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Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever
- melling 11y ago"In a world where a $100 smartphone can be tracked for free, the $250 million jet vanished." It sounds like Inmarsat is now making basic ping location available for free: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182223-inmarsat-now-giving-away-free-satellite-tracking-for-airplanes-but-mh370-is-still-nowhere-to-be-found http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182223-inmarsat-now-givin...
- lostlogin 11y agoThat quote had me thinking too. Could I not be tracked please? What would that cost?
- mystic001 11y ago:-) It is already being done.
- windsurfer 11y agoDon't cell towers need to know your position to transfer you from tower to tower?
- sigmar 11y agoNope edit: though I guess that fact that you are connected to a specific tower leaks location information
- schoen 11y agoThe "need to know your position" is a consequence of how they measure signal strength to allow handoff between cells, so you get overlapping coverage and each tower has a signal measurement for the same device. A post I saw here a couple of weeks ago suggested a simpler method of reducing location tracking than ones I had been thinking of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10985599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10985599 You would add extra RF spectrum overhead and a little bit of latency for making and receiving calls. In general the basic thing that should happen to recover location privacy in mobile services is completely decoupling payment, device identifiers, and routing. Right now they are all linked or trivially linkable (your carrier sees you register with your IMEI and IMSI, and it assigns you a phone number -- rather than registering with a random per-session IMEI, paying for the service with a blinded digital payment token, and getting a phone number, if you want one, from a third party VoIP provider).
- CamperBob2 11y agoGreat. Here's your next phone. It puts out 2,000 watts and comes with a free tinfoil helmet. Battery life isn't great, but at least you're not being tracked by local cell sites.
- 0xffff2 11y agoThat quote is disingenuous in the extreme. You absolutely can not track a $100 smartphone in the middle of the Indian ocean, for any price.
- melling 11y agoThat's Bloomberg's comment not mine. Not sure where the sudden need to downvote is coming from. My point is that it's now a free service to track planes. It was possible to track MH370, for example, but it required a fee.
- 0xffff2 11y agoYeah, I know what quotation marks mean... My point is that the quote makes it seem much easier to track an airplane than it actually is. It's great that Inmarsat is providing the service for free now, but the quote makes it seem like the service is trivial to provide when it really isn't.
- hluska 11y agoYour comment would be better if you weren't so aggressive.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoCurious, what language did the poster uses that implies aggression? I see none.
- gherkin0 11y ago> Curious, what language did the poster uses that implies aggression? I see none. This: "Yeah, I know what quotation marks mean..." It comes off as snappy.
- melling 11y agoHyperbole in the news happens all the time. At any rate, the quote is also inaccurate because according the May 2014 article that I posted, we have been able to track a jet for free for almost 2 years. I wasn't trying to start a discussion about how easy or hard one of them is.
- alien3d 11y agono tower.. you need a satellite and they have been checking even since and no information. The most weird was, nobody in penang tower or langkawi tower detect the oddness. And also army radar. Next time, tower must be on 24 hour
- freddref 11y agoweeks away from forever?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- willvarfar 11y ago"The company already offers a similar service for ships and boats, which use Inmarsat’s network free of charge for distress signalling." Interestingly, back when I was an intern, BT used to charge an exorbitant rate for those distress calls. I once wrote-up the whole internship thing http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/17282439831/an-eight-in-a-million-chance http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/17282439831/an-ei... "I was pretty uncomfortable when I found that mayday calls were being charged at the highest rate - £8 per minute if I recall correctly - even though Inmarsat itself explicitly carried those calls for free. I remember the manager I asked about that, when I found those calls in real logs, not meeting my eyes as he talked distantly about why that was."
