the women knew that they were handling poison - they kept their hands away from their body and immediately washed them after the attack.
Someone could have told them it was anything else that you wouldn't want on your body. Like, fart spray or whatever. A prank. That behavior doesn't really tell you anything conclusive, but I guess they just let anyone be a cop these days.
>> "All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
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 turned around would make them a laughingstock overnight.
I am baffled that we are even having this argument.
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.
Terror is a tactic used by terrorist organizations, but it’s hardly the only thing they do.
“There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Isn’t quite true, but publicity is inherently valuable to organizations dependent on outside donors. The Provos/IRA did similar things (attention grabbing and annoying) not just setting off bombs during the time of troubles.
Seems like an effective DoS attack - ground all planes in the US by sneaking cheap bluetooth speakers into people's luggage with provacative device names
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.
You're supposed to wait to walk through the scanner until your bag is in the x-ray machine, or far enough along to not be tampered with. Doing that, I'm still always waiting on the other side to see by bag come out the other end.
Even worse, what's to prevent the terrorists from temporarily renaming their Bluetooth bombs to something innocuous just before going through security and only renaming it back when they need to conveniently find them again while pairing?
Or going into the baggage claim area with a bag containing an explosive device, then acting like they grabbed the wrong bag and putting it back on the carousel, and then leaving.
As an aside, this is something I've only seen in the US. At least in my country the domestic baggage claim area is not accessible unless from an arriving aircraft.
I'm guessing that has more to do with theft though than security.
No, that's because in the US they're handling the international flights separately. It's also the reason why even when you have a layover, you need to clear customs.
Domestic flights in the US are like busses/trains elsewhere. Most people fly without a checked bag
Most of the world handles international flights separately without needing to do that unless it is an international-domestic connection.
However I agree that in purely domestic airports I don't see how you'd prevent general public from accessing bags. Except India, wherein you need a booked flight to even enter the airport.
> I don't see how you'd prevent general public from accessing bags.
People are routinely prevented from being where they are not supposed to be. Whether you put the baggage pick-up point in a publicly accessible area or on a restricted area is a design choice.
Absolutely true and you can tell at least in the old days when you'd fly southwest. Every other airline the overhead bin fills up. It is an inevitable drama when the flight attendants have to say "overheads are full now we are gate checking bags."
Southwest, at least before they changed their bag policy, would let you fly with two free checked bags. Finally everything worked as intended and those overheads were seldom used. Maybe for a jacket or purse or something, but no one was shoving a roller bag up there.
Spirit was another airline with ample overhead space, because they charged you nearly the same rate for overheads as checked bags.
Most domestic flights are short duration trips, a week's worth of clothes fit in carry-on suitcase, and the other stuff (laptop etc) can go in a backpack.
In all my domestic flights in the past year they've had to ask people at the gate to volunteer their carry-on suitcase to be checked into the hold because they didn't expect to have enough room in the overhead bins.
I usually volunteer because: it's free, I don't mind waiting at the pickup, and it's slightly more comfortable when getting off the plane.
I don't know if we are the level of "most people" but I'd say we are defintely at a "signficant percentage of ppl". Due to cost of checked luggage the popularity of one bag carry on flying has exploded.
I don't know if it's always more than 50% but on U.S. domestic flights a lot of people are carry-on only. It's far more than half on the routes and days frequented by business travelers. On routes and days where more consumer, family and vacation travelers fly it may not always be half but if it's not, it's close. Personally, I haven't checked a bag in over ten years. Using packing cubes it's possible to fit a huge amount in a well-designed modern suitcase.
The U.S. is different in this way from many other regions, especially much of the EU. There are specific reasons I've noticed:
- Due to the shorter EU domestic routes, it's more common to see smaller aircraft with much less overhead space for bags.
- For EU domestic routes, limits on carry-on bag size / count tend to be lower, more frequent and enforced more stringently (even when the aircraft in use isn't space-limited).
- In many countries there are different carry-on bag size / count allowances between domestic and long-haul international. In the U.S. almost all domestic flights use the larger international allowances (the rare exceptions usually being 'puddle-jumper' connections).
- In the U.S. checking bag compliance at the gate isn't as frequent or stringent. The nominal limit is a small suitcase + a personal item. On intra-E.U. flights, I see large backpacks rejected as the 'personal item' that are routinely accepted in the U.S. A higher percentage of U.S. passengers have maximum 22-inch roller bags than I see in the E.U. You can fit a lot in a 22" bag + large backpack.
- My perception is that elsewhere in the world, the average person on a domestic flight will be away from home longer than in the U.S. I assume this is due to the other regions often having better inter-city / region train and bus options than the U.S. which take a larger share of shorter duration trips.
- Other less significant factors might include U.S. business and evening attire being a bit more casual on average, making is easier to pack small as well as U.S. airline industry competition making shorter duration (but not necessarily shorter distance) U.S. domestic flights more accessible to more consumers. A lot of U.S. middle-class consumers now frequently use flights for weekend trips over 1,000 mi away. The U.S. has a larger number of smaller commercial airports in second-tier cities that are still fairly easy to get through quickly, even with TSA security. This can make same-day jet trips to cities ~500 to ~1000 mi away not much more involved than a typical EU train trip to a nearby city. For about a year, I did same-day and overnight jet flights from San Diego to Sacramento (~900 mi / 80 mins) about twice a week, often with nothing but a bike messenger bag as carry-on. I know a guy that did San Jose - Burbank as a daily commute for several months. A larger airport like SFO or LAX can add nearly an hour on each end just due to airport logistics and location but 2nd tier airports with longer direct flights make it possible. I think that's more unusual in other countries.
Indeed, although today I got on a plane at LaGuardia and they made me check my carry on at the gate even though there was plenty of space in the overhead bins ( 60% capacity flight, about half of us had to do this) so YMMV.
No idea why they made us do that, but I had to grab my bag at the luggage claim.
>> Do people collect their bags from the baggage claim area and then immediately reboard an aircraft to exit the terminal?
>> How do the arrivals exist the terminal
You arrive, go to baggage reclaim, then into the "public area". You can then exit the terminal, or go check in for another flight or whatever you like. The point is that once you have left the baggage collection area you cannot re-enter it.
>> Are you not allowed to have a friend who is picking you up assist with baggage claim?
exactly. No-one from outside is allowed into the baggage collection hall.
But equally, we don't get charged for trolly use. So you don't need help. You stack everything onto a trolly (which are there waiting for you for free.)
yes. In the US. that's what I'm saying. This appears to be a very US design. (Although obviously my experience of domestic air travel is limited to a small number of countries.)
In Uganda they make you get out of your car and go through a metal detector before getting to the pre-security security screening at the actual airport... 3-4 layers...
> What's to prevent terrorists from going through TSA, waiting in the scanning line when everyone is still going through, and then planting a bluetooth device into someone else's bag? I never open my carryon once I have packed it.
I make it a point to hold up the whole line until it is my turn to go through the xray. It gets fun when they mandate a pat down in lieu of the millimeter wave scanner but refuse to have someone available for it.
It’s the only way to honestly say you have kept your bags under watch. If anybody tries to send in my bags without me , I immediately speak up in a loud stern voice, “That is not your bag!”
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 acting like an asshole for the sake of being an asshole and making life just a little bit worse for everyone else around you.
This is not something to brag about. This is something to be ashamed of.
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.
How is waiting for my turn to go through the metal detector or be patted down being an asshole? I arrived before the people behind me and I’m following the security procedures of the airport.
It explicitly says to keep your belongings in your position at all times. To keep your bags in view. In fact they ask you if you ever lost sight of your bags.
If people don’t want to wait in line for people following the rules then let them be inconvenienced to the point where they will get the rules changed to speed up the process.
But I’m not going to give in to the stupidity of the security rules and forsake my own belongings to accommodate someone who doesn’t care enough to either come early and deal with the potential ramifications of the rules their elected leaders have chosen for them.
What you are doing is the equivalent of paying some poor cashier in pennies while everyone behind you is forced to wait in order to get revenge for some decision made by executives ten rungs up the food chain.
It is childish and immature. And worse, it biases people against whatever point you’re trying to make in the first place. Please make the conscious choice to be a better person.
> It explicitly says to keep your belongings in your position at all times.
Since you are hell-bent on following all rules to the letter, you could at least commit to the bit and follow your luggage through the X-ray machine.
If you concede that it’s not reasonable to do so, then I think you’re capable of being adult enough to concede that neither is purposefully obstructing a bunch of other travelers for the sake of a pointless exercise to obstruct everyone else so you can maintain eye contact with your luggage.
> What you are doing is the equivalent of paying some poor cashier in pennies while everyone behind you is forced to wait in order to get revenge for some decision made by executives ten rungs up the food chain.
These rules are not made by CEOs. They’re made by the people the populace has chosen to elect. Either directly or indirectly through inaction.
> It is childish and immature. And worse, it biases people against whatever point you’re trying to make in the first place. Please make the conscious choice to be a better person.
Again, what part of waiting for my turn is childish or immature? If the person in front of me is waiting for her turn I’m not going to complain. That’s the system we’ve arrived at.
> Since you are hell-bent on following all rules to the letter, you could at least commit to the bit and follow your luggage through the X-ray machine.
I think you’re misunderstanding my actions. I don’t hold up the line for no reason. I hold up the line until both me and my bags go through in tandem. Not a moment sooner nor a moment longer.
Isn't this terror-ists winning? When people give in to terror?
When we had the IRA active in the UK everyone would be proud to carry on as normal after any incident, to show that life would go on as normal despite their efforts. This doesn't seem normal.
You can modify your regex to only match when it's not a shortened url - then the short one will redirect to the real www.reddit.com address, before the redirect matches.
(Don't have the correct regex on hand right now, as I changed browsers and decided to use Old reddit redirect extension instead of scripting, but it worked in my previous browser)
to do that you have to open the link in new reddit first to expand it, then change it to old reddit. if you use a tool that automatically replaces www.reddit.com with old.reddit.com the shortened links break.
I got permanently banned for the "Christianity is just worshipping a Jewish zombie who is his own father who will save you if you invite him into your head, symbolically drink his blood, and eat his flesh" copypasta, so not everyone can log in :)
The entities that have access to flight manifests have far easier ways to identify who's behind your account. It's not a threat model worth seriously considering.
Internal flights in New Zealand don’t need ID. So if you knew you were going to posting your terrible flight experience, you could fly under a fake name.
Not public but definitely written down and semi permanent. It’s like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that could eventually lead to you. In this case, it gives a determined actor a specific course of action to follow (find the manifest).
We need to start asking questions about when it's appropriate to charge staff for falsely escalating a nonsense concern. A teen with a bluetooth network named bomb is not a threat, and turning around a plane for it is creating false alarm. This happens a lot, frequently in schools, where someone will make a joke (like asking Benjamin Netanyahu to drop bombs on a school building in a clear joking manor) and officials shut down the building and have the FBI arrest the child under false pretense of a threat.
At some point we need to start asking hard questions about when to charge administrators and staff for creating false alarms.
One of my coworkers once told me that, unless I changed our hardware design, he'd be forced to add a buggy part to our bill of materials to handle the use case.
The core conflict is religious. How can you pretend it's not
And the statement can be interpreted as violent when you consider the context pretty easily. Violence against Israel and jews is part of the Palestinian identity.
People prank others all the time with goofy names [1] (2014) So are we at the point where that will change and devices will have to just assign random sanitized dictionary names? "Connect to my 'apple horse bunny farm'" There are programs that can flood an area with tens of thousands of fake access points (scapy-fakeap). Or thousands of drones for that matter. [2]
Well next time pick one that browsers automatically filter out, example "hunter2" browsers automatically filter some passwords per W3C standards, notice you can't see my password. [1]
- 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.
I guess I shouldn't pine, I can just have AI summarize all sources for me, and stop dealing with poor reporting that tries to drag 3 bullet points into multiple pages for the sake of selling ad space.
Hmm I see. I only use "old" reddit and it does require login there to resolve to a real address. In any case, it is a special link that enables tracking (unnecessary, to say the least).
Oh, I thought how stupid it was to return the flight based on Bluetooth device name, which is just a random string identifying a thing. But I think it's also strongly discouraged to bring devices called bombs on a plane?
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.)
Provides many opportunities for cheaper and more scalable methods of terrorism.
Don't need to actually get explosives on board, just a bluetooth device. Manage to get 10 planes at once, and you've got a nice bit of chaos on your hands.
Wonder how easy it'd be to reverse pickpocket some fitbits into jackets left laying around before you catch your flight to a 'non-aligned country'.
Could cause lots of havoc with pre-planted speakers, too. Setting off random sirens at maximum volume, telling people to evacuate, etc. I wonder what the security solution would be if people started causing terror via text and sound.
The meta narrative here is a shift towards more authoritarian ideas gaining further foothold/dominance.
As can be seen in the naming treatment + the comments on that article + comments here. But also can be seen in various other places.
In fact, it has already happened to a degree where we see these lagging(!) indicators pop up. So wherever we currently stand is further than those. To which degree though I couldn't say.
It's beyond obvious at this point that we exist alongside a massive bot brigade (or many midsize bot farms) ready to chime in with senseless, cookie-cooker support for short-shrift authoritarian ideology.
It's palpable in the comment sections of many corporate news outlets, as well as on reddit.
Unless there's evidence that this pattern of comments is from real biological humans, I see no reason to presume that it is.
How would turning bluetooth off convince anyone that there isn't a bomb on board? It seems like the bluetooth offering is the least of our worries in the insane case that this is how a threat was delivered.
The idea wasn't to convince anyone of anything, it was to reduce RF noise so the cops could find the offending device more quickly. Also if it were a real threat you would probably quickly identify someone who is unwilling to turn off their Bluetooth.
> a flight attendant told passengers over the PA system that they "must turn off Bluetooth immediately," or else the aircraft would have to turn around.
So if the person just takes back their bomb threat everything is ok? Or did they think the terrorist labeled their Bluetooth bomb “bomb” and this would disable it?
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.
How many threats did actually turn out to be real to date? I couldn't find this being published. But how many threats did happen without any indication (only after the perpetrators tell). I can easily recalled maybe 3-4 incidents. So the issue here is do knowing threats really help?
You only hear the edge cases in the news. There are tens of thousands of incidents of unruly passengers some of which are just threats and some are actual violence.
But also, just because someone is making what could be perceived as a threat doesn’t mean it won’t escalate, which is why threats are taken seriously even if we don’t know whether something is guaranteed to go wrong. You don’t want a crazy person making bomb threats on a flight even if they don’t have a bomb, because they can inflict other issues while trapped in a metal tube at cruising altitude.
No they wouldn't. A fundamental part of a threat is to make it very clear that there's a threat. The reason you threaten is to get some concession, otherwise you wouldn't bother threatening.
This is at odds with basically every major security incident postmortem in recent history.
Most security failures happen when people wait to take something seriously until it is “very clear” that something is wrong.
We have the luxury of hindsight while reading this article but listen to the tapes of any security failures and you’ll find it painfully obvious that the most common issue is that people don’t do anything until it’s too late.
For example, there are many pieces of equipment that can be broken and they’ll still fly, because it’s not essential or there’s enough redundancy.
Child safety seats are not required even though they’d save lives, because the extra hassle and expense would cause some parents to drive instead, which is much more dangerous, leading to more overall deaths.
Normally the decisions are quite sensible. But the moment any “terrorism” enters the picture it all goes out the window.
In the simplest possible terms: this is total bullshit security theatre. At no point has there ever been a bomb or even a bomb threat carried out via usb device names. There is absolutely no reason to even look at the names of Bluetooth devices on a flight.
Without testing the null hypothesis that is not possible to determine. There doesn’t have to be an actual bomb for an unruly passenger to inflict injuries or death.
Why are people not reading the article!!!! It was a Fitbit. Best not to get news based on Reddit conjecture. It's wild how many people are running with the speaker thing.
Was wondering the same thing. Maybe there's some regulation about this, but the flight crew wanted to bend the rule to keep the plane going, figuring it was just a poorly named device.
This is wildly inaccurate to the point of being dangerous advice. The goal during a bomb threat call is generally not to challenge, mock, or provoke the caller into a reaction. It is to keep the caller talking for as long as possible and gather information that could help assess the threat and assist law enforcement or security. There is no reliable rule that says a "real terrorist" will hang up if laughed at or that a hoax caller will stay on the line. People making threats behave in many different ways and simplistic tests like this are not a dependable way to determine whether a threat is real.
I was talking about this with someone the other day… How many real terrorism threats have been preceded by the terrorist telegraphing their intentions with a phone call beforehand? My prior is that this number is essentially 0 and we should ignore bomb threats as a society.
Probably not super common but it does happen from time to time.
And imagine ignoring a bomb threat and then it's real, you probably would not want to be responsible for that.
The Weather Underground often warned the targets of their bombings via phone call. (I guess their goal was to attack gov't institutions and make a political statement, not to kill lots of people.) This was in the late '60s-'70s.
The IRA (Irish terrorists, for Americans confused at the acronym, or maybe confused at what the IRA did) did occasionally phone warnings and occasionally the information was accurate. Code words were used to authenticate the threat.
The PIRA actually do seem to have intended to give accurate warnings when they planted bombs, in Belfast at least. There were inevitably cases when the information was garbled or misunderstood but the use of codewords & the practice of delivering the warnings to a known set of media outlets was at least an attempt to minimise these.
The downside was that the vast majority of warnings were hoaxes - bomb scares were dozens of times more common than actual bombs.
The other main groups - INLA, UVF, and UFF/UDA also got in on the hoax game, but didn't often do real bombs (and didn't always give proper warnings when they did - see the UVF's Dublin & Monaghan bombings for a particularly grim example).
But real bombs were just common enough that the hoaxes from whatever source had to be taken seriously and so they caused huge amounts of disruption, probably more than anything that actually exploded.
Logically that probably makes sense, but it would require everyone in the chain of command agreeing to that policy, and there’s no way that would ever happen from a liability standpoint.
I think its a move by United to set precedent so they can do whatever they want on subsequent flights. And because of that, to also help law enforcement say they can take away some of your rights when flying.
Tinfoil hat on.
In the past few years, whenever I hear United on the news its not because they did something “good”.
The level of idiocy... like what was the alert for? "A bomb was registered through bluetooth?" They really thought that a legitimate bomb, calling itself a bomb and registering on a device bluetooth spectrum was a threat? And these people are allowed to fly planes? What if my laptop's name is dabomb and I register on the plane's wifi node, will that trigger a call to a SWAT team?
After this the number of the same occurrences will increase....
There are simple android apps that brings you literally near to the offender device this is not hard to do.
But the question is, was this not spotted at airport? Or the name was set like that just in middle flight?
The other incident mentioned is worse I think. It wasn’t a potential threat, it was stating an opinion.
“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.”
Given that the Palestinian Liberation Organization has an actual history of multiple hijackings, this makes a slight amount of sense.
Of course, someone planning to hijack a flight would probably never try to do so with WiFi ssid’s, not to mention that hardened cockpit doors and passenger attitudes mean that PLO style hijackings are now impossible.
Of course, telling people to turn off the network name (bomb, Palestine or otherwise) and everything will be fine, is a tacit admission that the whole thing is theater.
I understand that the United States is actually a puppet for Israel, although the name on a Bluetooth device isn't really breaking any laws? It's not calling harm to someone, its not a threat. I thought America was the place of free speech?
Passengers are required to follow orders by flight crew regarding flight safety. If the passenger shut off the device, it does appear that 1st Amendment speech protections would apply (prior restraint is expressly forbidden). If the passenger failed to comply, then I suppose the FBI could detain them for failing to follow the lawful order.
In the most simplistic terms, yeah. That's true. But the constraints aren't really shaped like that. For instance:
A completely-innocent Airtag speaks only bluetooth, and it can be activated from continents away -- as long as any Apple phone is nearby with a shred of Internet access.
My similarly-innocent Samsung phone is programmable (using its built-in Routines function) to perform actions in response to becoming disconnected from any given Bluetooth device.
Not directly, no, but they’ll build a file for what they consider extremist views. Just look back to the Civil Rights Movement era for the list of things people said that would get them an FBI file - we have a long and storied history of surveilling anyone and everyone who says things that go against what political power desires.
That being said, I do think any cabin crew pitching a fit over such a hotspot name is absolutely in the wrong. That’s not a threat, that’s personal opinion, and it’s not the hotspot owner’s fault the crew conflates Zionist ideology specifically with Jewish Faith in general like an ignorant fool.
> 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 without answering the questions, due to the possibility that the information will be used against them.
The result? They call someone else, and don't count "declined to answer" in their results. So the poll simply is the prevailing opinion of those who wished to answer, and thus is skewed one direction. (BTW, this is why everyone says there are "at least XXX hundred million guns in America; the best they can get is a low estimate)
This happens quite a lot with controversial topics.
I’m Jewish and living in North America. I have no ability to affect Israeli policy, nor is my heritage an endorsement of it. If someone was yelling at me about Palestine because I am Jewish, I would be pretty offended, even though I probably agree with them.
It’s the same as running up to a Muslim and screaming “stop terrorism”. Or running up to a black person and yelling “stop gang violence”.
The action of yelling at a random person because they belong to an ethnic group that is the dominant party that is doing a bad thing in a different part of the world means you are inherently judging them for their race/ethnicity. It is a pretty good definition of racism.
If you are yelling free Palestine at everyone, fine. If you are targeting your message at people because of their race, that’s just racism. The targeting is the issue, not the message.
I think this is true to some extent. On the other hand, the Jewish community in the US and the (unconditional) support it leadership gives Israel is a large reason any of this is possible.
Saying you weren’t directly involved is only an excuse up to a point.
This kind of generalization is exactly the issue though. There is no singular “Jewish community” in the us. Every single temple or congregation is independent, there is no central authority. You saying that there is unconditional support is just a different degree of yelling at random Jews in the street. Every one of my Jewish family members and friends is horrified by Gaza and the AIPAC/GOP collaboration and speaks against it. So the support is not “unconditional” as you posit.
Why aren’t we anti-war Jews the “Jewish community”? Lumping us all together as “unconditional” supporters of Israel and any supporter of Zionism as a supporter of the apartheid state is exactly the problem. It is definitionally racism to say that my behavior or viewpoint is a function of my heritage. So please stop.
What exactly am I supposed to do? Of course I’m not involved. I’ve never been to Israel. I don’t support their war aims. I don’t associate with any Jews or Jewish organizations who really do. Your last sentence is akin to saying that random Muslims can only claim not to be responsible for 9/11 up to a point. It’s reductive, stupid and racist.
Thanks for writing this. It's frustrating to see political-based bigotry be condoned and platformed by mainstream political and media figures. Like seeing the criminal Eric Adams, Kathy Hochul, and Chuck Schumer marching with Bezalel Smotrich and Amichay Eliyahu in the "Israel Day" NYC parade... it reminds me of the 1939 Nazi rally @ MSG or the 1925 KKK DC march. Every ethno-religious supremacist organization and national regime is inherently repugnant to human decency and desecrates the trauma and cost paid by and memories of previous generations to free us from tyrannical oppression by terrible ideologies where one group believes they are superior and another group are animals.
Either the person you're telling your opinion about Palestine agrees with you or not. Expressing an opinion about some situation publicly is not hate. And who you're telling your opinion to is irrelevant.
You're not telling them to not attack Palestine by shouting "Free Palestine", or anything similar, only that you believe that Palestine should be free, so your comparison is not valid, because it does not contain any hidden assumptions.
They might as well agree with you. They can correctly respond by shouting Free Palestine back at you.
I find this very hard to believe. I find it much easier to believe a throwaway account was made specifically to spread some form of zionist propaganda.
Not sure why this is downvoted. This was an example from the same article.
And the answer is that the FBI wasn't involved. That was a threat the pilot made, which comes psychologically from the same place as terrorist bomb threats (and also "eat your vegetables or you'll die early" parenting). You want to control someone's behavior so you threaten maximalist retaliation.
An aircraft is not really public. The Captain and FO have a tremendous amount of power they can wield to make sure a flight passes without incident. A plane is not the place to make statements.
Granted though, the FBI didn’t actually get involved. But why let facts get in the way of rage?
No. It’s not illegal to express that opinion (or any opinion) in public in the US in any normal scenario. I’m not sure to what extent the law is different on planes, but you can go outside on the street and yell “free Palestine, F Zionists” to your heart’s content and you will not have broken any laws.
I wouldn't want to see slogans like this on an airplane of all places. I agree with the slogan. There are plenty of other times/places to say it. Unfortunately freedom is already out the window the moment you go through TSA security, so if I'm getting my crotch patted down to fly, they can be quiet for a few hours too.
Cognitive dissonance can explain a lot. If you don’t think the current regime is genocidal (whatever that even means) then you might get very concerned that anybody who says it is genocidal is a dangerous lunatic or terrorist sympathizer. Even saying something obviously truthful like “there are good people on both sides” becomes a threatening provocation. Hate is a system.
Hard for to assess that stat given the polling organization has this on their Wikipedia page.
“On 29 August 2024 the Israel Defense Forces released Hamas documents[6] that it said showed that, unbeknownst to the PCPSR, Hamas had secretly falsified its levels of public support in polls conducted by the PCPSR.[7] Rejecting the IDF claims, Shikaki said it was 'highly unlikely' that Hamas had falsified its results, but vowed to probe the claims.[8]”
To be clear, it was God that decided to give this land to Abraham in "everlasting possession," so this is pretty cut and dried. Why would Abraham lie about that?? /s
"Airplane hijackings have occurred since the early days of flight. ...Pre-1929, 1929–1957, 1958–1979, 1980–2000, and 2001–present."
"...Between 1958 and 1967, there were approximately 40 hijackings worldwide..According to the FAA, in the 1960s, there were 100 attempts of hijackings involving U.S. aircraft: 77 successful and 23 unsuccessful....
"..In a five-year period (1968–1972) the world experienced 326 hijack attempts, or one every 5.6 days.."
And your conclusion is "Palestinian" movement (that you wrote between quotes)...invented airplane hijacking?
It's also completely false because they cited only Palestine-related hijackings, and not the parent article that goes back far further and proves they're lying.
Would you really be worried if someone said or wrote that near you in any context?
Short of them holding a weapon, this is baffling.
HN is generally absolutist when it comes to ‘freedom of speech’, and I don’t agree with having no limits, but in this instance it’s some overly sensitive overreaching BS.
What’s with the ‘so-called’? That’s what the country is called. Israel. But I’m not sure that you’re aware but there was a really big one 25 years ago this coming September. Maybe you heard of it?
The stated reasoning by Osama bin Laden in a letter published in 2002 [1] was primarily a response to grievances over the US support of Israel's occupation of Palestine, as well as a number of unrelated grievances mostly due to the choices of the various monarchies in the Gulf Arab states. For example, retaining a presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia at the request of King Abdullah.
It may be satisfying to affirm a world view in either direction in the topic, but an understanding of 20th century history suggests that Al Qaeda noted some legitimate grievances while others were not factual or misrepresented. For example, the United States did not support Russia's campaign in Chechnya. Additionally, American military campaigns in Afghanistan were in direct response to Al Qaeda's mass killings of noncombatants and Taliban refusal to stop Al Qaeda military activity based in Afghanistan.
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.”
What is even better now phone calls are prohibited, but all these airlines had actual credit card phones installed in every seat just 20-15 years ago and really wanted you to do phone calls for $1 a minute. And some people did, and it was annoying, and it was “fine”. Now that they can’t charge extra suddenly it’s “against regulations”.
Can you potentially see the difference (red-tape-wise) between a centralized/trunking FAA-certified radio on one highly-specific frequency vs. random, uncertified rogue transmitters all over the spectrum? This wasn't a carrier regulation.
That's not what the parent comment is talking about.
Calling over the cellular network has been prohibited since time immemorial. What the parent comment is talking about is carriers also prohibiting making calls over airplane-supplied WiFi.
You can't, for example, join a Zoom meeting, or use your phone's built-in WiFi calling ability, on a typical flight nowadays, for better or for worse.
Does your phone's cellular radio work at 30000 feet? Calls occur over flight wifi. Streaming video and audio are not permitted on most flights for bandwidth purposes, so it follows that calls are prohibited for the same reason.
> 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?
> Are we now actively participating in the genocide?
The US has provided over 310 billion (not inflation adjusted) in military funding to Israel since the Nakba. So I’d consider “participating” a strong understatement.
This is like the Adam Sandler movie where he says bomb on an airplane.
It's an overreaction, is it not?
A terrorist is not going to call their bomb's bluetooth trigger bomb. Even if they are, are you telling me we have no idea whether there is a bomb in luggage or not?
Even if you discount the possibility of an intentional threat as silly, this could have been a warning from someone under duress. Turning around was the right move.
How does that scenario work? Someone's under duress because presumably there's a terrorist on board. He lets the crew know there's a bomb onboard. The plane turns around, and the terrorist... lets the plane land safely?
OK maybe the bomb blows up when it crosses some longitude, because this is like the movie Speed, and turning around means the plane never cross that longitude..
If you mean another type of duress, naming your device "plshelp-[seat number]" would be a hell lot more effective..
How does your scenario work? Someone anonymously shouts BOMB ONBOARD and the plane just continues to its destination? "I guess they can blow us up whenever, so might as well keep going..."
Honestly I didn't think about that. Maybe they didn't either. Good example of why seeing something vaguely threatening and out of the ordinary is a reason to turn around, even if you don't know why exactly they'd do it.
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.
Does this story mean that anyone can disrupt flights by hiding on planes some minimal device with Bluetooth (say a pi zero), programmed to turn on only at random and after a few days?
I think this part of the article actually explains what freaked out the crew lmaoo:
"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."
Someone needs to explain to me how the name of a Bluetooth device has any bearing on anything. Isn’t the real security not letting a bomb on the plane?
Also, now anyone who wants to disrupt a flight can switch their WiFi or Bluetooth name to Bomb or “Free Palestine” and the flight gets disrupted? Get out of here.
There is nothing new in that. It's pretty common that people get drunk at the airport or on the plane and make jokes about bombs or something. Then the place is evacuated and flights are disrupted. The culprits get arrested and probably have to pay a fine and maybe some compensation to the affected airlines, but they usually don't get any prison time.
I brought some bathbombs on a trip as part of a thank you gift. My bag got pulled aside for additional screening, and I had to think for a second on what to call them when the TSA person asked me what they were.
> 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.
Wtf?
I can understand a bomb, but this is just free speech.
I am curious about the laws governing something like that. Does it matter whether it's a domestic or international flight? Are pilots king of the vessel?
The real "nightmare" is the browser that will automatically run all that garbage returned in the response body without any input from the user
It requires an "adblocker" to stop its default behaviour
Alternatively, one needs to disable Javascript, restrict the browser's access to DNS, etc.
When an advertising company releases a "browser" that intentionally allows website operators to cram pages fuil of advertising and tracking is that a coincidence
Is that the only way a browser can be designed
No
How many users realise this
A small number
For example, I'm using a browser that cannot automatically request resources, run Javascript, CSS, etc. where HTTP headers, including cookies, are trivial for the user to create, edit, save and delete. I do not need an "adblocker"
"Don't these sites realise how many users they're losing?"
This feels like one of those rare stories where everyone involved probably overreacted a little, but you can also understand why nobody wanted to be the person who ignored it.
These phones should have limits of how much you can use the tech...
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.
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
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.
> 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.
That is a very, very, very different statement than "I'm calling the FBI."
You're talking about should or shouldn't. The issue here is past that point: whether it's then right to involve people who are empowered to take away your physical liberty, and worse.
> That is a very, very, very different statement than "I'm calling the FBI."
Yes, but on an aircraft the captain is the dictator. They can do basically whatever they want within the confines of law and company policy - and honestly with enough seniority, which the captain on a transatlantic flight has a lot of - they can probably ignore company policy once or twice and get away with it and keep their job.
As far as I'm aware there is no law preventing the captain from deciding to go back because they don't like one of the passengers blasting their opinions to the entire aircraft. What the opinion is, its levels of subjectivity or objectivity, and whether or not it's popular is completely irrelevant.
I think if the captain doesn’t like you, what they say goes & it’s a federal matter.
I think the reason for the captain not liking you is secondary and could get him fired but it’s still: mess around in federal airspace, deal with the feds. Follow all instructions of all flight crew or you’re a criminal, regardless (I think).
Not actually the FBI though is it? Captain probably wanted to sound serious (mission accomplished).
Doesn’t even necessarily have to be the captain - refusing to follow instructions/direction of any member of the flight crew is a serious problem.
And yeah, if it was ridiculous or violated some other law or something they’d eventually have to deal with the consequences of that, but while in the air, what they say goes.
So what you're saying is if the captain doesn't like you because you're Zionist they can remove you?
That is exactly correct; it's his plane.
I think he would face discipline from his airline after the fact, but in the moment, he is in charge.
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What an odd thing to fixate on . . . swap the pronouns around any way you prefer, and my statement remains correct. The captain is in charge of the aircraft and she is to be obeyed if you want to fly on her aircraft. She can refuse to accept any passenger for any reason. If it is a stupid reason, she may have a problem with her employer later, but nobody can overrule her in the moment.
Friendly reminder that not everyone's first language is English, and for a lot of people for whom it isn't, gender-neutral pronouns can be a pretty foreign concept and it's easy to forget about it. We just apply the natural gender that the word has in our language (such as a chair being feminine in both Portugese and French, so a lot of natives of those languages may mistakenly refer to a chair as "her" in English). I wouldn't go so far as assume the person you're replying to is sexist or whatever it is you're thinking just from the fact they referred to an imaginary captain as "he".
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Yes. The captain has the authority, by law, to remove anyone (or everyone) for any reason. There is basically nothing the captain is legally barred from doing while the plane is en route.
There was a whole episode of Seinfeld about a pilot forcing Jerry off because he just didn't like him. Seems legit.
Have zionists hijacked many planes lately?
A few thousand pagers went off, quite a few in the hands of kids.
Terrorism by definition.
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Just the presidency
So just the commander in chief of the entire USA army then?
I don't know what the right answer is to people doing weird stuff in enclosed places with a captive audience is.
The wifi name probably should have been ignored. But the incidents of people airdropping profane pictures to randos on planes...
That's a design flaw in AirDrop, not an "incident"
When China mentioned this to Apple, Apple agreed, and “Everyone” is not the default and also not available for more than 10 minutes now.
A design flaw it only becomes due to people’s violent acts. If the goal is safety, we should spend more time helping people process their shit and less on raising shields. They only make people more angry. Everybody draws the line differently, but pushing your data on somebody else’s device without their consent is an intrusion, and as such I consider it to be an act of violence. We need to grow up and understand how to break cycles of violence, not push it further towards mutual destruction.
Unsolicited Dirty pictures via a protocol which is easy to disable (and rarely used anyway) vs getting punched in the face or shanked?
Really?
Why the “vs”?! All three acts are acts of violence. We can order them by our own judgment of intensity, but they’re still all violent. And as such also expressions of pain/hurt, which will lead to further expressions until it is finally seen and addressed. We all know this, but still act like we don’t.
No - someone dropping a picture to your phone when you have the ability enabled is not violence by any definition used by people with functioning frontal cortexes. Maybe it's good to remove the "Everybody" option, maybe it's not. Maybe it's good to make it auto-disable after 10 minutes, maybe it's not. Irrelevant.
But absolutely nothing will make a photo popping onto your phone a violent act.
I don't think it was presented as an "vs". Both can be a form of violence, even if one is much worse than the other.
You are actually giving away liberties when boarding a plane and I'm pretty sure this is even written somewhere in the contract between you and the airline that you agreed on.
No contract is allowed to take away what the law gives you. Either the law says "except on a plane/ship/etc." (which is plausible) or the contract is invalid.
Can you imagine how it would be if every contract you sign had a "I own you now, no backsies"?
That sounds like a technicality. You can absolute agree to not do something that would otherwise be lawful. You still have the same rights, but you have other restrictions on you. The two can exist concurrently.
That's not what I said though. I just said you're giving away liberties.
For example, at home, I'm free to walk around nude and scream.
On a plane, I'm not.
On a commercial passenger plane it's frowned upon.
On planes in general, many people jump nude for their 100th skydive - the original and best video of this has been scrubbed from youtube, but a quick search shows others.
Often screaming is included.
On most commercial flights, it's not only frowned upon.
But if you want to f$ck around and find out, I'm sure it will make for a fun "How I Ended Up On the No Fly List" story.
Been there, done that, still allowed to fly. Go figure.
> But if you want to f$ck around and find out
It's a tale as old as the USA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile_high_club
> the original and best video of this has been scrubbed from youtube
More US censorship. Nude skydiving, terrible. Indepth reviews of how to kill things with insane levels of weaponry? Featured video time.
To be fair, the weaponry is far less floppy.
> I just said you're giving away liberties.
>>this is even written somewhere in the contract between you and the airline that you agreed on
What I wanted to say is that you'll never give up any civil liberties because of a contract alone. If the contract can take those away it's because a law never gave them to you in those circumstances in the first place, so you never had them to begin with.
I just wanted to make it clear that you cannot agree to give up something that the law gives you. If the law doesn't give you something, you have nothing to give up.
The law gives very few liberties. And the places where people think it give liberties, it is actually just banning laws from being made around liberties.
Freedom of speech is the peak of this. People think it means "I can say whatever I like wherever I like". But that's not what it is. The government cannot make laws curtailing speech (though, it does... enforcement and interpretation don't line up with the original intent). You can, however, sign an NDA which curtails your speech. A business can kick you out for saying something they don't like. An employer can fire you for saying "poodle" one too many times.
And that's what we are dealing with around airlines. They absolutely can kick you off the plane and ban you for almost any reason. For what you say, wear, or because they don't like how tall or short you are.
The law really only protects a few things. Your race, your gender, your religion. Everything else is fair game for a private institution to discriminate against. They can kick you off a plane because you are a journalist. They can kick you off because you won't quarter soldiers. They can kick you off because you don't submit to a search of all your property.
> In short, please stow your rights in the overhead container or in your checked baggage and respect other peoples' right to be left alone.
What does a Bluetooth device's nickname have to do with leaving people alone?
Right, those other people (well, their devices) are asking you (well, your device) what your (device's) name is. You're not telling them until they ask. They need to leave you alone!
> they have no way to leave
Not only do the people have no way to leave, the owner of the place also has no practical way to make people leave, like they would for example in a restaurant. At least once the plane is in the air.
And the captain has to ensure the safety not only of the flying machine but also of the cabin. So I can absolutely understand the move here and the need to forbid everything that could incite violence in the cabin.
Anyone willing to start a fight over a tacky WiFi name should be committed. Seriously, what an insane thing to do. It's such an easy thing to not be bothered by. It sits in the background, invisible, and you're... just letting it live rent free in your head? There's so many more annoying things to flying than someone's dumb personal hotspot name.
Can we just recognize how crazy of a scenario this is?
People are not rational. Or at least one cannot assume they are when it comes to safety.
People start actual fights over small groups of other people, that neither of them know personally, who are chasing after a ball on a pitch.
So what's your argument? We all act crazy because crazy people might exist? That's just as crazy as being afraid of terrorists.
Why would you let the crazy people run the world. If they're that crazy you put them in a hospital because clearly they need help
The argument is that if I'm responsible for the safety of a very heterogenous group of people in the cabin of my airplane, I will assume that those people are already stressed and will probably act even less rational than they normally would. And that's all that matters in that moment.
> If they're that crazy you put them in a hospital because clearly they need help
Oh believe me, I would if I could...
I think the point here is the captain is responsible for an isolated pocket of humanity in a cabin. That captain is to take that cabin way up in the air, move it a lot, and get it back down safely.
And not all of the risks are about moving the cabin. Many of the risks are within the cabin and while some dickhead getting uppity at the pub will get collared by the police, it is a totally different problem while in the air.
So, while in the cabin, don't try to fuck around and find out. No one wants to find out anything. They just want to get to the other end of the trip.