- samstave 11y agoWhy don't we have an additional distress beacon on all planes that says their gps coords to Inmarsat continuously no matter what? Basically why can't we use the Inmarsat network for more than distress but any and all planes report to some tamper proof system every minute? (Yes I know how many flights there are, but you don't need to store the data once a plane has reached its destination successfully)
- mikestew 11y agoI was thinking about this on a motorcycle trip to Alaska. For $250 one can buy a consumer device that updates my location via satellite every few minutes to display on a web page. $35/month, and they have cheaper plans. Were I to have been eaten by a bear, or splattered by a semi on the Dalton Highway, my wife would have at least known where to recover the body. Any yahoo with $250 and a shipping address can have one of these, yet two years later we still don't know where this Malaysian flight went to?
- julianz 11y agoWhich satellite would it talk back to? There's no coverage over that part of the Southern ocean. It's ridiculously remote and nobody is out there.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- partiallypro 11y agoEven if it were water proof, it would only be so at a certain depth. The pressure asserted by the ocean would render it useless...and the density of the ocean above it would probably make the signal too weak.
- luso_brazilian 11y agoWhile that's true at the very least (assuming that there really is a cheap worldwide GPS tracking available) the last known position would be much more accurate than in MH370. That would make unnecessary the attempt to extrapolate the existing data (the pings) in order to infer the plane last location good location.
- tlrobinson 11y ago> I'm sure Find My iPhone probably has a limited range or something Either I missed the sarcasm or this is the understatement of the century. There's no cell service in the middle of the Indian Ocean, several thousand miles from Australia. Not to mention the fact that radio waves travel extremely poorly through water.
- joshvm 11y agoThe problem is that water is an excellent RF attenuator. Even if the phone was working, it would be useless even under a few metres of water. For this reason submarine communication is only one way and requires kilometre long ELF emitters (which everyone in the world can pick up). Above 20m depth you can use VLF, but it's still only one way. The second problem is that phone location relies on there being a cell tower nearby (or a few so you can triangulate). You don't get a good reception in the middle of the Pacific, I'm guessing. Not to mention the third problem that we're told to put our phones into airplane mode anyway. Even if the phones had WiFi or Bluetooth on, it's a higher frequency than GSM and has an even poorer range underwater.
- ggreer 11y ago
- gaur 11y agoAnother case of a rambling article burying the lede. I skimmed the article and still can't figure out why we're weeks away from a point of no return. Is the search going to be called off? Is there a transponder that's going to give out? Why can't the journalist just put the important information up front, instead of a bunch of irrelevant crap about someone's sleep deprivation?
- cosmotron 11y agoI believe the "weeks" figure is related to this quote: "Without fresh clues, the hunt should end about June, when four ships are due to finish combing the seas off western Australia, Dolan said."
- gaur 11y agoI saw that part. I guess to this journalist, "weeks" really means "four months".
- JacobAldridge 11y agoEarth to be swallowed by as sun expands into red giant in a matter of weeks. 4 billion years = 208 billion weeks, right?
- cddotdotslash 11y agoIn the fifth paragraph, it says "Without fresh clues, the hunt should end about June, when four ships are due to finish combing the seas off western Australia." I imagine that the news would be quite boring if every article were written as a bullet-point list of points. Sometimes people enjoy reading a story, not just a two minute summary.
- Johnie 11y agoI thought there was some technological reason (ie battery dead), but it seems like it's just a funding thing. The batteries only had 30 days of life anyway.
- intrasight 11y agoRest assured that this mystery will be solved. Petabytes of data? Please give it to Google so they can add it to Google Maps. The fact that we can't successfully crowd-source this search is indicative of our having very incomplete maps of the ocean floor. Eventually (could be a hundred years but I expect less) there will be a swarm of autonomous submersible robots doing detailed scans. They will find all kinds of interesting things - including MH370.