Punish the dickhead getting upset over the easy to ignore and not that provocative of a thing.
Don't police functioning adults, police dysfunctional adults. Why is this even a contentious statement?
Define crazy. Because you sound crazy to me. The point of view depends on where you sit. Some other people maybe want to put you in prison, for your „craziness“. Care for what you wish.
> I will assume that those people are already stressed and will probably act even less rational than they normally would
They turned what most passengers considered at most tasteless into a real threat worthy of returning to base. How can this possibly help with the stress? If this was to reduce stress, it was disproportionate and backfired in a major way.
Why are airlines adding to every part of that stress but drawing the line at a device's BT name?
Everything about flying is getting worse. The process of buying the tickets full of shady practices and dark patters, the check-in, the boarding process, the cabin luggage getting smaller for the same type of ticket, the ever more cramped seats, the removal of the old amenities like free food or snacks. They are all getting more terrible and adding stress. From what I can tell from my own ticket purchases with the same airlines in the past, the prices kept up with inflation over the past decades but the services have fallen far behind.
Even more you have to actively seek it out to even see it. These people are looking for ways to get triggered.
Do people get kicked out for offensive t-shirts and tattoos? How about bad cologne, good cologne, bad BO, or just for being so ugly that it's offensive?
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.
> I think GP's point is that it's not a risk to the plane?
That is up to the captain to decide.
But as the GP comment asked:
1. In what way is it a risk to the plane? Or is the idea that we should not attempt to evaluate whether pilot's decisions are objective and reasonable? Is there some objective rule being used? (Or if an objective rule can't be stated, is it more like the pilot's feelings or mood about the passenger(s) at any particular moment?)
2. But if someone believes it's reasonable for pilots to turn planes around based on whether someone is wearing a pro or anti Biden/Trump shirt, etc. wouldn't the better solution for airlines to just proactively ban clothing, stickers, etc. with countries' flags, candidate names, political slogans, etc. rather than having pilots turn around planes midflight based on a whim(?), costing hundreds of people large amounts of time and money?
> wouldn't the better solution for airlines to just proactively ban clothing, stickers, etc. with countries' flags, candidate names, political slogans
https://www.united.com/en/us/fly/contract-of-carriage.html
Rule 21 Refusal of Transport
Part H: Safety – Whenever refusal or removal of a Passenger may be necessary for the safety of such Passenger or other Passengers or members of the crew including, but not limited to:
5. Passengers who are barefoot, not properly clothed, or whose clothing is lewd, obscene or offensive;
Is the point here that clothing containing a pro or anti Biden or Trump, or have a countries' flag, or be a US military uniform, should "pose a risk to his plane", and so airlines should be proactively banning such things from being allowed onboard? Or how does it answer the grandparent and great-grandparent's comments questions about why such thing should "pose a risk to his plane"?
This is such an insane thing we're doing. We're policing the behavior of functioning adults because it might upset dysfunctional adults? Why the hell are we creating a society that protects crazy people? It's absolutely insane
Ban clothing altogether.
Nudist flights for the easily terrorized.
1. Does the pilot need anything but his personal biases to claim that poses a risk to the plane?
2. Because any rational person understands that we need to coexist in a society with a spectrum of political opinion, and that a fucking access point name doesn't cross the boundary between safe and dangerous to society.
3. Because doing it for one and not the other is obviously biased and arbitrary and demonstrates that it's not an actual danger to the plane, it's just some asshole with a bad day choosing to exercise his authority over someone whose politics he dislikes. To severe consequences to both that person and everyone else on board the plane. That's not a society you want to strive for.
> One that is actively hostile to millions of Americans
No it isn't. You can read that implication into it, but it's not "actively hostile" in the way that an "F... X" statement is, for any X, and it's a sign of how slanted the discourse is that you would consider them equivalent.
> 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
"not trying to make a political statement", but... Can we say, that Palestine is an enclosed space, considering its total land and sea blockade?
Oh, the irony
> 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.
If you are in any way harassing people by shouting through the plane for example, I agree. But the SSID of a WiFi network isn't that. No one is forced to continually read the list of available hotspots over and over again. There is nothing special about the fact that it's on a plane here.
You are the airline guest until they decide you are not.
At which point you are at least trespassing, and probably worse because it’s commercial aviation.
You agree to their terms when you purchase a ticket.
Indicating that you sympathise with terrorist while on an aircraft should 100% result in law enforcement getting involved.
> Indicating that you sympathise with terrorist
But that isn't what they did. And even if they did, sympathizing isn't being a terrorist yourself. Law enforcement has nothing to do there, unless you're in a totalitarian state.
Which causes that have extremists are okay? Or you're saying all of them?
It's actually even simpler than that. The airplane isn't just a "private business, and you shouldn't mess with their space". They're protected and empowered by broadly ratified conventions (which includes virtually every country in the word), starting with the Tokyo Convention:
> The convention [...] recognises certain powers and immunities of the aircraft commander who on international flights may restrain any person(s) he has reasonable cause to believe is committing or is about to commit an offence liable to interfere with the safety of persons or property on board or who is jeopardising good order and discipline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Convention
And this is an offence? Or does he actually believe they're about to commmit a crime?
Is there some reasonable test? Could he do this for a band t shirt
> 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.
Its not private space. Its public because they sell tickets. Its like going to any other event, and I don’t think there’s a constitutional exception to free speech on airplanes where you can’t express your opinions.
I'm not sure if you are saying one can or can't express opinions on airliners.. but I do want to point out that the "contract of carriage" of most airlines is more restrictive than you might find for a ticketed event like a concert. You might want to read the one for United, just for fun (especially if you fly). https://www.united.com/en/us/fly/contract-of-carriage.html Rule 21, item H 16 even indicates that you can't smell bad. YMMV, but it is pretty far from a "public" space as I define one.
Flying on a plane is in no way similar to a public ticketed event. It takes about 30 second of logical thinking to realize that's not true.
Considering the passengers of an airplane a captive audience of a wifi hotspot name is wild. Have these people no ability to not be triggered?
Your passport is inherently political. Uniformed service members boarding first is inherently political. The choice of language the crew is able to communicate to passengers in is inherently political.
If I can ignore seeing your neglected toenails tangled haphazardly around the sandiest pair of adidas flip-flops you possess, you can kindly ignore the SSID "Electronic Frontier Foundation", Karen.
> Actually, I don't think it's a good idea to bring your politics into a an enclosed pace like this
Ah yes, the classic "your politics," but of course the person having this opinion's politics are perfectly fine, because they're the "normal" person with the "normal" politics, not like that crazy person who thinks some randos shouldn't be the subject of genocide. How dare they!
I believe the idea is that no one should be declaring their political beliefs loudly in such an environment regardless of how “normal” they are. I’m not sure broadcasting a WiFi endpoint meets my threshold for “loudly”, but otherwise I tend to agree.
Maybe, but you know as well as I do that if the SSID were "God Bless America," "Support our Troops," "Fuck George Bush," "I'm glad Hitler is dead," "The South will rise again," or any number of things that there would be no incident.
Believing you do not have the right to name your Bluetooth what you want is also a political belief.
>I don't think it's a good idea to bring your politics into a an enclosed [s]pace like this
I agree! I'm getting so sick of politics on HN
I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not, but what exactly is your vision of HN "without politics"? It's very hard to avoid because so many technical things have overlap with politics, and lots of technical decisions have political implications. HN currently loves talking about all things AI, and that's probably one of the biggest political topics out there.
Oh it's easy! There's just two genders - male and political. Just two races - white and political. Just two beliefs - conservative and political.
> 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.
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.
A lot of people swap jew for zionist or israel to cover up their antisemitism, so yes "fuck jews" could be interpreted as a threat.
There is no more succinct way to describe a Zionist than by using the word Zionist. To assume anyone who says "Zionist" means "Jew" is to make an unnecessary leap in bad faith.
“Fuck Jews” cannot reasonably be interpreted as a threat.
It’s a nasty antisemitic thing to say, but that’s all it is.
A lot of people shout 'Free Palestine' before doing some vigilante violence (shooting in DC, firebombing I'm Boulder), so wouldn't that make security officials jumpy? The whataboutism of Israel being more 'evil' doesn't mitigate the security threat.
I hear “free Palestine” shouted tens, or hundreds of times every day while walking outside on the street.
Only time violence is involved is when drunk American or Israeli tourists get uppity, otherwise the protestors just stand there and make noise.
How would you, or the protesters you hang out with daily, feel if someone shouted “Fuck Gaza”?
I wouldn’t care. I certainly wouldn’t feel threatened.
Not sure about the protesters, I usually try to keep my distance to avoid hearing damage.
Eh, most Nazis that use the words interchangeably really do use them interchangeably. Like, they'll talk about the Jews controlling everything in one sentence and say it's Zionists pushing cultural Marxism or whatever the next.
You realize that calling everyone who criticizes an ongoing genocide an antisemite isn't workable, right?
> You realize that calling everyone who criticizes an ongoing genocide an antisemite isn't workable, right?
At what point did I ever mention that?
The only issue I can see that causing is a fight. And anyone that is willing to start a fight because someone has s stupid device name should be committed because they're insane. That's crazy amounts of petty.
People like the “wash it’s not free speech” are the ones championing fcc blocking licenses and arresting g people for quoting Trump
Freedom of speech for me not thee.
So if the pilot is informed that there is a bearded guy on the plane should he turn around as well? What if its an evil looking moustache?
It doesn’t.
I get my lighter through in Brazil all the time and a friend of mine got giant scissors through in Buenos Aires. It’s entirely a choice to freak out over nothing.
In most of the world you’re allowed to do outlandish things like have a beer at the mall. Or walk outside with one.
>even a tiny probability that it might be a threat has to be paid attention
What if it had been named "Teddy Ruxpin is my friend", but the pilot doesn't know whether that's a secret code for "I'm going to release aerosol sarin nerve gas on the plane"?
Should he react to all messages as if they are threats, because no matter how small the risk is, more than zero is too much?
If you can't know whether something is a threat or not, the only reasonable response is to treat it as a non-threat. Anything else leads to absurd outcomes that make it harder to protect from real threats.
>The right to free speech does not mean the right to ignore the predictable effects What are the predictable effects for the scenario in question? Please enlighten us, because most of us are apparently unable to predict those ourselves.
> What if it had been named "Teddy Ruxpin is my friend", but the pilot doesn't know whether that's a secret code for "I'm going to release aerosol sarin nerve gas on the plane"?
I'm unable to find any connection between Teddy Ruxpin and sarin gas online, so I don't see why a pilot would make such a connection. Am I missing something?
> If you can't know whether something is a threat or not, the only reasonable response is to treat it as a non-threat.
Have you ever been in a position where you were responsible for the safety of several hundred people?
> What are the predictable effects for the scenario in question?
That not turning that Bluetooth device off when told to was going to end up delaying the flight.
> That not turning that Bluetooth device off when told to was going to end up delaying the flight.
This thread is discussing the “Free Palestine, F Zionists” WiFi hotspot and the threat to turn it off within 30 seconds or face the FBI. Which is explicitly not a threat, whereas “BOMB” in the context of a plane is more obviously a potential threat.
> explicitly not a threat
I don't see that as necessarily true. I can imagine many situations where F INSERT NAME OF ENTITY would be considered threatening. If they had F the captain of this plane, would the captain be wrong to feel threatened at all?
Name a single one of those situations, I can’t imagine any.
Threatening is not the same as an actual threat. If someone stood up on a plane and yelled “bomb”, the default implication is that there is a bomb present.
If someone gets up and yells “F the captain”, it is reasonable to be fearful that they might act on that sentiment, but the statement itself is not a threat; not an expression of intention (or in the former case, presence of an object that is intended) to inflict evil, injury, or damage.
>I'm unable to find any connection between Teddy Ruxpin and sarin gas online, so I don't see why a pilot would make such a connection.
And I'm unable to see the connection that you're imagining in the original post. What is it? Can you explain it to me? Is the threat here in the room with us now?
> Should he react to all messages as if they are threats, because no matter how small the risk is, more than zero is too much?
No. But he should treat messages that are blatantly intended to provoke others as such. If someone on the flight is going out of their way to cause trouble, kicking them off is the smart move.
> If you can't know whether something is a threat or not, the only reasonable response is to treat it as a non-threat.
To someone whose primary consideration is safety, like the captain of an aeroplane, your logic is entirely nonsensical.
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.
Let's get real. This was a pilot using authority granted to them for security purposes to punish somebody whose politics they disliked.
The pilot should be fired effective immediately.
I would be a bit more charitable in assigning motive for the pilot's actions.
Airline pilots are morally and physically responsibile for the lives on their aircraft. This necessitates respect for their authority.
Like other professionals, they must compartmentalize personal beliefs and professionalism.
Playful antics and silly BS, whether it be for the lulz, politics, or anything else, is a disrespectful act of defiance to the individuals you entrust to deliver you safely to your destination.
They are the final authority in flight, and have broad discretion they must exercise prudently with a bias for risk aversion.
I've known 2 airline pilots. They are the most even keeled people I've ever come across. Literally, the coolest and calmest people.
The system (should) weed out anyone who would act unprofessional, like letting their political beliefs cloud their judgment.
It's interesting that you know what the pilot was doing and why they were doing it. Anyways, there's zero chance the pilot will be fired. Pilot unions are incredibly powerful and go to bat to protect their members.
How would the pilot know the perp's political leanings...?
edit: oh you mean the "f z" guy
> 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.
It's as recent as WWII was when Nixon got elected.
And Nixon followed through with countless post-WW2 policies, practices, and acted on concerns that stemmed specifically from that conflict. The Cold War and all related funding being an easy example.
I’d also be very wary of recency bias when looking at the extremist fringes of religious and political situations that have been ongoing for centuries. We might feel a couple decades is a long time, but in conflicts all parties can veto the other parties subjective interpretations.
> quite relevant
Quite relevant in terms of? Security (theater?) measures that have been allowed to continue?
Hey look, that person may have discovered that the introduction of Bluetooth on mobile phones somehow prevented future hijackings from being listed on Wikipedia with those keywords they grepped for. Let's not count out this water-tight approximation of commercial piloting procedure. Just think of how many incidents have been similarly prevented around that specific regional conflict by reducing legroom, shrinking overhead storage, and innumerable TSA back-of-the-hand bad touches.
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.
The right of free speech is not wholly encompassed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In fact, it's the other way around, it's because the right of free speech is recognized as a universal, natural right then the US Federal Government is not permitted to make a law suppressing speech. The First Amendment does not create the right. The right is there, naturally, whether or not the United States or its constitution or government exists. The First Amendment merely explicitly states that the government isn't permitted to impede that right.
Using the existence of the First Amendment to narrow free speech as a right to what the government is permitted to do and nothing else is a severe perversion of both the document and the beliefs of the framers.
In short, "it's a private entity doing it" is an incredibly poor defense of behavior that suppresses speech. It's like how young children will defend their rude or offensive behavior with "it's not illegal." The reason that's an unconvincing argument is that it's an incredibly low bar. The world is full of behaviors that may not be so universally offensive or outrageous that people have explicitly written down that nobody is every allowed to do that thing. It's actually a very small range of possible behaviors that that covers.
The only reason that there isn't a general law barring private parties from restricting the speech of others is (a) one's right to free speech does not necessarily negate another's rights in the same or a different area, (b) one's rights do not entitle one to the use of things owned by others against their desires, and (c) any such law could be used by the government to indirectly suppress other rights.
The narrow nature of the First Amendment is not to be taken as an implication that the right is narrow. It's an admission that the law cannot perfectly protect human rights.
> The right of free speech is not wholly encompassed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
And there are other human rights besides the right to free speech, which have to be balanced. One of them is the right to safe travel. That means people who are responsible for the safety of a planeload of people have to err very strongly on the side of being safe rather than sorry. And mature adults are suppposed to recognize that fact and not insist on exercising their free speech right everywhere they go, to the detriment of other rights.
How about taking the full quote, and defining the terms in that full quote? Otherwise you’re just straw-manning based on cherry picking.
Threats in airplanes, post 9/11, land different. “Free D.C., Fuck Americans” says something different to fellow passengers than “Free D.C.”.
Not crazy, not bonkers. Yes, a threat. And in an airline context: they are all treated as credible… that’s why your shoes get checked, and water gets stopped, and babies banana smoothies get confiscated because of potassium content.
Plus, there’s a red line from the PLO and hijackings through 9/11 to the current state of airline security. That’s not neutral, and not incidental, for an airline that knows recent history.
I'm pretty sure Madison would have jailed you if you showed up on his lawn with an "ARSON" sign.
The founders believed in private property rights as much as free speech. Property was even a requirement for voting in most states.
> The founders believed in private property rights as much as free speech
This explains why Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty happily destroyed private property in the Boston Tea Party.
The First Amendment is academic in a country where foreign visitors are expected to hand over their social media history just in case there's criticism of Glorious Leader and the Great Country He Leads.
And Great Leader recently asked social media sites to provide details of critics.
The ship has sailed. The plane has crashed. The party is over.
There may be survivors, but right now it's too early to tell.
The first amendment is indeed concerned only with the US government’s interaction with the matter, as is appropriate, but that does not imply it’s without other limitation. Your list is very broad and covers a wide range of common sense limitations—like, say, that you don’t want somebody in your vehicle harassing you.
Anyway, airlines are hard because the basic problem is they’re public necessity still halfway regarded as private business. It’s also an unnatural situation that many people be forced to share such little space in “public”, and we’d likely have a different constitution were it always the case.
I don’t think this one will be addressed by principle from on high.
That's nice and all, but you're not in the United States when you're on a plane in the air over the ocean. In this particular case, because United Airlines is a US airline, US law will mostly apply, but I'm sure you get the point.
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?
Well we're talking about this now, so this was actually effective. The point of talking about something is to make people aware of the issue.
For example I don't leave my house often, so a walking protest in the middle of a city has zero chance to reach me. HN post does.
I’d certainly want everyone who’d feel uncomfortable because of a “Free Palestine” WiFi access point to feel maximally uncomfortable.
I really don’t think this is an uncommon opinion.
It's a device name. Why is anyone feeling uncomfortable? It's crazy to be upset by such an easy to ignore thing
Exactly, I’d imagine anyone genuinely bothered by such a network name must be a particularly unpleasant person anyway.
Not very likely, imo, that they did it specifically for the flight. More likely they named it weeks or months ago and just now boarded an airplane.
> Does naming WiFi hotspot to reflect one’s political views achieve anything?
Does action-less speech achieve anything? Advertising, PSAs, political campaigning, etc. all indicate its value in attaining mindshare. Moreover, freedom of expression is liberating for people.
If they aren't actively harming people nor threatening to do so with their words then that's their right. Can by tacky or in bad taste, why's that matter? It's not harming anyone and is a bad WiFi name even meaningfully annoying?
It's the woke shit behind it that is annoying.
Would you say the same if it praised Israels bravery? Honoured Charlie Kirk? Said anything you don't agree with?
Yes, I would. Because it’s just words. Beyond that, it’s words you don’t even have to look at. You would be choosing to repeatedly read the list of WiFi networks.
Irrelevant objection.
Currently signalling support for Palestine is common online. In videogames in my country (Spain) every third player has some such signal (flag or phrase). It's not a serious protest, it's a sign of belonging to group x (whatever group x is), something teens in particular are big in signalling. It's not a big deal and reacting operationally as if it were is a huge security error.
It seems to be just bored, edgy teenagers. Probably "acting out" in one of the few ways they can. (They can't vote but they already have solved every political problem in their head. Ahh youth.)
Still doesn't make it OK, though.
> 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?
They do not, it is all woke signaling to others.
They can put a pic up on Reddit, Insta and get updoots for it from all the genz maniacs.
If you wear a PLO shal you are basically a terrorist in my eyes.
> 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.
This. Many people are unaware of just how much authority a captain has; Failing to follow their instructions is (basically) a felony. It's best to just not mess around on an aircraft.
Am a pilot, this is totally wrong.
PIC authority is strictly limited to in-scope items, this very obviously wasn’t in scope unless it was e.g. causing other passengers to behave in an unruly manner.
thanks for clarifying, this whole thread was sounding a bit ridiculous
It's not about a special status of flight captains. Same can be said of e.g. a store manager acting in-place of the owner. It's a matter of one being on someone's private property, instead of on public property.
Hi, when I was in flight school it wasn’t explicitly stated but certainly heavily implied that as pilots were not allowed to trespass passengers and kick them off the plane mid-flight.
If you have information to the contrary, I would like to be made aware because occasionally I have ended up stuck for hours in the air with unpleasant passengers.
Was just clarifying GP's general point and not stating anything specific to pilots.
You’re badly wrong, aircrew has actual legal authority which stems from the fact that they’re aircrew.
Absolutely nothing to do with private property, especially considering that you can’t trespass people on a plane.
> 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.
> 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).
I don't know why you've decided to explain what is a Hasidic jew in that way (or at all). However I hope you can at least understand in retrospect why describing a religious group as people who all follow some negative behavior is promoting hate towards all members of that group, regardless of their actions.
Needs to throw in a bit of that to gain the approval and upvotes of the antisemites.
You're completely wrong. What I wrote was based on my own observations and just to illustrate that those guys seem quite radical and absolutely would heavily object to offensive hotspot or bluetooth device names.
I have no hate against any kind of jew, muslim or soccer team.
Looks like I was wrong in my last statement above. unfortunately you didn’t understand (or chose to ignore) why your comment is promoting hate.
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.
The issue is censorship of opposition to genocide. True unambigous political censorship
There are numerous spaces and opportunities for you to express your opinions. In fact almost anywhere else (in the US anyway)
Except that this exact thing is the exact thing being censored everywhere around US.
Second, you know full well such name is not a threat, neither passive no active. The reason for that being not allowed is not a threat or abundance of other options. It has nothing to do with any of that. It is just a continuation of the above strategy.
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”?
Not OP, but why draw a line for WiFi names at all? Do you think an actual terrorist goes around drawing attention like that?
That's not even necessary. The fact that it could create panic is enough.
And by the way, a terrorist is (by definition) someone who wants to incite terror in others. So any person knowingly broadcasting "we will all die” is a terrorist already.
Or a nihilist, or a fatalist, or a pessimist, or an antinatalist, or a realist.
Don't go putting people into boxes. That's the path of persecution.
You have the inalienable right to say what you want on a plane, limited by what the government is allowed to prosecute. In a confined space, that is a bit riskier. That's a solely personal choice - no laws are being broken. The Captain has the right to ask you to conform or leave, but that's a separate issue.
People are being overly sensitive. A wifi name is not a protest. It does not disturb personal privacy and tranquility. It's about as offensive as an article titled "We’re All Gonna Die!" from your favorite news outlet - which by the way, is not an uncommon headline.
What if my wifi name was "peanut butter for all!" but unbeknownst to me and by some rare cosmic coincidence everyone on the plane was deathly allergic to peanut butter. Does that make me a terrorist? No! But I swear someone would try to drag me through decades of litigation regardless. These people seem to have divorced words and meanings from the mechanics of how the world works. Like, "this piece of paper says you shouldn't say this, so off with your head".
> The Captain has the right to ask you to conform or leave, but that's a separate issue.
It's not a separate issue, because the captain very likely will err on the side of caution if he has to decide whether you are a terrorist or a nihilist.
You think... a device named "Free Palestine, F Israel" could... create panic? I'm sorry, that is crazy. Only a crazy person would panic over that
I don't fly very often, but every time there's at least one person I would consider crazy enough for that.
Then at put that person in jail, not the person with the tacky device name.
Do you hear yourself? You're saying we should be irrational because there's irrational people. That we should send people to jail because they might upset an irrational person? You're sending the wrong person to jail. Are you crazy?
You're interpreting a lot, as I didn't say any of that.
What I'm saying is that the decision whether or not something is considered a risk is completely at the discretion of the captain. And by accepting the terms of the airline when boarding the plane, you agree to follow the orders of the captain.
So if that captain says "turn it off", you turn it off. It's very simple.
But I give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don't want to understand for the sake of confrontation, so I'll leave it at that.
terrorist/terrorism are words that should be removed from anyone's vocabulary as they have lost their meaning.
Similar to woke/wokism, these have become words used by far right extremists and politicians around the world to name anything that is against their hatred and opinions.
Propaganda is a very important part of terrorism so I would not put that past them. Imagine the headlines if something like that does happen in the future.
In short, a Pascal's wager and a demonstration that it is not easy to have good things.
I already drew the line. Credible threat. Of your three, the last one and I'm not even sure that.
I think advertisements are socially acceptable and actually expected to be as blatantly offensive as possible. How would people react if it were "Boeing go boom. Fly Airbus now! Text 777 NOW for Airbus discounts."
> 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.
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.
Not all Jews are Zionists .. so they are not equivalent words.
eg: https://www.jewishcouncil.com.au/who-we-are
To the antisemites it’s the same thing.
I can point you to threads here on HN where negative things are said about Jews and the term “Zionists” is used interchangeably with “Jews”.
Misuse by idiots doesn't make them equivalent terms.
Depends on who’s saying it. Often times it’s obvious from the context that “Zionist” is just being used as a loophole, and pretending that the difference is then still important is disingenuous.
What's your position here?
Are Jew and Zionist equivalent words in your opinion?
Someone writing “F Zionists” very likely does not make a distinction between Zionists and Jews.
The Jewish Council of Australia is not going to name their hotspot “F Zionists”. Ultra Orthodox Jews are not going to use swear words to express their view.
I’ll go as far as say that anyone who genuinely wants Jews and Arabs to live in peace side by side is not going to go about it with antagonistic one-sided rhetoric.
>Someone writing “F Zionists” very likely does not make a distinction between Zionists and Jews.
That's completely untrue and this is either bad faith or you need to go outside more.
Here, I'll say it myself: Fuck Zionism.
I have no issue with Jews. I just don't like settler colonialism.
> I have no issue with Jews.
You do with at least the 95%+ of Jews who support Jewish self-determination in the Jewish homeland. That's all Zionism is.
Your response is doing nothing to disprove my point. If anything it’s just another data point in support of it.
Nobody conflates Zionism with Jewry more than Israel does. Do you have a problem with them doing it?
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.
>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
The person you are replying to is all over this thread to such an extent that I think they should take their abundance of energy and apply it to becoming a commercial pilot so that they can ignore anything that aligns with their personal preferences.
>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.
And? What's your point? You're implying that a pro-Palestine WiFi network name could even slightly plausibly be interpreted as a threat to hijack an airplane? You can't be serious.
Also, the whole idea of being over backwards trying to stretch things into being interpreted as threats is absurd on its face. A threat is pretty much definitionally intended to be understood as a threat.
As a side note, why is it that in these discussions some people are so quick to equate anything critical of Israel with antisemitism, but we never see much push back in the other direction? I find your insinuation that expressing support for Palestine means you want to hijack an airplane to be wildly racist.
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".
Here's the options:
- You have an actual bomb that's been slipped onto someone else's stuff that is cellphone triggered; perhaps when you get to UK cellular service, perhaps after cabin altitude + time, or whatever. Making the announcement doesn't hurt at all. You want to turn back in this case.
- You have a person who has a device with a name in bad taste, either because of humor or malice. Making the announcement doesn't hurt at all. You would rather not turn back in this case. They might turn it off.
- You have a person who is controlling the actual bomb on the plane. Making the announcement or turning back or even continuing -- it doesn't matter. Your moves are visible to them.
This was a teenager. Then again, there's a whole line of bluetooth speakers called "SoundBomb." And lots and lots more products named "Boom" (still, yes) in some way. There isn't any need for this to be anything more than a reasonable name for a speaker.
Now take your scenarios and weight them by their probabilities
If you think I'm exaggerating here, you're right, but in the conservative direction. There are 44k flights in the US PER DAY. There have been 8 bombings, *since 9/11*[0]. 4 of those involved US craft (not all passenger craft either), and *0* of them succeeded. My numbers are an over-estimate if you take all 8 and count it against a single day of US flights. If we take those 8 bombs, across 24 years of US flights you get closer to 0.000002%, and that's still conservative.I'm sorry, but the risk is just stupid low. There's only 2 lotteries in America that you have a better chance of winning than these absurdly conservative odds (no lottery if you use non-conservative statistics).
I'm sorry, but even if there were a dozen bombing attempts a year this would still be an absurdly safe activity given the shear volume of flights per day.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_airliner_bombing_a...
What would have been your estimated odds, of a plane hitting twin towers out of malice, a day before 9/11 happened.
I agree with your comments more often than not, I empathize with your annoyance, but if you play out the game theoretic consequences there are no non-annoying outcomes. I don't like it but that's how it is.
Low probability events with outsized consequences are very difficult to reason through. One potentially chipped thermal insulation ceramic tile, should we engage reentry or not. What are the odds that the tile did get chipped, what are the consequences if it did.
The only good way to play this is for a country to not act in ways that motivates potential acts of organized terrorism. That would leave only the positively deranged solitary cuckoo brains to deal with.
Remember, I didn't say the odds are 0, I said these are extremely black swan events. In fact, there's a lot of more likely ways to die on a plane that are far more likely. If you aren't afraid of those, then your fear is fear, not reality.
> 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.
Another take: the likelihood of getting struck by lightening surely dictates what you do during a thunderstorm? In the same way that the likelihood (or lack there of) dictates how often you buy lottery tickets.
If we didn’t attempt to mitigate terrorist attacks at all, would they be as infrequent as they are now? I know that’s not really what you’re saying, but surely likelihood is extremely dependent on circumstances.
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 operational error by incompetent terrorists. The pilot reports the observation but does nothing. The bomb goes off. Now the pilot and the airlines are made a bunch of scapegoats. They are declared professionally incompetent and insurance cover is denied to their family.
I can well imagine current administration doing exactly that, throwing the pilot and the crew under the bus. The 911 first responders were and they weren't even in a position to prevent it. Maybe the pilot and crew can imagine that too and in that case they took a rational decision.
Do not forget that this
https://youtu.be/_uYpDC3SRpM?si=lOWfqPEPCxTGu_Vj (Jon Stewart to the Congress for first responders)
is the society we live in.
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?
Individual choices is what I try to make but that's not enough.
Sure, which is why you tell people to turn the device off and only when that completely fails do you take greater corrective action.
I do think we overreact on security matters, but I do think it's reasonable to not head over the Atlantic with something labelled "BOMB" if you can't figure it out.
I think if you set the amount of security to zero you'd get more bombings. Before 1990 we had a 2-3 per decade. This may not sound like much, but given that we have about 0-0.5 airliner crashes with fatality per year, it would be a significant contribution.
We're not just talking things labeled "bomb" here. TFA has a very different example that's not so easily arguable as that.
Risk is not a synonym for the likelihood of something happening, but the likelihood and its possible effect.
For example, the risk of not wearing your seatbelt on the motorway is high because, even though most journeys will not require a seatbelt to stop any negative effects, if something bad happens it will become very high risk without the seatbelt.
Without the negative effect there is no risk, so it's not just probability.
What are the risks? That people die. Do you know how many people died of preventable things just today?
Or it's scary because it means we're going to go to war? Then why aren't we scared sooner? Be scared of the thing that causes people to want to blow up planes. It's not like they just wake up one day and a country decides it's going to blow up a plane. Our government spies off so many people and the result is we're still scared to get on planes? What a waste of money
As soon as you declare the possible effect to be effectively infinite in magnitude, you can justify any level of response to any level of risk.
That's not a sane way to do risk management. You have to be able to use common-sense human judgement as well as situational training.
And common-sense human judgement would tell you that, even if the possible effect is a plane full of people blowing up and that starting a war, the likelihood of that occurring because you didn't yell at a teenager to turn off a Bluetooth device is so infinitesimally small that it's not worth considering.
> Passengers on the flight arrived back in Newark just before 9:00 PM on Saturday evening, and were met by a significant contingent of local and federal law enforcement.
If you'll actually read the article, federal law enforcement was being called in this situation as well.
does landing a plane early due to a bomb threat seem reasonable? either there is a bomb, in which case landing early won't help, or there isn't, in which case landing early won't help
Certainly telling them to turn off bluetooth will not have any positive effect, if there was a bomb I presume it would only have a negative effect.
But some people are really dumb when it comes to having common sense with respect to tech (or non-tech too, hehe).
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 turning around.
They probably do have to treat it seriously just in the unlikely chance it turns out to be some mentally unstable person's way of legitimately making a terroristic threat. But it also needs to be treated similarly to a drunk and violent person who needs to be duct taped to their seat until they can get handed off to the authorities.
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.
The whole conversation is moot anyways. What's the actual odds of getting on an airplane that is going to be the target of a terrorist attack. I'll tell you, they're approximately 0. Far less than 0.0001%.
If you act like they're real you're just going to end up suffering alarm fatigue because the number of actual instances is just so astonishingly low.
Besides that, the terrorists win by creating fear. No damage is necessary. People being afraid to fly is the terrorist's main goal. To get you to think they could be anywhere and are everywhere. It's called a terror campaign because the literal goal is to create terror. Casualties are just a good way for them to achieve that goal, but far from the only way. We spend billions a year to fight a near non-existent threat.
Terrorists also work on creating alarm not just hiding their operations.
[flagged]
And how would these stupid terrorists actually get a bomb on a plane?
[dead]
> 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.
To qualify even for the 'far end of reasonable', you'd have to divert the plane. Returning to origin, especially when the origin is not one of the 10 closest airports and is in a much more densely packed urban area (with a much more harrowing approach) than any of those 10 renders this entire incident totally unserious.
There are real actual safety concerns to address in aviation. This doesn't make the top 1,000 list. It's wasted effort in a world where economy of opportunity is significant.
Should we call the FBI because you have also written the forbidden character set; since you said doing so is probably cause to call the FBI?
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.
I don't know what it's like to be a pilot, to be responsible for not just your own life and million dollar aircraft, but the hundred-so passengers onboard.
But I do know what it's like working in a draconian safety-crazy job where if you're caught not following a safety-related SOP you're basically fucked.
I can't blame them too much.
In this particular case, I think the point is less 1 or 2 but more point 3
(3) the contrapositive, where you continued the flight, it really was someone stupid enough to name the broadcast name of a bomb "BOMB", it goes off, and now you have to explain to the press "we thought nobody would be stupid enough to really name it 'BOMB'"
So you assume it's a low risk event, and tell everyone onboard to turn off their devices to remove the chance it's just someone making a bad joke or a coincidence, and then you end up with the outcome of trying to avoid having to say that in a press conference where everyone is already primed to think you didn't do enough.
That makes absolutely no sense. As the previous comment pointed out, turning around is not treating it seriously. If you are trying to save face in the extremely unlikely event that it is real, then the only thing you can do is head to the nearest airport.
1) If it really was a bomb and went off, the pilot wouldn't be there to explain to the press anyway.
2) How likely would a bomb's name really be "BOMB" vs anything else? If the latter is any higher, wouldn't it be reasonable to always turn around whenever the any other name shows up? In that case, all Bluetooth devices should be strictly banned in the cabin. But TSA is not doing that (not yet).
If someone is planning on triggering a bomb on a plane, and they haven't done so, you can assume they have a target you haven't reached yet. So going back is not only the safe option, but also the location the people & plane came from.
The only thing it protects is the target. If there is a terrorist on board and they expose the fact they are aware of the bomb, or the bomb is minimally capable, the plane is doomed whatever they do.
It’s possible conditions weren’t good enough at potential alternatives.
> 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.
There was a guy who hid explosives in a shoe and we had to take off our shoes for many years because of him.
I don’t know how that contradicts the original comment since that plot didn’t work and didn’t result in deaths or (significant) injuries.
The plot worked, the device didn't (nor did it need to.)
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.
A minor spelling nit. It's "it's", not "its", when used as a contraction for "it is". ;)
Sorry, you teed it up too well. I had to!
Arg, that’s what I get for typing on my phone
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.
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."
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
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.
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.
That would not solve the problem. On a radio, you could have a moment of interference and only receive 'crash' when someone broadcasts 'good crash'. It is better to avoid certain words entirely. There is also no reason to use those specific words when you could describe, e.g. a software crash as a software problem, error, issue, etc.
Is it a taboo, or is it just reserving specific words to mean specific things and insist everybody be precise about it?
> 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
The individual victims were not the point of my comment. You see how the HN crowd calls it all security theater and mocks the TSA/airlines/etc. right now? Same idea, except regarding how stupid they are to miss what's literally in front of them, rather than how stupid they are to act on what's in front of them.
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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.
>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.
They didn't know how the situation would develop
No one sane would also name a Bluetooth device like that
But yeah, they didn't go for the closest airport either
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.
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.
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.
>First of all, this is not currently a bomb threat up until someone actually makes a threat.
It makes sense from the perspective of zero tolerance. Any mention or reference is perceived as a threat regardless of additional actions taken.
It doesn’t have to be an intentional threat to be worth responding to. One might reasonably think they’d stumbled on an (admittedly poorly executed) attack.
> 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.
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.
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.
I wouldn't have thought so, but until now I didn't even realise that there were Bluetooth devices with configurable names.
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"? 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.
> 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.
“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.”
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.
> 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?
There were some pretty public tantrums on open source mailing lists. It's pointless to revisit them.
Though I still see the occasional hissy fit over git master branches that were never renamed.
All new code projects at work cannot have a master branch.
However I never heard of anyone complaining about recording masters or golf masters.
Only among one side of the political spectrum.
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.
No, it means none of that.
It's code.
No one that matters looks at it or cares.
Making unnecessary changes to code does zero in solving any societal ills.
Soooo it's fine to name all your variables slurs then? Like, yes, hyperbolic, but the contention was that the SWE community is overwhelming cis while het dudes from the US and we were making it unwelcoming to anyone else.
> it's fine to name all your variables slurs then?
Hyperbole. Renaming “master” directories was a total circlejerk endeavor by the same crowd that came up with Latinx.
I haven't met anyone who is actually uncomfortable with the term "master," only people concerned about what others might think of them. It's not really being inclusive; it's just signaling inclusivity. Surely the time would be better spent, I don't know, volunteering to tutor underprivileged students or something? Or just living your damn life.
I have met several people who are uncomfortable with the 'master/slave' terminology. In my experience, those who do not experience much racism in their day to day lives do not find it offensive, and vice versa. Therefore, it is at least slightly offensive in my opinion.
Once I was explaining how my day went to an ex, and my day happened to involve the terms, and they were absolutely floored that those terms were still used. Then the whole conversation was about racism in tech, and that had significantly less aura than my story of how I fixed everything. Beware ye olde words, lest ye scare thein hoes.
Why not spend the 5 seconds it takes to do that refactor and then tutor the kids?
More like 5 days, unless by "refactor" you mean #define master main
It takes your team 5 days to change a variable name?
> Soooo it's fine to name all your variables slurs then?
Except that never happened. It's fantasy.
What did happen was words like "black hat" and "white hat" got re-classified as hateful language.
I'm actually surprised the conference was spared by the mob.
At my work at also got rid of build cop because that was considered offensive.
My personal experience is also that some of the more extreme noninclusive language policing in some circles has faded away to a significant degree.
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.
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.
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
What do they call a software crash? Rapid unscheduled termination?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
It was a fitness wristband. The kid probably didn't even know it used Bluetooth.
According to the article, it was a Fitbit device belonging to a teenager... Chances are, the kid selected that nickname for the device a long while ago and forgot about it, and was probably unaware that the device was using Bluetooth at all, and that they should turn off their fitness tracker when the announcement came through...
At the same time, some people in the comments under the article are more or less calling for the death penalty for the kid...
> some people in the comments
The commenters' status as people (I presume here you mean biological humans) seems unlikely to me.
I wouldn't like to guess either way about this particular article, but it's possible many really are people. Certainly there were plenty of online commenters for news articles reacting in exactly this sort of way long before there were LLMs.
It seems very obvious to me that certain constituencies in online commenting are at all-time highs for loudness:
* police/prison/statist notions of justice * auto industry / auto-first infra * both pro- and anti-israel * pro-IP / copyright industrial complex
There are a bunch more. Maybe it's a shift in actual human sentiment, but without evidence, I don't think it makes sense for that to be the first presumption.