- 0xffff2 11y ago>Please give it to Google so they can add it to Google Maps. What do you think "add[ing] it to Google Maps" would accomplish? What makes you think the data analysis is easily crowd-sourced? I.e, what makes you think that analyzing the data requires no special experience or expertise? >there will be a swarm of autonomous submersible robots doing detailed scans Why? What would be the economic case for doing this? Building machines that work at the extreme depths of the sea floor is incredibly hard. The search for a single lost airplane (and it really is just the one, not a single other commercial airliner is unaccounted for) certainly isn't going to fund this pipe dream.
- hueving 11y ago>Why? Gold lost on sunken ships!
- intrasight 11y agoyes, that would be incentive enough
- gherkin0 11y ago> What do you think "add[ing] it to Google Maps" would accomplish? Give us better publicly-accessible seafloor maps for that bit of ocean? >> there will be a swarm of autonomous submersible robots doing detailed scans > Why? What would be the economic case for doing this? Immediately? Who knows. He did qualify his statement with an "eventually/100 years," though. I can imagine such robots would be useful for environmental monitoring, mineral prospecting, and defense reasons. Especially if the cost decreases. IIRC, there already are automated scientific buoys that drift with the currents, do programmed dives, and transmit their measurements by satellite. Edit: here is a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_glider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_glider Edit2: here is a paper about installing mapping sonar in such a vehicle: http://www.physics.mun.ca/~bdeyoung/Zhou_Icebergs_2014.pdf http://www.physics.mun.ca/~bdeyoung/Zhou_Icebergs_2014.pdf
- thezealot 11y agoThe poor guy. We will never find that plane, "they" made sure of it. The plane disappeared exactly how it was meant to. The Sheeple want to speak out but "baa-baa" is not very loud.
- kazinator 11y ago> “There’s always this question: Have we missed something?” The question persists simply because its answer continues to be "yes". The plane is somewhere, and you didn't look there.
- jordache 11y agoThat H3 font style looks soo bad. Just horrible, horrible topolsky
- thrillgore 11y agoTopolsky hasn't been with Bloomberg for nearly a year.
- jordache 11y agoit was his baby
- mariuolo 11y ago"Forever" is a long time. It could be found in a few years or in a few decades. Although reading the flight recorders by then could be problematic. It's not the first time anyway, a British plane disappeared on the Andes in 1947 (after sending a cryptic Morse message BTW) and was found 50 years later, so I wouldn't despair.
- jonshariat 11y agoMountains and deep oceans are a big difference though. I really hope we do find it and get the families some answers.
- mariuolo 11y agoIndeed, but technical means also improve with time.
- pm24601 11y agoAndes are dry and cold and will preserve things. People hike the Andes. People can see things from above in the Andes. The ocean is deep. Sediment drifting down from above layers the debris. Ocean currents disperse the light aluminum fragments that remain from the ocean impact. An undersea landslide covers the fuselage or it slides down into an underwater canyon, separating and breaking apart. I vote "forever".
- rwhitman 11y agoThe MH370 tracking problem is unfortunate but what I'm most fascinated by in all of this is the continuing reminder of how powerless we are as a civilization when it comes to the oceans. A plane crashes in an area with no landmass and we lose it. We've overfished many species to near-extinction because we completely failed to understand exactly how many fish there actually are. The sea acts as a natural eraser for human habitation, sometimes wiping out all evidence of entire communities within hours. We lose all kinds of cargo into the ocean and haven't the faintest clue where it goes. We're only beginning to figure out how to convert seawater into potable form effectively. The majority of our planet is covered in something we can't even figure out how to build habitats on top of without piling up dirt underneath. The belief that we have any mastery over this planet seems to humbly disintegrate when looking at our relationship to our oceans
- fapjacks 11y agoI grew up in Kansas but lived on Oahu for six years. I will never forget the first time my squad leader took me body surfing at Sandy's. That is the interface of the most powerful force on our planet.
- maxerickson 11y agoThe logistics of a cruise ship probably don't compare all that badly to a town of similar size.
- kijin 11y agoExcept you probably won't die if you accidentally step outside of the town.