Fortunately, we're gonna get this here web-o-trust thing going in the next 10 years or so and not have to doubt who the humans are anymore. Riiight?
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Awful joke. There have to be at least some consequences for the kid, like getting banned for flying United for 10 years.
Let’s say it wasn’t a joke, who would name their explosive device bomb?
Clearly not a HNer. The name goes against RFC1178 in a couple of different ways.
> Awful joke. There have to be at least some consequences for the kid, like getting banned for flying United for 10 years.
Take a step back. You yourself describe it as a joke. Are you really saying that the quality of the joke ("awful") should result in the origin of the joke (a kid, even!) should be banned from a major air carrier for 10 years? Does this really seem like a proportional response?
And this doesn't even begin to consider another possibility: the device was named what it was named in a completely different setting, and the owner just forgot about it. That makes it not even a joke, just forgetfulness.
Was any of this a good idea? No, probably not, but people need to calm down.
> Was any of this a good idea? No, probably not, but people need to calm down.
I can understand the safety concern - and I think the decision to turn around was ultimately the right call. Especially given that they had called for people turning off BT for some time.
The fact that the device was not turned off suggests to me that the owner did not know they were the cause of this. If they had done this by intent and were set on going through with it even after the turnaround was initiated, they would have also had the sense to drop the device into some other seat or leave it in the lavatory...
If it turns out they did this with full intent, there should be some _appropriate_ consequence
> I can understand the safety concern - and I think the decision to turn around was ultimately the right call.
I don't, and I think it fits what Bruce Schneier called "Cover Your Ass" security (he was referring to the equally stupid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_Mooninite_panic)
It sounds like a fantastic DDoS opportunity, you could shut down an entire nation's aviation just by putting a few tiny bluetooth transmitters in places that air passengers might accidentally pick them up. The attack relies entirely on the overreaction to non-threats by ignorant buffoons in positions of authority.
Personally, I think the airline and its policies should be publicly ridiculed. If we don't punish the airline for doing this, and make unequivocably clear that it did the wrong thing, that its "what ifs" are meaningless and bluetooth/wifi channel names are not a security threat, then this nonsense will just continue.
In general and long-term I agree with what you are saying. I assume this was a new/unknown situation. (On the other hand, the article links to other similar stories, so maybe I am cutting them too much slack). If "electronic device names" are of concern, there should be an established protocol to deal with them. Especially if this keeps happening.
IDK, this was pure technical incompetence by rubes that can barely operate a smartphone. The delay relies entirely on these supposed "adults in the room" overreacting.
> If it turns out they did this with full intent, there should be some _appropriate_ consequence
Sure, if evidence is uncovered of the guy say telling his friends "haha, I'm gonna make them turn the plane around", I can get behind the baying for consequences.
We're nowhere near that. There's plenty of non-nefarious ways this could all have come about, and people need to put down their pitchforks.
> At the same time, some people in the comments under the article are more or less calling for the death penalty for the kid...
Equivocating and straw-manning only weaken your argument.
Do we want this kind of thing to happen again? The kid was 16, ok. The columbine shooters were 17.
Throw the book at him, he should have known better.
Are you really trying to equate murder with naming a Bluetooth device and that a child should have their life ruined on the same scale as if they were equivalent in impact or intent, with little knowledge of the actual situation or intent?
Weird how you want kids to be punished for stupid mistakes. If you drive, you probably put more people lives in danger last week than that kids fitness tracker. When you speed, you put lives in danger (statistical fact, none of that “but I am good driver crap”) — will you ask for the death penalty if a cop sees you going 1mph over?
Or do you only want strong punishment for others as is usually the case with such opinions?
There is something deeply stupid about assuming that naming your bluetooth device "bomb" is a real threat, let alone that it's going to be a real bomb. Reminds me of all those post Columbine "zero tolerance" policies where kids were punished for marginal doodles of guns. Or the "twitter joke trial". It's as is people are string matching for threat shaped words, not the semantics of a threat.
Mind you, this gets harder when powerful people have got in the habit of making mostly-joking threats on social media themselves.
I’ve never understood this logic. If we want to treat people who are under 18 as adults in certain legal circumstances, then we should just establish a new age or set a concrete exception based on the law violated. Making special exceptions on a case by case basis where people have to argue about it, especially when it demonstrably affects certain demographics more than others, is a terrible way to operate.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say you probably don’t have kids. If your teenager got in trouble for a messed up “joke” like this and the result was a criminal proceeding where they’re tried as an adult you’d be (rightfully) crying that it’s too much.
Also what does columbine have to do with this? Unless your implication is that any kid around the age of 17 should be treated as a potential school shooter.
> Throw the book at him, he should have known better.
What book!? The book of laws that outlaw jokes in bad taste potentially made years ago, outside the context of air travel altogether, only to be forgotten about and accidentally brought into the context of air travel where one can conceivably think of laws that make those jokes problematic?
Come on!
Pretty absurd stuff. Obviously if FAA safety first is going to apply not to aviation employees but to something that is easy to DOS attack as the consumer this doesn't work.. They could at least implement a policy of scanning Bluetooth and similar beacons at security gates though. More theatre, more fun at least doesn't mean more turning around.
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> Hard to imagine at least one person didn’t see the device name and immediately brush it off as entirely unimportant.
There are hundreds of BT devices everywhere that people waiting for a flight hang out. Without automatic scanning for the specific purpose of catching weird names, it'd be near impossible for the weird name to ever show up for anyone except the owner. And most devices don't advertise their BT name unless in pairing mode, so no, it wouldn't show up in the security screening either.
So, how did it eventually show up? Owner's phone goes off/airplane-mode, watch starts advertising; someone else wants to connect their BT headphones and sees the name of the watch?
There are way fewer Bluetooth signals active at once on an airplane then there are in an airport. There is also the entire duration of the flight for it to be discovered. Also take in to account that most people are not fidgeting with their device settings when they are walking around an airport, they are trying to get through security and get to their gate. Once you are on a plane that’s when you usually stop and start setting up your devices, such as connecting headphones.
Here is the reddit thread where passengers were live replying. I don't seem confirmation of what the Bluetooth device name was. There is one comment in there claiming the following:
"Wife is on the plane. Guy had a speaker named bomb. He just confessed to it. He said he named it forever ago and forgot about it. He’s 16 years old. Wife’s friend is sitting next to him as they are questioning him."
https://www.reddit.com/r/flightradar24/comments/1tsfu8y/emer...
It’s seems like they just reported this initially as “four letter word” and then a media outlet later assumed it was bomb. It seems more likely it was a UE Boom, which has boom in its default Bluetooth name.
If that’s the case the teen likely just owned the device and didn’t knot it was turned on. It’s rather long battery and it’s not obvious if it’s on or not.
Yes I have a speaker of the same brand, bluetooth ID is Boom4 as it is the model name. I have no idea if it can be changed, if it can, probably only through an app only a minority of users would have had installed anyway (I don't).
Aditionally the order given by the crew (turning off bluetooth) would have done no results as most people would simply assume turning off bluetooth on their smartphone/videogame console/laptop and wouldn't know how to do that on anything else.
The comments ont that link are completely crazy, I read about jail time or even death penalty.
Also people could assume airplane mode turning off all wireless connection. It does not turn off bluetooth(at least on my phone)
It was in the article. The kid renamed his Fitbit "Bomb".
I thought it was strange the airline didn't disclose the actual word, how could that be sensitive? Covering up what was a clear overreaction in hindsight seems to fit. Best to let people blame the teenager.
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This decision almost certainly came about because of people thinking what action was least likely to get them fired. Any rational person would realize the odds of an actual bomb are so close to zero you would need to start worrying about the sun spontaneously exploding if you were worried there was a bomb. The problem is that if you ignored it your boss could say you ignored a bomb threat and fire you.
Also if they really thought there the plan was going to explode any moment they would have ditched in the ocean or at least diverted to the nearest airport. They didn’t because there was no danger except to their jobs.
If they were really worried, they probably would have diverted, yes. But ditching in the north Atlantic is something no pilot is going to do unless they are 100% sure there is a bomb that's going to go off, because people are probably going to die either way.
They are still never going to ditch as long as the plane can fly
> This decision almost certainly came about because of people thinking what action was least likely to get them fired.
For aircrew, not following company SOPs is the express route to getting fired.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352666
That is covered 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.
That does not actually address the parents point in any way.
It kind of does, that an attacker can rely on something a small as a Bluetooth name to cause disruption based on employees following policy out of fear of being fired.
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I kind of get that a device named BOMB made the plane turn back.
However, I don't understand this part:
> flight attendant told passengers over the PA system that they "must turn off Bluetooth immediately," or else the aircraft would have to turn around.
If there's a BOMB, turning off Bluetooth won't make it much safer. I mean, a turned-off bomb is probably safer than a turned-on bomb, but it's still a bomb.
Pilots: "Phew, BOMB is now turned off. It's absolutely safe to continue flying. Thank you for your cooperation, passengers and terrorist(s)."
Nobody in the chain of command thought this was a real emergency situation.
The point of turning Bluetooth off or having to turn around the aircraft was to follow the airline's rules on terrorism, which likely tell them to abort a flight route if there's any symbol that could be interpreted as a bomb.
The captains were risking their jobs if they didn't follow this stupid request. This is a good case for getting common-sense exceptions to checklist-style rules.
It was not about whether to turn back or not but rather to identify whether the device is in cabin or not. If it disappears after being asked, they do not need to empty the cargo hold when searching for the device after landing. They were going to turn around regardless.
Every commercial cabin has a designated Least Risk Bomb Location (LRBL) Once a bomb is determined to be in the cabin they can move it to that location. Funny to think of them actually finding a Fitbit with that name and then moving it there. Then procedure would be to stack up luggage to absorb blast energy.
If you're an in emergency situation, then "probably" safer is better than nothing
Sure.
What about non emergency situations such as, say, an objectional (to some) device name on a network?
I can't help but wonder would any of this happened had the device been named "Bomb" in Farsi using unicode.
Il nome della rosa - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose
It's only an objectionable device name once you know it's safe. When you're on a plane, you have to err on the side of caution
If the story had been "Bomb detonated on plane after bluetooth name sparks alert" then it would've been more than just objectionable
"Please stop scaring the flight crew with the bad word or we will turn this plane right around"
it's not the case that the pilot has to think like you, it's that every passenger on the plane would need to. The pilot has unlimited discretion and every interest to keep the passengers on the plane calm, or act preemptively and land as soon as possible.
HBO's Barry, unbelievably, covers this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzzg3q1YuUE
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.
You forgot to add the cherry: they refuse to publish the "four-letter-word" as if we're stupider than they are and will never precisely figure out the puzzle. This story is equally as stupid as it is frustrating.
I'm confused why people keep calling it a speaker when the article states it was verified by multiple sources as a Fitbit that the kid gave the name bomb. Nowhere in the article was a speaker mentioned.
People are wont to stick to their pet theories even after they’ve been contradicted by facts. The idea of a Bluetooth speaker named “boom” filled the initial vacuum and became a meme that won’t die.
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?
I just found the theory referenced on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/KidsAreFuckingStupid/comments/1tsts...
> A redditor who's wife and her friend were on the flight said that the 16yo boy next to wife's friend admitted to naming his speaker "Bomb" long enough ago that he had forgotten he'd named it that. Wife's friend got to hear the questioning
That is also stated clearly in the comments.
Reddit really wants to run with the default speaker name theory, though.
> long enough ago that he had forgotten he'd named it that
Actually sounds a lot like "that was the default name but now that everyone's making a big deal about it I'm assuming I must have named it that". I wouldn't assume that this "confession" means that reddit's theory is at all incorrect.
Witnesses are terribly inaccurate sources of information, unfortunately.
(Not to say the alternative also couldn't be the case)
Renaming a Bluetooth device like a speaker permanently for everyone (as opposed to a nickname you give it in your phone or whatever) is difficult if possible at all and usually requires firmware or hardware changes, unless the option is given by the device or its companion app (which is very rare).
So your assumption seems the most likely. I highly doubt a 16 year old kid is firmware hacking a cheap speaker just to rename it for a "joke"
It’s commonplace for Bluetooth speakers to allow changing their Wi-Fi name (SSID) using the related app. Everyone being able to identify each other’s Bluetooth speakers is exactly one purpose of that.
Bluetooth speakers don’t typically have WiFi or SSIDs. The Bluetooth advertising name is changeable on some newer higher end devices, but the vast majority of cheap speakers do not implement this from a practical standpoint. Changing the name on your device only changes the alias that you see, at least on most devices, but it might be possible to hook that on some OSs ?
An, sorry, yes, I confused with Wi-Fi for some reason. Nevertheless, they allow changing the name they broadcast, in the sense that other devices that see it for the first time see the changed name.
It seems like some newer speakers allow it. I really wanna know what speaker he actually had.
Don't believe anything on Reddit, ever.
Also, who carries a Bluetooth speaker on a plane? And for what purpose?
Most BT speakers have a battery, which means it has to be in carry-on luggage. Why it would be powered on is the question, but this could have happened inadvertently by getting knocked around in a bag.
Sometimes I see my BT speaker broadcasting BLE info when it is turned off. Most things do not really 'turn off' these days.
If you want it at your destination you are kind of forced to as you can't transport batteries in your checked luggage.
I do, because I want to listen to music when I travel. Not in the plane, but at my destination.
Speaker in carry on luggage to be used in vacation. They were flying to Malaga
Not Malaga according to the article — destination was Palma de Mallorca.
It's not extremely far fetched that someone would call a speaker "bomb". Especially if it's loud and has a lot of bass.
We used to call such devices "boomboxes". And a bomb makes "boom".
Wiktionary also has this meaning listed for bomb: "9. Something highly effective or attractive."
I can't explain why, but the top comment is the funniest thing in this whole episode to me:
Removed for violating Rule #6: Must be a kid and must be stupid.
Common reasons for this remove include but not limited to:
Teens are not considered kids as its a different kind of stupid.
I'm so confused. We're all commenting on an article that explicitly says it was verified by multiple sources to be a Fitbit. The kid named his Fitbit Bomb. Why are so many people saying it was a speaker? Did they change the article?
For the vast majority of “dumb” devices, it is not possible to rename the Bluetooth advertising name. You can assign a local alias to the MAC of the device so that it shows up to -you- as a custom name, but with the exception of host devices like phones or laptops, it is unusual to be able to change the advertising name.
I own a bluetooth speaker from the Boom brand and it has obviously the model name as bluetooth ID.
Changing it would require installing an app that I don't really want to for obvious reasons. Additionally some bluetooth device never really turn down completely and still advertize their bluetooth ID via BLE so the teenager in question may not even have realized he could change anything and the commands given (turn off bluetooth) were completely stupid as it wouldn't change anything if people turned down their smartphone bluetooth.
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...
That was an unrelated issue from an audit that had been done before the heist.
One of the theories right after the heist was that the thieves where former security guards. France had just laid of most of the museums security, the alarm triggered just fine, there just wasn't anyone left to respond.
My girlfriend and I were staying at her sisters apartment one Christmas (while the sister and her partner were away). They made homemade kombucha which gave the apartment an overpowering smell. You couldn't escape it anywhere in the apartment, particularly the kitchen. On the first night of arriving while lying in bed my girlfriend wanted to connect to the wifi but we didn't know the password. I guessed it first attempt, and yes it was kombucha
Security by Obviousness.
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.
The court of public opinion would probably be upset an actual bomb made it through the security theatre while their water bottle did not. If there was actually someone intending to actually bomb the plane, giving them the entire flight back to the origin airport decide to go through with it or head back to the waiting authorities would not go over well in the court of popular opinion either.
> 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 idiots. Whether due to power tripping or CYA, who knows, but I’m not surprised this happened on United.
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.
I don't think it's as silly as people are making out. It at least proves a passenger is in control of the device, rather than it being stashed / hidden in the cabin. A device in the cabin not owned by any passenger broadcasting a signal is definitively more suspicious than one with a passenger in control. We don't know what their next step would have been - they might have asked everyone from row X to Y to turn their bluetooth back on to narrow down the search etc. They probably didn't expect that anybody would fail to respond to the first instruction.
Turning it off would have solved the bureaucratic problem for flight crew. Sadly, the passengers (collectively) failed to accomplish this basic task.
> Turning it off would have solved the bureaucratic problem
The article says two Bluetooth radios weren’t turned off. Do we know if one of those was “the bomb?”
You can't really turn off most BLE devices with internal batteries, off means low power mode nowadays. Some of them are still discoverable on wireshark when they are 'off'.
It could've been in checked luggage and turned itself on from the movement. No way for the passengers to get to it. Unfortunately it didn't turn itself off (although if it did, and then later turned on again, that would've been even worse.)
The passenger may not have even known, I've certainly renamed friends' phones as a goof, although not to something that would get them in to trouble.
Isn't that what they did?
Nope. Look at the flight track. They went all the way back.
> Nope. Look at the flight track. They went all the way back.
Good point, I was thinking they were over the ocean and that was naturally the closest airport, but it looks like they could have landed in e.g. Nova Scotia in a shorter time period.
I presume a passenger reported it. And the pilot was not allowed to ignore it.
Not being able to ignore the speech/writing/transmission of a passenger is reasonable. Not being able to ignore the speech/writing/transmission of the manufacturer of a device on the plane is unreasonable.
Wifi SSID? Passenger speech, since those are typically changed by the user. Bluetooth GAP/GATT device name? Manufacturer speech, since those are often not changeable by the user.
I expect pilots called company, and risk assessment made the decision. Pilots can and do make flight safety decisions, but operational control is an airline decision.
Doesn't make it any less moronic. Next they're gonna arrest you for boarding the plane with Da Bomb hot sauce.
The article mentions that terrorists have used fake bomb threats to achieve some other goal, which makes sense
> terrorists have used fake bomb threats to achieve some other goal
That 'other goal' being to cause disruption. Which this did.
Now we all know how to disrupt a flight anonymously. Grudge against <airline>? Fill your boots!
I mean something like taking control of the plane or else they blow it up
Would it though? I'm unconvinced.
Bomb threats are a thing.
What makes it serious to me going all the way back to New York instead of the closest airport in a situation believed being risky ...
A 16 year boy apparently named his Bluetooth speaker “bomb” and couldn’t turn it off, as it was probably in checked luggage. Woof.
You can't rename most Bluetooth speakers. "Bomb" was the name the selling brand gave the speaker.
By making everyone turn off their Bluetooth, the kid whose speaker had turned on probably couldn't even see the device broadcasting the name. People linked to one by a company made Hellotec but Hama has a similarly named device, and plenty of other speaker manufacturers try to make a pun out of "boombox" by naming their devices "bomb" (iJoy, ZEB-MUSIC, and presumably other such brands).
Maybe if someone asked the passengers if anyone knew about this "bomb" Bluetooth device the kid would've remembered, but in this case I can't blame them. On the other hand, asking passengers if they know something about a bomb is probably the quickest way to cause a panic.
The entire thing seems like a ridiculous overreaction. What kind of terrorist would call their bomb "bomb"? This is "Al Qaeda Free WiFi" all over again.
but Hama has a similarly named device
...I mentally appended an "s" to that, and was momentarily very confused.
Even better. The news made it sound like it was an intentional act (at best a prank) by the kid.
If it’s a commercial product doing it, I can’t even quantify the levels of facepalm involved.
When you rename a Bluetooth device from your phone, does that affect the name it broadcasts, or only the label applied in the list of Bluetooth devices in the phone?
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? Otherwise how do you distinguish which one of the three million Bluetooth devices within range is your friends Bluetooth speaker you’re trying to connect to?
Some devices come with apps that include proprietary renaming features. Those devices can be renamed.
Your iPhone's rename feature won't change anything for other devices. Maybe Apple is smart enough to sync the renamed device to other Apple devices as well, I don't know about that, but it certainly won't change what the other passengers on your phone see.
You can distinguish Bluetooth devices by their MAC address, that's usually how the rename mapping works.
iPhone BT settings also let you rename devices, but I think that's just a local setting, not like the BT spec has a rename feature. Not sure cause uh, my iPhone broke. But for sure there are speakers that have their own apps that let you rename them.
> 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.
For example, many Apple wireless peripherals can rename themselves after your user account once you connect them at least once. That has to be a function of the peripheral though, it's not performed by the device you connect it to (past telling the peripheral the new name, of course). Third-party peripherals usually do not have this functionality.
> 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.
Almost nobody install apps of their bluetooth device.
People buy the speaker, charge it and turn it on, pair, play music, throw the packaging away, that's it. Usually the bluetooth name refer to the brand and model which is much more convenient to know which one you are connecting to than giving it a silly name.
I wouldn't expect most people to know they can do it in the first place and even those who do like me don't bother most of the time.
Many of the cheap unbranded/OEM'd ones seem to just use their MAC address, which is (supposed to be) unique.
I've never had a bose device that allowed this - is that new? And for JBL, it's only the latest gen (or maybe starting with gen 3?) that started allowing it.
As for other brands I own: Jlab, jawbone, pyle, and anker don't seem to have any such functionality that I can see.
So it's far from ubiquitous, sufficiently so that it makes no sense to presume that a bluetooth name is a message from a passenger and can be understood to have any intended meaning.
Yeah, you can 100% rename select JBL Speakers.
I don't see why people are hung up on this. Imagine even just 2 or 3 of the same model "JBL SpeakerName" nearby, how would you know whos is whos? Renaming is common.
You would know which one is the desired one because only the desired one would be in pairing mode at that moment. Obviously a collision (if I can say that word) is possible, but unlikely enough for most purposes.
Rename is a fairly common feature on Bluetooth speakers and headphones, for example my Bose NC-700.
I own zero Bluetooth audio devices with rename functionality. I don't think it's common at all. Especially in the "cheap, obnoxious Bluetooth speaker" category.
My phone will show me a different name for a "renamed on phone" Bluetooth device, but all other devices in the area won't.
Define Common
+1 on this for my Soundlink, but it's important to mention it has to be through the Bose app itself. I don't think you can rename devices from a pairing device's native bluetooth settings?
Otherwise, I trust many folks in an HN comment section would reminisce on stories from their earlier years, where they'd rename the Bluetooth devices around a densely-populated area to cause mischief.
It was a bomb speaker: https://hellottec.com/product/bomb-portable-bluetooth-speake...
Calling their speaker Bomb was asking for trouble and I’m surprised this hasn’t occurred before now.
It reminds me of when RED released a camera called Weapon, and I heard of people putting tape over the name when going through the airport.
They did not calculate with the stupidity of some people. I don't blame them. There are just too many mind blowing ways of stupidity to be able to account for all of them. Also it's not their fault other people decide to ground a plane for no reason.
What kind of company doesn’t want to pay $5 per month for a paid workers plan for their website?
The kind of company that normally is well within the free tier for years until their product is unexpectedly part of a news cycle.
In all likelihood the site being down right now is actually a PR win.
A lot of non-software businesses probably outsource their websites to some bottom barrel consultant in LCOL countries.
That, or they're such a small business that they never expected one of their random products to be HN hugged to death.
Companies that focus on product and not “investor value” through nice looking working websites
It probably worked fine until today, and will be back to working fine in a few days.
https://ams3.digitaloceanspaces.com/tesancdn/hellottec/2_BH_...
https://web.archive.org/web/20260531033828/https://tesancdn....
Oh man, talk about unfortunate set of circumstances. It looks like a cartoon-like bomb too.
I'm assuming that's where the name comes from
Yep, I found the product listing via Google. It says Bomb
Website already HN'd into oblivion it seems
Reddit got there first.
The two are indistinguishable for all intents and purposes.
hn has much less traffic than reddit
I prefer the term "hugged to death" which I only ever have seen used on HN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect
Wait so they thought there was a bomb on board but if they “turned it off” they’d keep flying? or they knew it wasn’t a bomb but turned around anyway to teach everyone a lesson? i’m not sure which is worse
Excellent point.
> it was probably in checked luggage
Which would violate FAA regulations if it was powered on (as it obviously was):
"When portable electronic devices powered by lithium batteries are in checked baggage, they must be completely powered off and protected to prevent unintentional activation or damage."
https://www.faa.gov/hazmat/packsafe/portable-electronic-devi...
How exactly do we know it was in checked luggage vs carry on luggage compartment.
Without tools, its not exactly easy to point-point a Bluetooth signal. Nor are passengers meant to be roaming around the aircraft whilst in flight (i.e to access carry on luggage compartment and turn it off).
It might've been off when packed, but all the vibration turned it on at some point.
Are you serious?
It happens: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kZVd659gxd0
It does happen, even to products being shipped new from the factory.
When did Airlines start scanning Bluetooth devices?
Airlines have kept tabs on Bluetooth and WiFi hotspots as early as the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 incidents (2016)
You'd think they would do this before taking off..
Perhaps it was turned on by being jostled during take off.
Also possible spotted by for example a passenger that notified the crew.
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What's to prevent terrorists from going through TSA, waiting in the scanning line when everyone is still going through, and then planting a bluetooth device into someone else's bag? I never open my carryon once I have packed it.
This reminds me of the SNL sketch where TSA employees had no answer for someone bringing two separate bottles of 3.9 ounces onto the plane.
I'm sure Sean Duffy, of Real World and now Sec of Transportation, will fix this.
Nothing. TSA is a joke. At first, the security theater arguably had a legitimate psychological purpose. The airline industry nearly collapsed after 9/11 because people were so scared of filing. But that was a generation ago—the psychological trauma in the aftermath of 9/11 dissipated ago. But we’re still stuck with the TSA because in the meantime it turned into a massive jobs program.
We’d be better off spending TSA’s $8 billion budget on paying people to dig holes and fill them back in.
I don't see any evidence of TSA being a jobs program. Their mission and the agents executing it appear to be toward flight security. I'm certain there are many counterexamples of misguided policies and agents exhibiting incompetence. But the general direction of the agency is to screen passengers prior to entering secure airport areas and this is generally successful.
TSA is famous for failing tests for decades. Here’s the latest one: https://abcnews.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-ope...
Over the years, their failure rate has consistently been 80-95%.
I don’t think you can reasonably call that „generally successful“.
I failure is the goal: yes.
Every other country seems to do the same thing though
In Australia, you place your carry on luggage onto a tray and it passes through an xray machine, at the same time, you walk through a metal detector. Takes about 30 seconds depending on the line.
It still feels incongruent with the reality of the situation in my opinion. I can hop on a bus with 200 other people, or on a train with literally 0 security carrying whatever I want in a bag with no staff nearby either.
That's basically how it is in the US, except that sometimes there aren't enough machines so the lines are long, and it's the spinning scan thing rather than a metal detector. Usually no line in major California airports when I've gone. NYC is hit-or-miss. Just did a transfer through LHR and the security line was insanely long.
It used to be much worse though. I think the new machinery has made the difference.
The bus/train is different because they're harder to weaponize. Everything we got was a response to the 9/11 attacks.
I agree with you on train and somewhat bus but cars are extremely easy to weaponise and dirt cheap. Any terrorist trying to hijack a plane and not simply using a car (with or without extra explosives) is an idiot.
Essentially terrorism isn’t about spreading terror, because they are so laughably ineffective at it.
See this excellent gwern article: https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror
These kinds of measures are always reactionnary to prior events. For example in Spain you do get your bag scanned (but I doubt scan operators are sufficiently trained to spot anything of importance anyway) at train stations before embarkments and also any governmental/official/administrative office because Spain has a history of bombing (mostly by ETA).
Isn't this because there otherwise wouldn't be allowed to fly into US airspace?
I mean for a flight that doesn't go to/from the US.
The US requirement is that passengers on flights to the USA have been processed in conformance with US regulations _and_ since that processing have not had any contact with passengers processed otherwise. It's not in itself a stupid rule but does make the US rules contagious, since either other airports re-build to keep the US-bound and other passengers segregated or they have to apply US rules to all.
This hit Auckland International badly: it had a lovely open atrium with a garden but the rules forced a forest of partitioning walls since passengers were transferring from smaller airports that couldn't quickly adopt the US rules.
I often fly from Milan Malpensa airport, and I’ve noticed there are two separate security areas: one for people flying to the US or Israel, and one for everyone else. I’d always wondered why this was the case, and now I get it.
Not to the same extent though - for example I can't remember if I ever had to take my shoes off (maybe there was a couple of months where we had to do it back after the attempt happened in December 2021?), so I was pretty shocked to go to the US for a work trip in 2019 and have to do that. Here in Australia there's no liquid limit in carry on for domestic flights.
Nowadays I don't need to remove shoes in the US. I vaguely remember times it was randomly required or not, not sure when, and back when it was always required. I'm not TSA precheck or anything. But yeah we have the liquid limit, which always seemed like the one dumbest thing to me, maybe even a way to sell drinks.
Unless it has changed for a while the TSApre lines don't make you take off shoes and belts vs the regular lines. I also think they stopped making TSApre tahe laptops and iPads out of bags. But it may also have to do with equipment upgrade cycles and what was deployed to which lines.
It's not just security theater. It shifts the attack vector entirely. Instead of airplanes as weapons that could be used to kill thousands, terrorists can blow up a few hundred people.
Those checkpoints are only there to provide a soft target instead of letting it be a plane.
I agree. Sure you can still get weapons through screening, in fact I've accidentally done it twice with like 4" pocket knives, but not sure what the odds are. A lot of the "security theater" argument seems to be annoyance at having to go through TSA, cause what's the alternative, just barely screen people like before?
No, the “security theater” argument is because TSA consistently fails penetration tests: https://abcnews.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-ope...
“When ABC News asked the source if the failure rate was 80 percent, the response was, ‘You are in the ballpark.’”
> Instead of airplanes as weapons that could be used to kill thousands...
As pilots had been screaming for for years prior to 2001, cockpit doors have been reinforced and locked, and cabin procedures have changed so that those doors are rarely unlocked. [0] This happened shortly after the WTC bombings that totally destroyed the buildings. This means that the only people who can get control of an aircraft are the crew of that aircraft.
The first of the two things that stops "another 9/11" had a one-time monetary cost and was done twenty five years ago. The second was the murder of everyone on board three airliners by hijackers. Prior hijackings were a diversion and an annoying delay. Now that "hijackers will kill you all" is on the table, hijackers will be outnumbered ten or thirty to one and will not succeed. Remember that the plane intended to crash into the Pentagon crashed in a field somewhere because its passengers heard about the ones that hit WTC and -correctly- determined that they had absolutely nothing to lose.
> ...terrorists can blow up a few hundred people [at a checkpoint].
The fact that this doesn't happen indicates that even a jetliner with a flimsy, unlocked cockpit door wouldn't be used as a weapon to kill thousands. Murder -let alone mass murder- is vanishingly rare. By and large, people simply don't want to kill or injure each other... they just want to go about their business.
To support this point, I'd like you to tell me when was the last time you heard about a cell-phone-battery-bomb? You may remember those from back when Israel's military booby trapped the batteries of phones that they believed were going to be delivered to many members of the opposing military... and then set off those bombs all at once. Shorty after the bombings, Bunnie Huang [1] did some thinking and came to the conclusion that not only is it pretty easy to fabricate such remotely-triggerable bombs with like five-figures [2] worth of perfectly ordinary equipment that is entirely legal for anyone to have, if one built such a bomb with the explosive force of a hand grenade it would be [3] undetectable to a TSA CT scanner operator, and -because batteries are sealed- entirely undetectable to explosives swabs.
If The Terrorists Are Constantly Out To Get Us, why haven't we seen these bombs? It has been what, three years or so since those very clever booby traps were distributed to and used against opposing forces? Where are the domestic bangs and booms?
[0] One expects that airlines did not wish to do this because its cost was greater than zero. I wonder how the cost compared to the destruction of three airliners, two skyscrapers, all the deaths and cleanup, and twenty five years (and counting) of security theater.
[1] Huang is a fellow with fairly substantial commercial electronics design and fabrication experience
[2] USD
[3] ...in part because of the variance in battery construction from manufacturer to manufacturer and even from model to model...
Why would a terrorist want to plant a Bluetooth device on someone else's bag when all it would accomplish is a minor delay of one flight and would result in a prison sentence after security camera review??
Remember: Kim Jong-Un’s brother was not killed directly by North Korean goons. They hired two women they convinced they were working on a prank show to spray him with the poisons.
You’d do something like that.
After reviewing the video tapes the police concluded that the women knew that they were handling poison - they kept their hands away from their body and immediately washed them after the attack.
Someone could have told them it was anything else that you wouldn't want on your body. Like, fart spray or whatever. A prank. That behavior doesn't really tell you anything conclusive, but I guess they just let anyone be a cop these days.
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Why stop at one bag for one flight?
> would result in a prison sentence
That doesn’t seem like a significant deterrent here.
This is the type of prank you’d see some idiot do to try and get followers on TikTok, not something a terrorist would bother with.
You sure about that?
>> "All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/11/continuing-anxi...
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 turned around would make them a laughingstock overnight.
I am baffled that we are even having this argument.
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.
Terror is a tactic used by terrorist organizations, but it’s hardly the only thing they do.
“There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Isn’t quite true, but publicity is inherently valuable to organizations dependent on outside donors. The Provos/IRA did similar things (attention grabbing and annoying) not just setting off bombs during the time of troubles.
People accidentally sneak weapons through TSA all the time.
There are many anecdotal examples out there. More scientifically, they had a horrific detection rate in some audits.
Seems like an effective DoS attack - ground all planes in the US by sneaking cheap bluetooth speakers into people's luggage with provacative device names
Doesn't even need to be a speaker. Just a battery and transmitter.
This would probably be a supply chain attack if it ever happens.
This is the SNL sketch in question: https://www.tiktok.com/@hamtelevision/video/7276358099089231...
it never made sense. i could bring two or more identical 4oz sunblocks, for example, but not a single 5oz toothpaste.
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.
Only because we have labeled anything and everything terrorism these days.
Even then this is an extremely lame and ineffective form of sabotage, compared to the kind of prison sentence you’d be risking.
> What's to prevent terrorists … planting a bluetooth device into someone else's bag
Reminds me of Professor Chaos trying to flood the world by leaving the garden hose on.
You're supposed to wait to walk through the scanner until your bag is in the x-ray machine, or far enough along to not be tampered with. Doing that, I'm still always waiting on the other side to see by bag come out the other end.
Even worse, what's to prevent the terrorists from temporarily renaming their Bluetooth bombs to something innocuous just before going through security and only renaming it back when they need to conveniently find them again while pairing?
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The same thing that is stopping them from suicide bombing the super crowded security checkpoint line before ID checks.
Nothing really.
Or going into the baggage claim area with a bag containing an explosive device, then acting like they grabbed the wrong bag and putting it back on the carousel, and then leaving.
As an aside, this is something I've only seen in the US. At least in my country the domestic baggage claim area is not accessible unless from an arriving aircraft.
I'm guessing that has more to do with theft though than security.
No, that's because in the US they're handling the international flights separately. It's also the reason why even when you have a layover, you need to clear customs.
Domestic flights in the US are like busses/trains elsewhere. Most people fly without a checked bag
Most of the world handles international flights separately without needing to do that unless it is an international-domestic connection.
However I agree that in purely domestic airports I don't see how you'd prevent general public from accessing bags. Except India, wherein you need a booked flight to even enter the airport.
> I don't see how you'd prevent general public from accessing bags.
People are routinely prevented from being where they are not supposed to be. Whether you put the baggage pick-up point in a publicly accessible area or on a restricted area is a design choice.
> However I agree that in purely domestic airports I don't see how you'd prevent general public from accessing bags.
I don't understand this.
Why can't they have a door after the baggage claim that does not permit entry to the baggage claim area?
That's how things work in the UK.
In my local airport, the final part of leaving the arrivals area is the same for both international and domestic flights.
Passport control > Baggage claim (international) > Customs > One-way exit to landside
Baggage claim (domestic) > One-way exit to landside
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Absolutely true and you can tell at least in the old days when you'd fly southwest. Every other airline the overhead bin fills up. It is an inevitable drama when the flight attendants have to say "overheads are full now we are gate checking bags."
Southwest, at least before they changed their bag policy, would let you fly with two free checked bags. Finally everything worked as intended and those overheads were seldom used. Maybe for a jacket or purse or something, but no one was shoving a roller bag up there.
Spirit was another airline with ample overhead space, because they charged you nearly the same rate for overheads as checked bags.
Most domestic flights are short duration trips, a week's worth of clothes fit in carry-on suitcase, and the other stuff (laptop etc) can go in a backpack.
In all my domestic flights in the past year they've had to ask people at the gate to volunteer their carry-on suitcase to be checked into the hold because they didn't expect to have enough room in the overhead bins.
I usually volunteer because: it's free, I don't mind waiting at the pickup, and it's slightly more comfortable when getting off the plane.
It's not that different in Europe depending on the route.
Checked bags are a hassle and cost money.
I don't know if we are the level of "most people" but I'd say we are defintely at a "signficant percentage of ppl". Due to cost of checked luggage the popularity of one bag carry on flying has exploded.
I don't know if it's always more than 50% but on U.S. domestic flights a lot of people are carry-on only. It's far more than half on the routes and days frequented by business travelers. On routes and days where more consumer, family and vacation travelers fly it may not always be half but if it's not, it's close. Personally, I haven't checked a bag in over ten years. Using packing cubes it's possible to fit a huge amount in a well-designed modern suitcase.
The U.S. is different in this way from many other regions, especially much of the EU. There are specific reasons I've noticed:
- Due to the shorter EU domestic routes, it's more common to see smaller aircraft with much less overhead space for bags.
- For EU domestic routes, limits on carry-on bag size / count tend to be lower, more frequent and enforced more stringently (even when the aircraft in use isn't space-limited).
- In many countries there are different carry-on bag size / count allowances between domestic and long-haul international. In the U.S. almost all domestic flights use the larger international allowances (the rare exceptions usually being 'puddle-jumper' connections).
- In the U.S. checking bag compliance at the gate isn't as frequent or stringent. The nominal limit is a small suitcase + a personal item. On intra-E.U. flights, I see large backpacks rejected as the 'personal item' that are routinely accepted in the U.S. A higher percentage of U.S. passengers have maximum 22-inch roller bags than I see in the E.U. You can fit a lot in a 22" bag + large backpack.
- My perception is that elsewhere in the world, the average person on a domestic flight will be away from home longer than in the U.S. I assume this is due to the other regions often having better inter-city / region train and bus options than the U.S. which take a larger share of shorter duration trips.
- Other less significant factors might include U.S. business and evening attire being a bit more casual on average, making is easier to pack small as well as U.S. airline industry competition making shorter duration (but not necessarily shorter distance) U.S. domestic flights more accessible to more consumers. A lot of U.S. middle-class consumers now frequently use flights for weekend trips over 1,000 mi away. The U.S. has a larger number of smaller commercial airports in second-tier cities that are still fairly easy to get through quickly, even with TSA security. This can make same-day jet trips to cities ~500 to ~1000 mi away not much more involved than a typical EU train trip to a nearby city. For about a year, I did same-day and overnight jet flights from San Diego to Sacramento (~900 mi / 80 mins) about twice a week, often with nothing but a bike messenger bag as carry-on. I know a guy that did San Jose - Burbank as a daily commute for several months. A larger airport like SFO or LAX can add nearly an hour on each end just due to airport logistics and location but 2nd tier airports with longer direct flights make it possible. I think that's more unusual in other countries.
> That sounds like bullshit to me.
Have you taken a US domestic flight? Everyone wants to bring their massive roll-ons into the cabin, nobody wants to check if they can avoid it.
Indeed, although today I got on a plane at LaGuardia and they made me check my carry on at the gate even though there was plenty of space in the overhead bins ( 60% capacity flight, about half of us had to do this) so YMMV.
No idea why they made us do that, but I had to grab my bag at the luggage claim.
Do people collect their bags from the baggage claim area and then immediately reboard an aircraft to exit the terminal?