- maxerickson 11y agoI was mostly drawing a comparison with the one sentence The majority of our planet is covered in something we can't even figure out how to build habitats on top of without piling up dirt underneath. A town of 5,000 people that is situated on land will usually also import loads of fuel and food. So a cruise ship isn't really the same thing as a town, but it has quite a bit in common with it if you look at the town as a habitat.
- jorgecurio 11y agohard to believe they have all this satellite pointing back at us and they can track anyone anywhere seemingly but they can't find a giant several hundred ton airplane? Either that or we underestimate just how large the body of oceans are. And likely more scary is the fact that once a nuclear submarine submerges, nobody knows where it is. We can't even find this plane. A moving submarine beneath the vast body of ocean even more so. I wonder if it's possible to develop xray vision that sees through the earth's ocean.
- SeoxyS 11y agoI find it hard to understand how we can be justified spending so much money and effort trying to find the wreck. What is there to gain? The only benefits I see are: - Giving family members (maybe a few thousand people) closure. - Understanding what happened, and potentially making a few improvements to plane safety as a result. Given the very slim chance of them even finding the plane and learning anything useful out of it… I don't see how the search justifies a 9-figure price tag. (I don't mean to be insensitive)
- Zikes 11y agoAnd when it happens a second time, you will be asking why we never bothered to find out what happened the first time. Honestly, $130m is not a lot of money to an industry such as that. I'll bet the majority of it was covered by insurance anyways.
- WalterBright 11y agoThe insured always winds up paying the cost of the claims, and then some, eventually. The premiums are based on the expected claims.
- netinstructions 11y ago> Understanding what happened, and potentially making a few improvements to plane safety as a result. Well Wikipedia says a Boeing 777-200ER costs $261.5 million[1]. That's about double the cost for the search. If it's possible to prevent even one future mishap as a result of learning anything the cost is justified. Besides closure is important for the families and friends of the passengers. Especially with crazy articles saying the plane could have landed in Kazakhstan[2]. Imagine the suffering people must be going through thinking their loved ones are 95% dead but 5% possibly maybe caught up in a crazy conspiracy. Even if it's 1% or 0.001% likely it could be enough to keep one awake at night. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777 [2] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/jeff-wise-mh370-theory.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/jeff-wise-mh370...
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- acqq 11y agoThe simple answer to the "mystery" is a scenario about a "lone wolf" with the determination and the capability to direct the plane to the middle of the ocean and die with the plane. We saw a confirmed example of such a guy almost exactly one year later (8 March 2014, 24 March 2015): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 The rest are just the details.
- exabrial 11y agoDid they ever look into that crazy conspiracy theory where it went north instead of South and landed in Russia?
- orionblastar 11y agohttp://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/missing-malaysia-airlines-plane-recap-3251098 http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/missing-malaysia-air... They looked into the North Corridor to see if the plane flew there. I don't think they found anything.
- DarkContinent 11y agoIs it possible to track passengers' smartphone data to get a better grip on where the plane would have entered the ocean?
- Ycros 11y agoThere's nothing there for any phones to connect to...