How do the arrivals exist the terminal
Are you not allowed to have a friend who is picking you up assist with baggage claim?
>> Do people collect their bags from the baggage claim area and then immediately reboard an aircraft to exit the terminal? >> How do the arrivals exist the terminal
You arrive, go to baggage reclaim, then into the "public area". You can then exit the terminal, or go check in for another flight or whatever you like. The point is that once you have left the baggage collection area you cannot re-enter it.
>> Are you not allowed to have a friend who is picking you up assist with baggage claim?
exactly. No-one from outside is allowed into the baggage collection hall. But equally, we don't get charged for trolly use. So you don't need help. You stack everything onto a trolly (which are there waiting for you for free.)
often baggage pickup is on the terminal side of the ‘one way exit’.
yes. In the US. that's what I'm saying. This appears to be a very US design. (Although obviously my experience of domestic air travel is limited to a small number of countries.)
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We need to put a checkpoint before the checkpoint so that never happens!
In Uganda they make you get out of your car and go through a metal detector before getting to the pre-security security screening at the actual airport... 3-4 layers...
> What's to prevent terrorists from going through TSA, waiting in the scanning line when everyone is still going through, and then planting a bluetooth device into someone else's bag? I never open my carryon once I have packed it.
I make it a point to hold up the whole line until it is my turn to go through the xray. It gets fun when they mandate a pat down in lieu of the millimeter wave scanner but refuse to have someone available for it.
It’s the only way to honestly say you have kept your bags under watch. If anybody tries to send in my bags without me , I immediately speak up in a loud stern voice, “That is not your bag!”
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 acting like an asshole for the sake of being an asshole and making life just a little bit worse for everyone else around you.
This is not something to brag about. This is something to be ashamed of.
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.
> You are being an asshole to prove a point.
How is waiting for my turn to go through the metal detector or be patted down being an asshole? I arrived before the people behind me and I’m following the security procedures of the airport.
It explicitly says to keep your belongings in your position at all times. To keep your bags in view. In fact they ask you if you ever lost sight of your bags.
If people don’t want to wait in line for people following the rules then let them be inconvenienced to the point where they will get the rules changed to speed up the process.
But I’m not going to give in to the stupidity of the security rules and forsake my own belongings to accommodate someone who doesn’t care enough to either come early and deal with the potential ramifications of the rules their elected leaders have chosen for them.
> I make it a point to hold up the whole line
What you are doing is the equivalent of paying some poor cashier in pennies while everyone behind you is forced to wait in order to get revenge for some decision made by executives ten rungs up the food chain.
It is childish and immature. And worse, it biases people against whatever point you’re trying to make in the first place. Please make the conscious choice to be a better person.
> It explicitly says to keep your belongings in your position at all times.
Since you are hell-bent on following all rules to the letter, you could at least commit to the bit and follow your luggage through the X-ray machine.
If you concede that it’s not reasonable to do so, then I think you’re capable of being adult enough to concede that neither is purposefully obstructing a bunch of other travelers for the sake of a pointless exercise to obstruct everyone else so you can maintain eye contact with your luggage.
> What you are doing is the equivalent of paying some poor cashier in pennies while everyone behind you is forced to wait in order to get revenge for some decision made by executives ten rungs up the food chain.
These rules are not made by CEOs. They’re made by the people the populace has chosen to elect. Either directly or indirectly through inaction.
> It is childish and immature. And worse, it biases people against whatever point you’re trying to make in the first place. Please make the conscious choice to be a better person.
Again, what part of waiting for my turn is childish or immature? If the person in front of me is waiting for her turn I’m not going to complain. That’s the system we’ve arrived at.
> Since you are hell-bent on following all rules to the letter, you could at least commit to the bit and follow your luggage through the X-ray machine.
I think you’re misunderstanding my actions. I don’t hold up the line for no reason. I hold up the line until both me and my bags go through in tandem. Not a moment sooner nor a moment longer.
Some people deserve to be insulted. It’s fine.
> make it a point to hold up the whole line until it is my turn to go through the xray
How? I’ve seen idiots do this. I just go around and ahead of them.
Isn't this terror-ists winning? When people give in to terror?
When we had the IRA active in the UK everyone would be proud to carry on as normal after any incident, to show that life would go on as normal despite their efforts. This doesn't seem normal.
The Reddit thread on this was equal parts amazing and hilarious.
Real time insights from not one, but 9, redditors on the flight.
Main post: https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/s/57lugEMhxl
All the redditors on board: https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/s/Fh2KoqG4SY
A passenger with a hilariously illtimed username: https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/s/W86tRI6ZVf
Those new obfuscated links prevent old.reddit to work.
Is there a way for you to post proper direct links?
> Main post: https://old.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/comments/1tse6mq/ua_...
> All the redditors on board: https://old.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/comments/1tse6mq/ua_...
> A passenger with a hilariously illtimed username: https://old.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/comments/1tse6mq/ua_...
You can modify your regex to only match when it's not a shortened url - then the short one will redirect to the real www.reddit.com address, before the redirect matches.
(Don't have the correct regex on hand right now, as I changed browsers and decided to use Old reddit redirect extension instead of scripting, but it worked in my previous browser)
My current regex looks like this:
Mapping toYou can click on any of the links and replace "www" in the url with "old", then you'll have things more or less like how it used to be.
to do that you have to open the link in new reddit first to expand it, then change it to old reddit. if you use a tool that automatically replaces www.reddit.com with old.reddit.com the shortened links break.
For now!
> Those new obfuscated links prevent old.reddit to work.
Can't you just set the old theme in your profile? That's what I do.
only if you actually log in. not everyone does.
I got permanently banned for the "Christianity is just worshipping a Jewish zombie who is his own father who will save you if you invite him into your head, symbolically drink his blood, and eat his flesh" copypasta, so not everyone can log in :)
I'm one ban away from a permaban thanks to the Navy Seal copypasta
They work with old reddit redirect extension on firefox
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Very interesting, but a hell of a way to dox yourself for being on the flight manifest.
The entities that have access to flight manifests have far easier ways to identify who's behind your account. It's not a threat model worth seriously considering.
Are flight manifests public?
Internal flights in New Zealand don’t need ID. So if you knew you were going to posting your terrible flight experience, you could fly under a fake name.
Not public but definitely written down and semi permanent. It’s like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that could eventually lead to you. In this case, it gives a determined actor a specific course of action to follow (find the manifest).
We need to start asking questions about when it's appropriate to charge staff for falsely escalating a nonsense concern. A teen with a bluetooth network named bomb is not a threat, and turning around a plane for it is creating false alarm. This happens a lot, frequently in schools, where someone will make a joke (like asking Benjamin Netanyahu to drop bombs on a school building in a clear joking manor) and officials shut down the building and have the FBI arrest the child under false pretense of a threat.
At some point we need to start asking hard questions about when to charge administrators and staff for creating false alarms.
In the hardware world, we use the abbrevation BOM (bill of materials) frequently.
Needless to say, we use the full "Bill of materials" phrase when anyone on the call is at the airport or travelling in general.
One of my coworkers once told me that, unless I changed our hardware design, he'd be forced to add a buggy part to our bill of materials to handle the use case.
I had to call in a BOM threat.
Ok, fine. Bomb is bomb, I get that. But how is “Free Palestine, F Zionists” a reason to call the FBI?
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The statement is neither violent nor muslim per se.
The core conflict is religious. How can you pretend it's not
And the statement can be interpreted as violent when you consider the context pretty easily. Violence against Israel and jews is part of the Palestinian identity.
Here is a hint: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/30/us-congress-advance...
America is basically Israeli's puppet at this point, can't let bad words being said about their masters
People prank others all the time with goofy names [1] (2014) So are we at the point where that will change and devices will have to just assign random sanitized dictionary names? "Connect to my 'apple horse bunny farm'" There are programs that can flood an area with tens of thousands of fake access points (scapy-fakeap). Or thousands of drones for that matter. [2]
[1] - https://observer.com/2014/03/park-slope-kiddie-shop-hunts-fo...
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8jn_6EmYxE
Pranks aside, this becomes remarkably scary when you think about all the ways that a malicious/compromised device could cause chaos.
I really don't appreciate you posting my unhashed password to the public like that
Well next time pick one that browsers automatically filter out, example "hunter2" browsers automatically filter some passwords per W3C standards, notice you can't see my password. [1]
[1] - https://bash-org-archive.com/?244321
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-portable-bluetooth-speake...
- Passengers on the plane commented of the event as it was going on in this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/s/57lugEMhxl
I guess I shouldn't pine, I can just have AI summarize all sources for me, and stop dealing with poor reporting that tries to drag 3 bullet points into multiple pages for the sake of selling ad space.
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.
Hmm I see. I only use "old" reddit and it does require login there to resolve to a real address. In any case, it is a special link that enables tracking (unnecessary, to say the least).
With the old reddit redirect extension it goes right to old reddit without the login window.
Oh, I thought how stupid it was to return the flight based on Bluetooth device name, which is just a random string identifying a thing. But I think it's also strongly discouraged to bring devices called bombs on a plane?
The product website has been hugged to death.
I'd love that as well - can we not get LLMs to summerize and give us non-click bait versions of these events.
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.)
A "system where people can feed facts" already exists. It's WikiData. Why involve money and credentialism into this?
I think it's going to take more than $20 per month to get enough suction to make any difference, at this point.
Wikinews closed up and went read-only on May 4, 2026:
https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_closes_Wik...
If my radio got FCC stamps on it, I'm sure the airplane has this figured out but in the opposite direction.
Did someone update fly by wire to run on 2.4Ghz BLE or something? What is even the deal with airplane mode?
Provides many opportunities for cheaper and more scalable methods of terrorism.
Don't need to actually get explosives on board, just a bluetooth device. Manage to get 10 planes at once, and you've got a nice bit of chaos on your hands.
Wonder how easy it'd be to reverse pickpocket some fitbits into jackets left laying around before you catch your flight to a 'non-aligned country'.
Could cause lots of havoc with pre-planted speakers, too. Setting off random sirens at maximum volume, telling people to evacuate, etc. I wonder what the security solution would be if people started causing terror via text and sound.
The meta narrative here is a shift towards more authoritarian ideas gaining further foothold/dominance.
As can be seen in the naming treatment + the comments on that article + comments here. But also can be seen in various other places.
In fact, it has already happened to a degree where we see these lagging(!) indicators pop up. So wherever we currently stand is further than those. To which degree though I couldn't say.
Plan/act accordingly.
It's beyond obvious at this point that we exist alongside a massive bot brigade (or many midsize bot farms) ready to chime in with senseless, cookie-cooker support for short-shrift authoritarian ideology.
It's palpable in the comment sections of many corporate news outlets, as well as on reddit.
Unless there's evidence that this pattern of comments is from real biological humans, I see no reason to presume that it is.
How would turning bluetooth off convince anyone that there isn't a bomb on board? It seems like the bluetooth offering is the least of our worries in the insane case that this is how a threat was delivered.
The idea wasn't to convince anyone of anything, it was to reduce RF noise so the cops could find the offending device more quickly. Also if it were a real threat you would probably quickly identify someone who is unwilling to turn off their Bluetooth.
if it were a real threat you would probably quickly identify someone who is unwilling to turn off their Bluetooth.
> a flight attendant told passengers over the PA system that they "must turn off Bluetooth immediately," or else the aircraft would have to turn around.
So if the person just takes back their bomb threat everything is ok? Or did they think the terrorist labeled their Bluetooth bomb “bomb” and this would disable it?
I guess they assumed there were two scenarios:
1. It was unintentional; someone had a bluetooth device called BOMB for some reason that made sense before boarding the plane. They would turn it off.
2. It was intentional; someone wanted to send a warning and chose this channel - they would leave the device on.
3. The level of tech illiteracy combined with airplane security theater is an affront to all thinking people.
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.
How many threats did actually turn out to be real to date? I couldn't find this being published. But how many threats did happen without any indication (only after the perpetrators tell). I can easily recalled maybe 3-4 incidents. So the issue here is do knowing threats really help?
You only hear the edge cases in the news. There are tens of thousands of incidents of unruly passengers some of which are just threats and some are actual violence.
But also, just because someone is making what could be perceived as a threat doesn’t mean it won’t escalate, which is why threats are taken seriously even if we don’t know whether something is guaranteed to go wrong. You don’t want a crazy person making bomb threats on a flight even if they don’t have a bomb, because they can inflict other issues while trapped in a metal tube at cruising altitude.
https://www.iata.org/en/iata-repository/pressroom/fact-sheet...
No they wouldn't. A fundamental part of a threat is to make it very clear that there's a threat. The reason you threaten is to get some concession, otherwise you wouldn't bother threatening.
This is at odds with basically every major security incident postmortem in recent history.
Most security failures happen when people wait to take something seriously until it is “very clear” that something is wrong.
We have the luxury of hindsight while reading this article but listen to the tapes of any security failures and you’ll find it painfully obvious that the most common issue is that people don’t do anything until it’s too late.
That has nothing to do with what we're talking about. We're discussing threats. Serious threats are made seriously.
There was literally no threat.
They did not know if it was a threat or not. Hindsight is everything.
The industry is usually smarter than this.
For example, there are many pieces of equipment that can be broken and they’ll still fly, because it’s not essential or there’s enough redundancy.
Child safety seats are not required even though they’d save lives, because the extra hassle and expense would cause some parents to drive instead, which is much more dangerous, leading to more overall deaths.
Normally the decisions are quite sensible. But the moment any “terrorism” enters the picture it all goes out the window.
All of those have the luxury of risk evaluation in advance
You don't have your head quite on, they had already taken off!
Yeah, that’s how diversions work?
In the simplest possible terms: this is total bullshit security theatre. At no point has there ever been a bomb or even a bomb threat carried out via usb device names. There is absolutely no reason to even look at the names of Bluetooth devices on a flight.
A normal level of risk aversion? Are you being serious? They inconvenienced a few thousand passengers to save zero.
Without testing the null hypothesis that is not possible to determine. There doesn’t have to be an actual bomb for an unruly passenger to inflict injuries or death.
It wasn't a bomb threat: https://hellottec.com/product/bomb-portable-bluetooth-speake...
Why are people not reading the article!!!! It was a Fitbit. Best not to get news based on Reddit conjecture. It's wild how many people are running with the speaker thing.
> This website has been temporarily rate limited
The url conveys the relevant information.
Was wondering the same thing. Maybe there's some regulation about this, but the flight crew wanted to bend the rule to keep the plane going, figuring it was just a poorly named device.
Apparently it wasn’t a threat - a kid had a commercial Bluetooth speaker that names itself as ‘bomb’. No one on the plane did anything intentionally.
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This is wildly inaccurate to the point of being dangerous advice. The goal during a bomb threat call is generally not to challenge, mock, or provoke the caller into a reaction. It is to keep the caller talking for as long as possible and gather information that could help assess the threat and assist law enforcement or security. There is no reliable rule that says a "real terrorist" will hang up if laughed at or that a hoax caller will stay on the line. People making threats behave in many different ways and simplistic tests like this are not a dependable way to determine whether a threat is real.
You are supposed to take every threat as real. Which is also why calling in a fake threat is considered a big federal crime to deter clowns.
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I was talking about this with someone the other day… How many real terrorism threats have been preceded by the terrorist telegraphing their intentions with a phone call beforehand? My prior is that this number is essentially 0 and we should ignore bomb threats as a society.
Here's one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omagh_bombing
Two: https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/nye/pr/2012/2012nov08.h...
Three (not sure if the caller was the one planting the bomb here): https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/may/01/bomb-aimed-a...
Probably not super common but it does happen from time to time. And imagine ignoring a bomb threat and then it's real, you probably would not want to be responsible for that.
The Weather Underground often warned the targets of their bombings via phone call. (I guess their goal was to attack gov't institutions and make a political statement, not to kill lots of people.) This was in the late '60s-'70s.
The IRA (Irish terrorists, for Americans confused at the acronym, or maybe confused at what the IRA did) did occasionally phone warnings and occasionally the information was accurate. Code words were used to authenticate the threat.
The PIRA actually do seem to have intended to give accurate warnings when they planted bombs, in Belfast at least. There were inevitably cases when the information was garbled or misunderstood but the use of codewords & the practice of delivering the warnings to a known set of media outlets was at least an attempt to minimise these.
The downside was that the vast majority of warnings were hoaxes - bomb scares were dozens of times more common than actual bombs.
The other main groups - INLA, UVF, and UFF/UDA also got in on the hoax game, but didn't often do real bombs (and didn't always give proper warnings when they did - see the UVF's Dublin & Monaghan bombings for a particularly grim example).
But real bombs were just common enough that the hoaxes from whatever source had to be taken seriously and so they caused huge amounts of disruption, probably more than anything that actually exploded.
Logically that probably makes sense, but it would require everyone in the chain of command agreeing to that policy, and there’s no way that would ever happen from a liability standpoint.
The IRA bombs in civilian areas in the uk almost always had phone calls that preceded the bombs going off.
It was standard practice during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, for example.
I think its a move by United to set precedent so they can do whatever they want on subsequent flights. And because of that, to also help law enforcement say they can take away some of your rights when flying.
Tinfoil hat on.
In the past few years, whenever I hear United on the news its not because they did something “good”.
One thing I learned as a globe trotting cypherpunk: always respect sky law.
Can you share any examples?
I thought Bluetooth devices only announce their name when specifically asked to do so, and usually switch out of that mode after a minute or so.
Or can the name be retrieved even when they're not broadcasting it?
The level of idiocy... like what was the alert for? "A bomb was registered through bluetooth?" They really thought that a legitimate bomb, calling itself a bomb and registering on a device bluetooth spectrum was a threat? And these people are allowed to fly planes? What if my laptop's name is dabomb and I register on the plane's wifi node, will that trigger a call to a SWAT team?
The most important question is not answered by the article - was it done intentionally or accidentally. That makes all the difference.
You’re not going to name your bomb “bomb”.
Needless drama.
> Those onboard were also instructed to leave all their belongings on the aircraft before deplaning.
After this the number of the same occurrences will increase.... There are simple android apps that brings you literally near to the offender device this is not hard to do. But the question is, was this not spotted at airport? Or the name was set like that just in middle flight?
And I thought of an actually aviation-relevant bluetooth name like this: https://www.heise.de/imgs/18/1/2/6/3/5/5/9/gross-16329129490...
No pilot will lose their job by taking action to potentially save passengers lives.
But the chances are high, they do lose their job if they don't (and/or potentially lose their life as well).
It's that simple.
(regardless of how dumb/overreaction some might view this as)
The chances of potentially losing lives were not high in this case of an unusual Bluetooth device name.
Always easy to guess which country has this reaction. The terrorists well and truly won.
I find interesting that no one thought about localising the device based on the Bluetooth signal strength.
That needs a skillset that is not on board of that plane.
However, that is also not the actual goal. There is no true threat. No one actually believes that it would be a bomb.
The goal is compliance and to train people to self-police each other.
___
Good new torment nexus idea though. Just litter the plane with BLE antennas and triangulate exactly who it is that is having wrong thoughts.
We'll be seeing it 1-5y from now
Andddd now everyone knows that an arbitrary text string in a device hostname is enough to ground a flight.
The other incident mentioned is worse I think. It wasn’t a potential threat, it was stating an opinion.
“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.”
Given that the Palestinian Liberation Organization has an actual history of multiple hijackings, this makes a slight amount of sense.
Of course, someone planning to hijack a flight would probably never try to do so with WiFi ssid’s, not to mention that hardened cockpit doors and passenger attitudes mean that PLO style hijackings are now impossible.
Of course, telling people to turn off the network name (bomb, Palestine or otherwise) and everything will be fine, is a tacit admission that the whole thing is theater.
Genuine question, what could the FBI actually do?
I understand that the United States is actually a puppet for Israel, although the name on a Bluetooth device isn't really breaking any laws? It's not calling harm to someone, its not a threat. I thought America was the place of free speech?
Passengers are required to follow orders by flight crew regarding flight safety. If the passenger shut off the device, it does appear that 1st Amendment speech protections would apply (prior restraint is expressly forbidden). If the passenger failed to comply, then I suppose the FBI could detain them for failing to follow the lawful order.
To be honest calling the police and saying you have a bomb planted on flight XYZ and want 100000$ or you'll detonate it, is probably also enough.
But bombs apparently use bluetooth now, so he can't detonate it from more than a few metres away...
In the most simplistic terms, yeah. That's true. But the constraints aren't really shaped like that. For instance:
A completely-innocent Airtag speaks only bluetooth, and it can be activated from continents away -- as long as any Apple phone is nearby with a shred of Internet access.
My similarly-innocent Samsung phone is programmable (using its built-in Routines function) to perform actions in response to becoming disconnected from any given Bluetooth device.
> he can't detonate it from more than a few metres away...
Reliably bomb detonation is on the roadmap for Bluetooth 8.
You can probably sharpie "I have a bomb" on your forehead and get the same result
Why would it land in New York instead of St John?
Because they knew it’s not a real threat and they wanted to land at United hub for cost saving reasons.
Better food and theater.
Presumably the logistics of being back at a major hub
If you genuinely fear for the lives of everyone on board, who gives a shit about logistics?
I guess you can infer how they weighted the two concerns
> "Free Palestine, F Zionists"
Does the FBI usually get involved when someone says these words in public in the US?
Not directly, no, but they’ll build a file for what they consider extremist views. Just look back to the Civil Rights Movement era for the list of things people said that would get them an FBI file - we have a long and storied history of surveilling anyone and everyone who says things that go against what political power desires.
That being said, I do think any cabin crew pitching a fit over such a hotspot name is absolutely in the wrong. That’s not a threat, that’s personal opinion, and it’s not the hotspot owner’s fault the crew conflates Zionist ideology specifically with Jewish Faith in general like an ignorant fool.
“Free Palestine” isn’t exactly fringe. In fact, outside America and Israel, I’d bet it’s the default stance
> “Free Palestine” isn’t exactly fringe. In fact, outside America and Israel, I’d bet it’s the default stance
That's certainly not true in many European countries
> 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 without answering the questions, due to the possibility that the information will be used against them.
The result? They call someone else, and don't count "declined to answer" in their results. So the poll simply is the prevailing opinion of those who wished to answer, and thus is skewed one direction. (BTW, this is why everyone says there are "at least XXX hundred million guns in America; the best they can get is a low estimate)
This happens quite a lot with controversial topics.
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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Why? This makes no logical sense.
re the second response: Original commenter did not specify exlusivity to jews. So that's my assumption.
I’m Jewish and living in North America. I have no ability to affect Israeli policy, nor is my heritage an endorsement of it. If someone was yelling at me about Palestine because I am Jewish, I would be pretty offended, even though I probably agree with them.
It’s the same as running up to a Muslim and screaming “stop terrorism”. Or running up to a black person and yelling “stop gang violence”.
The action of yelling at a random person because they belong to an ethnic group that is the dominant party that is doing a bad thing in a different part of the world means you are inherently judging them for their race/ethnicity. It is a pretty good definition of racism.
If you are yelling free Palestine at everyone, fine. If you are targeting your message at people because of their race, that’s just racism. The targeting is the issue, not the message.
I think this is true to some extent. On the other hand, the Jewish community in the US and the (unconditional) support it leadership gives Israel is a large reason any of this is possible.
Saying you weren’t directly involved is only an excuse up to a point.
This kind of generalization is exactly the issue though. There is no singular “Jewish community” in the us. Every single temple or congregation is independent, there is no central authority. You saying that there is unconditional support is just a different degree of yelling at random Jews in the street. Every one of my Jewish family members and friends is horrified by Gaza and the AIPAC/GOP collaboration and speaks against it. So the support is not “unconditional” as you posit.
Why aren’t we anti-war Jews the “Jewish community”? Lumping us all together as “unconditional” supporters of Israel and any supporter of Zionism as a supporter of the apartheid state is exactly the problem. It is definitionally racism to say that my behavior or viewpoint is a function of my heritage. So please stop.
What exactly am I supposed to do? Of course I’m not involved. I’ve never been to Israel. I don’t support their war aims. I don’t associate with any Jews or Jewish organizations who really do. Your last sentence is akin to saying that random Muslims can only claim not to be responsible for 9/11 up to a point. It’s reductive, stupid and racist.
Thanks for writing this. It's frustrating to see political-based bigotry be condoned and platformed by mainstream political and media figures. Like seeing the criminal Eric Adams, Kathy Hochul, and Chuck Schumer marching with Bezalel Smotrich and Amichay Eliyahu in the "Israel Day" NYC parade... it reminds me of the 1939 Nazi rally @ MSG or the 1925 KKK DC march. Every ethno-religious supremacist organization and national regime is inherently repugnant to human decency and desecrates the trauma and cost paid by and memories of previous generations to free us from tyrannical oppression by terrible ideologies where one group believes they are superior and another group are animals.
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Either the person you're telling your opinion about Palestine agrees with you or not. Expressing an opinion about some situation publicly is not hate. And who you're telling your opinion to is irrelevant.
You're not telling them to not attack Palestine by shouting "Free Palestine", or anything similar, only that you believe that Palestine should be free, so your comparison is not valid, because it does not contain any hidden assumptions.
They might as well agree with you. They can correctly respond by shouting Free Palestine back at you.
Correct. Expressing your opinion about Palestine to the general public is not hate.
Directing the expression of that opinion at random Jewish people, in a targeted manner is hate.
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I find this very hard to believe. I find it much easier to believe a throwaway account was made specifically to spread some form of zionist propaganda.
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> when someone says these words in public in the US?
Depending on where the plane was, it might not even have happened in the US.
Not sure why this is downvoted. This was an example from the same article.
And the answer is that the FBI wasn't involved. That was a threat the pilot made, which comes psychologically from the same place as terrorist bomb threats (and also "eat your vegetables or you'll die early" parenting). You want to control someone's behavior so you threaten maximalist retaliation.
An aircraft is not really public. The Captain and FO have a tremendous amount of power they can wield to make sure a flight passes without incident. A plane is not the place to make statements.
Granted though, the FBI didn’t actually get involved. But why let facts get in the way of rage?
> A plane is not the place to make statements
Sounds like they should only be made in freedom designated zones a-la Bush-Cheney
No. It’s not illegal to express that opinion (or any opinion) in public in the US in any normal scenario. I’m not sure to what extent the law is different on planes, but you can go outside on the street and yell “free Palestine, F Zionists” to your heart’s content and you will not have broken any laws.
Imagine getting your jimmies this rustled over expressing antipathy for a genocidal regime, and sympathy for an oppressed people.
I wouldn't want to see slogans like this on an airplane of all places. I agree with the slogan. There are plenty of other times/places to say it. Unfortunately freedom is already out the window the moment you go through TSA security, so if I'm getting my crotch patted down to fly, they can be quiet for a few hours too.
Cognitive dissonance can explain a lot. If you don’t think the current regime is genocidal (whatever that even means) then you might get very concerned that anybody who says it is genocidal is a dangerous lunatic or terrorist sympathizer. Even saying something obviously truthful like “there are good people on both sides” becomes a threatening provocation. Hate is a system.
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It’s not just the beating and killing of people. That seems bad enough, but the recent episode of ‘settlers’ torturing a dog is horrific.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/world/middleeast/settler-...
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Discussion around it quickly turns into a ‘yes but look what they did’.
It baffles me. A rich, powerful democracy should be held to a higher standard. But… yes, both sides have been terrible.
Which side is going to work towards a peaceful coexistence?
Have you also looked at polls of how Muslims feel about killing Jews?
For example, 3/4 Gazans were in support of killing and raping Israeli Jews (and Arabs) on Oct 7:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/poll-shows-palesti...
Hard for to assess that stat given the polling organization has this on their Wikipedia page.
“On 29 August 2024 the Israel Defense Forces released Hamas documents[6] that it said showed that, unbeknownst to the PCPSR, Hamas had secretly falsified its levels of public support in polls conducted by the PCPSR.[7] Rejecting the IDF claims, Shikaki said it was 'highly unlikely' that Hamas had falsified its results, but vowed to probe the claims.[8]”
> if they decide they want your city
To be clear, it was God that decided to give this land to Abraham in "everlasting possession," so this is pretty cut and dried. Why would Abraham lie about that?? /s
The "Palestinian" movement _invented_ airplane hijacking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings_an...
So yes, the FBI will get involved in this case. In this context it is something to worry about.
Biased much? You could have used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_hijacking
That says:
"Airplane hijackings have occurred since the early days of flight. ...Pre-1929, 1929–1957, 1958–1979, 1980–2000, and 2001–present."
"...Between 1958 and 1967, there were approximately 40 hijackings worldwide..According to the FAA, in the 1960s, there were 100 attempts of hijackings involving U.S. aircraft: 77 successful and 23 unsuccessful....
"..In a five-year period (1968–1972) the world experienced 326 hijack attempts, or one every 5.6 days.."
And your conclusion is "Palestinian" movement (that you wrote between quotes)...invented airplane hijacking?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_hijacking
Looks like the first one was a Hungarian in 1919.
Which is kind of ironic, considering modern terrorism was basically an invention of the Zionist movement in Palestine.
It's also completely false because they cited only Palestine-related hijackings, and not the parent article that goes back far further and proves they're lying.
> In this context it is something to worry about.
Would you really be worried if someone said or wrote that near you in any context?
Short of them holding a weapon, this is baffling.
HN is generally absolutist when it comes to ‘freedom of speech’, and I don’t agree with having no limits, but in this instance it’s some overly sensitive overreaching BS.
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> so-called “Israel”
What’s with the ‘so-called’? That’s what the country is called. Israel. But I’m not sure that you’re aware but there was a really big one 25 years ago this coming September. Maybe you heard of it?
u/fortran77 used the phrase so-called “Palestinian” movement (slightly edited since), so I simply responded with the same rhetoric :)
Of course, I somehow doubt that you would have a similarly strong reaction when Palestine is erased.
No evidence of that, of course, but your comment stands.
No that was because they hate our freedom, not because of decades of occupation and war all over the middle east funded by US taxpayer dollars.
The stated reasoning by Osama bin Laden in a letter published in 2002 [1] was primarily a response to grievances over the US support of Israel's occupation of Palestine, as well as a number of unrelated grievances mostly due to the choices of the various monarchies in the Gulf Arab states. For example, retaining a presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia at the request of King Abdullah.
It may be satisfying to affirm a world view in either direction in the topic, but an understanding of 20th century history suggests that Al Qaeda noted some legitimate grievances while others were not factual or misrepresented. For example, the United States did not support Russia's campaign in Chechnya. Additionally, American military campaigns in Afghanistan were in direct response to Al Qaeda's mass killings of noncombatants and Taliban refusal to stop Al Qaeda military activity based in Afghanistan.
1. https://scholarship.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/server/api/core/bi...
Note: this hyperlink may die. The original copy published in The Observer has tragically suffered from link rot.
I’d like to see a rebuttal to this comment.
Is the US now safer after the Iran attacks?
In the UK you can get arrested for saying less.
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
Ah so the wording suggests that it's a thought/speech crime, not that the particular event is outlawed. Yeah that's still nuts.
A paddy wagon is now speeding towards your home.
The government of Israel has more freedom of speech and control over the US than voting citizens do.
Give citizens time, one of them might persuade Trump to attack another country, levelling the score.
Greenland isn’t out the danger zone yet.
Flight policies have always been very weird.
I remember I was not allowed to use a laptop with a CD or DVD attached.
Now you have internet on board.
What is even better now phone calls are prohibited, but all these airlines had actual credit card phones installed in every seat just 20-15 years ago and really wanted you to do phone calls for $1 a minute. And some people did, and it was annoying, and it was “fine”. Now that they can’t charge extra suddenly it’s “against regulations”.
And, of course, terrorist manual states that any weapon needs to be labelled as such.
Can you potentially see the difference (red-tape-wise) between a centralized/trunking FAA-certified radio on one highly-specific frequency vs. random, uncertified rogue transmitters all over the spectrum? This wasn't a carrier regulation.
That's not what the parent comment is talking about.
Calling over the cellular network has been prohibited since time immemorial. What the parent comment is talking about is carriers also prohibiting making calls over airplane-supplied WiFi.
You can't, for example, join a Zoom meeting, or use your phone's built-in WiFi calling ability, on a typical flight nowadays, for better or for worse.
Does your phone's cellular radio work at 30000 feet? Calls occur over flight wifi. Streaming video and audio are not permitted on most flights for bandwidth purposes, so it follows that calls are prohibited for the same reason.
What transmitters? Now calls happen over WiFi which companies sell.
Don’t get me started on TSA policies.
I would be worried about a device called "AR-924 Pager" but no one thinks that is an issue.
Looks like I picked a bad day to stop smoking crack.
I wonder what would they do to Malaysian firemen travelling with work devices. :-)
Bomba means Firemen in Malay.
https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/fire-engine-photos.com/43...
https://apicms.thestar.com.my/uploads/images/2025/10/10/3563...
I hope somebody follows up to ensure that the kid isn't being punished for a completely unpredictable event involving a commercial device.
Why didn't they just ask the passengers to simply not try to connect to "BOMB"?
Would have been so much simpler.
Oh gosh, sure, terrorists always name their devices "bomb" in the open.
I don’t know if we should laugh or cry
JTFC the comments on this one.
And the "Free Palestine, F zionists" that made a return to ramp.
I shouldn't be surprised of the security by obscurity of the aviation industry after seeing it for 10+ years, but still am.
Remember the 737 Max guy. And the likes.
Of FFS.
hellottec is down but a cdn mirror of the product: https://ams3.digitaloceanspaces.com/tesancdn/hellottec/2_BH_...
And terrorists will:
- communicate in English (because apparently even ancient Romans speak perfect English)
- name the device “bomb”
Honestly they would probably know decent English
Awhile ago I named my phone "you-have-been-hacked" and to my joy it made me look twice at my router a few months later haha
Perhaps the joke is irresponsible on my behalf potentially causing unnecessary stress for whomever is directly or indirectly scanning my device...
..but on the other hand, if this person can't see the joke, perhaps they shouldn't have access to scanning devices.
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts?
Cheers
I wonder if this is some heightened alert measures taken after recent events
Could've been me, but I'm glad it wasn't me. xD
> 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?
The article links to this Reddit thread as a source: https://old.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/comments/1tk2ktz/wif...
I consider posts like this larp/ragebait by default unless there's any actual evidence of that happening (like the flight being aborted in this case).
> Are we now actively participating in the genocide?
The US has provided over 310 billion (not inflation adjusted) in military funding to Israel since the Nakba. So I’d consider “participating” a strong understatement.
Great.
Now troublemakers have new way to make travelling even more stressful.
Surely we could of just used some basic Bluetooth fingerprinting and reveal the MAC Address of the Bluetooth device, then realize its a speaker...
Why would a bluetooth speaker be needed during a flight? It feels a bit antisocial to turn some loud music in a cabin.
IM THE BOMB AND ABOUT TO BLOW UPPPPPPPP
Security theater at its finest
AI slop article with 300+ upvotes, nice going guys.
This is like the Adam Sandler movie where he says bomb on an airplane. It's an overreaction, is it not? A terrorist is not going to call their bomb's bluetooth trigger bomb. Even if they are, are you telling me we have no idea whether there is a bomb in luggage or not?
Ben Stiller right? That’s Meet the Parents.
Thanks, always get those two mixed up.
That should be a perma ban. I get jokes, but there should be boundries.
If they even controlled the name the "joke" could have been done months earlier and meant bomb as in excellent.
Better to scan baggage for the actual, ya know, bombs. Fine people joking about bombs verbally or written sure.
Even if you discount the possibility of an intentional threat as silly, this could have been a warning from someone under duress. Turning around was the right move.
How does that scenario work? Someone's under duress because presumably there's a terrorist on board. He lets the crew know there's a bomb onboard. The plane turns around, and the terrorist... lets the plane land safely?
OK maybe the bomb blows up when it crosses some longitude, because this is like the movie Speed, and turning around means the plane never cross that longitude..
If you mean another type of duress, naming your device "plshelp-[seat number]" would be a hell lot more effective..
How does your scenario work? Someone anonymously shouts BOMB ONBOARD and the plane just continues to its destination? "I guess they can blow us up whenever, so might as well keep going..."
> How does that scenario work?
It’s funnier than that. If they had turned off the ‘bomb’ the plane would have just carried on.
The event is bizarre.
Passenger trying to warn the crew would leave the device on
People have watched too many silly action movies.
Honestly I didn't think about that. Maybe they didn't either. Good example of why seeing something vaguely threatening and out of the ordinary is a reason to turn around, even if you don't know why exactly they'd do it.
Well. I just changed my bl labels on 3 phones and wifi ap settings to variations of this. Done a million miles on aa in 1.5 years before.
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.
Does this story mean that anyone can disrupt flights by hiding on planes some minimal device with Bluetooth (say a pi zero), programmed to turn on only at random and after a few days?
I think this part of the article actually explains what freaked out the crew lmaoo: "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."
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48342158
Someone needs to explain to me how the name of a Bluetooth device has any bearing on anything. Isn’t the real security not letting a bomb on the plane?
Also, now anyone who wants to disrupt a flight can switch their WiFi or Bluetooth name to Bomb or “Free Palestine” and the flight gets disrupted? Get out of here.
There is nothing new in that. It's pretty common that people get drunk at the airport or on the plane and make jokes about bombs or something. Then the place is evacuated and flights are disrupted. The culprits get arrested and probably have to pay a fine and maybe some compensation to the affected airlines, but they usually don't get any prison time.
There are simpler ways to disrupt a flight.
Yeah. You should have seen the line to the bathroom when I named my WiFi hotspot "Free mile high club - meet me in the bathroom".
Are there? Setting a device name might be the lowest effort thing I can think of.
Requires you to be on the plane.
Just call the police and say you have a bomb planted on flight XYZ and want 100000$ or you'll detonate it.
Just wait until you hear what a bad joke while waiting in the TSA line can do to you day.
I brought some bathbombs on a trip as part of a thank you gift. My bag got pulled aside for additional screening, and I had to think for a second on what to call them when the TSA person asked me what they were.
In other news, Tom Jones got removed from a plane for singing the wrong lyrics.
Blewtooth
Can you name your phone “not a bomb”?
> 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.
Wtf?
I can understand a bomb, but this is just free speech.
I am curious about the laws governing something like that. Does it matter whether it's a domestic or international flight? Are pilots king of the vessel?
> Are pilots king of the vessel?
They have the last words on these events.
... I can't believe what I am reading...
"Bluetooth speaker name had been set to a "four-letter word, [...] BOMB".
Luckily, it wasn't named "Nuclear Bomb from Cuba" because US Authorities would not have other choice than to nuke Cuba.
Seriously? What those people are doing when they see a fence with "ASS" painted on it? Do they believe that too?
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GOATed plane, love the engine power.
What a usability nightmare this site is: 3-4 popups before I could even read the title. No thank you. And this is with an adblocker turned on.
Don't these sites realize how many users they're losing?
That adblocker does not sound very effective
No popups when using uBlock Origin and/or uMatrix
The real "nightmare" is the browser that will automatically run all that garbage returned in the response body without any input from the userIt requires an "adblocker" to stop its default behaviour
Alternatively, one needs to disable Javascript, restrict the browser's access to DNS, etc.
When an advertising company releases a "browser" that intentionally allows website operators to cram pages fuil of advertising and tracking is that a coincidence
Is that the only way a browser can be designed
No
How many users realise this
A small number
For example, I'm using a browser that cannot automatically request resources, run Javascript, CSS, etc. where HTTP headers, including cookies, are trivial for the user to create, edit, save and delete. I do not need an "adblocker"
"Don't these sites realise how many users they're losing?"
The number is so small why would they care
This feels like one of those rare stories where everyone involved probably overreacted a little, but you can also understand why nobody wanted to be the person who ignored it.
These phones should have limits of how much you can use the tech...
> These phones should have limits of how much you can use the tech...
What do you mean?
He's a moron.