- linuxkerneldev 11y agoI would hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but Malaysia's politics are quite a spectacular bowl of spaghetti. You have Saudi "donations" of billions, a Prime Minister who stands accused of using the country's Speciall Forces team for blowing up a Mongolian woman involved with a billion dollar French defense company purchase of Scorpene submarines. The accused murderer now resides in Australia. You literally have the financier of the Wolf of Wall Street movie, parties with Paris Hilton, squandering of billions of Malaysia's taxpayer funds. You have bankers being murdered in broad daylight. You have attorney generals being fired and prosecutors being found dead inside barrels of cement. You have Deputy Prime Ministers being kicked out. You have ex-Prime Ministers raising a 5 alarm fire demanding that the Prime Minister be arrested. You have apartheid policies being increased in the country. You have sudden import of millions of foreign workers, who have been accused of being used as false vote banks. So.... when they write "keeping secrets forever", that almost seems like what was intended for this flight. [1] http://www.sarawakreport.org/2016/01/court-case-opens-against-najib-in-france-how-come-not-in-malaysia/ http://www.sarawakreport.org/2016/01/court-case-opens-agains... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Shaariibuugiin_Altantuyaa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Shaariibuugiin_Altan... [3] http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/7/28/malaysias-najib-razak-sacks-attorney-general.html http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/7/28/malaysias-na... [4] http://www.sarawakreport.org/2015/11/kevin-morais-drew-up-the-charge-sheet-against-najib-and-then-sent-it-to-sarawak-report-says-brother/ http://www.sarawakreport.org/2015/11/kevin-morais-drew-up-th... [5] http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/kevin-morais-murdered-military-doctor-among-7-arrested-say-cops http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/kevin-mo... [6] http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/malaysias-most-explosive-murder-mystery-is-blowing-up-in-australia/news-story/d8e92bbd5172292a63664f90e2598767 http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/mala... [7] http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/malaysia-moving-towards-apartheid-tendencies-nus-academic-warns http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/malaysia-... [8] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/01/27/the-mystery-behind-a-700-million-donation-from-the-saudi-royal-family-to-the-malaysian-pm/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/01/27... [9] http://www.asiasentinel.com/politics/banker-murder-connection-malaysia-1mdb/ http://www.asiasentinel.com/politics/banker-murder-connectio... [10] http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/zahid-defends-move-to-bring-in-1.5-bangladeshi-workers http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/zahid-de... [11] http://www.theantdaily.com/Main/Lindsay-Lohan-Paris-Hilton-and-1MDB-what-a-threesome http://www.theantdaily.com/Main/Lindsay-Lohan-Paris-Hilton-a... [12] http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/12/29/fbi-probes-wolf-of-wall-street-ties-to-malaysian-fund/ http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/12/29/fbi-probes-wolf-of...
- Twirrim 11y ago"forever". What hyperbolic drivel. Ultimately we will find the plane, be it by deliberate searching action, or accidental discovery as we further map the oceans or whatever else draws us below the waves.
- racecar789 11y agoHow will Bloomberg manage the content of these animation/graphic heavy articles? Talking say 10 years from now. These articles go way beyond standard text/image content.
- tcannon 11y agoLast year I sailed my 30' boat from Oakland to Hawaii. I went three weeks with no sign of life aside from Albatross and flying fish. None. I couldn't even get my sat phone to work 90% of the time. I covered, roughly, the distance from Oakland to about Massachusetts. My boat was much smaller, and had very little as far as safety equipment on a passenger jet. While both might be exceptionally hard to spot -- even a 1000' vehicle with 1000' span would be hard to find on solid ground somewhere between CA and MA, add deep water, and that piece of wing was not attached to the plane when it hit the water. I know this as it still was shaped like a wing. I'm also a pilot and can only guess as well as other pilots, but when you over-stress the airframe from a loss of control, you can fold a wing. No life jackets floating as they're still in the plane which likely hit well before that chunk of wing fluttered down into the water. I doubt we'll ever really know. Seems unlikely to have been a bomb, as shit would be washing up.
- rm-rfU 11y agoIt will be found eventually, perhaps by a film crew in 50 years.
- solidsnack9000 11y agoLater generations will discover our airplanes, lost at sea.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- alien3d 11y agoI'm live in Malaysia . There's a lot of weird information in few years. Some even not logical.The airline strike hard twice in a year and now changing hand to new company. Anybody here can downvote me here but we need agent Mulder And Scully to solve this issue. Eistien and new agent can help also :)
- water_badger 11y agoWhat do you think it means if the pilot of the plane reappears? http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/taiwan-mh370-pilot-mysteriously-resurfaces-almost-2-years-after-his-flight-vanished-over-china-sea/ http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/taiwan-mh370-pilot-mysteriou...