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Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site
- asimovDev 1y agois this a common setup to have the camera store to external storage device without storing to the SD card as well?
- malux85 1y agoYes because external storage is much larger, and theres nothing more annoying than being in the middle of doing some science with 30 other bits of complex equipment, and then the camera stops working with storage full errors and youre 7000m underwater in a cramped sub trying to navigate a camera UI to find the setting. Configure your systems so they are in the configuration that is less likely to cause random disruption in the field.
- 3eb7988a1663 1y agoWhich makes me wonder why they bother with the SD card at all. What was it meant to be storing? If it is not intended to be the real storage area, why not just have it in a loop, constantly over-writing the oldest material?
- aucisson_masque 1y agoThey probably used it for testing only, hence why it had irrelevant footage. They might have forgot to remove or just didn't care.
- mook 1y agoThe camera was an off the shelf part (from a very specialty shelf I suppose). It had an SD card built in because some people might not have a thing to stream to; it's probably good for demos and cheap enough to be good for a bullet point. Given the rest of the components inside they probably had enough margin that they weren't optimizing for costs. The value add was in the pressure vessel, and that seems to have mostly worked.
- intothemild 1y agoIt continues to amaze me how indestructible SDCards are.
- imploded_sub 1y agoIt wasn't in the crushed part, it was in the camera's shell, and the camera was mounted outside, if I understood properly.
- netsharc 1y agoAnd: > This still and video camera is rated to withstand depths up to 6,000m (19,685 feet, 3,281 fathoms) Unlike the Titan sub...
- mrguyorama 1y agoWhy didn't they just build the sub out of camera enclosures? /s
- 3eb7988a1663 1y agoThe picture looks like the camera + storage SD card were in a sealed metal tube that was untouched.
- daemonologist 1y agoAlthough the entire enclosure was shaken around enough to tear bits off the PCB via sheer inertia and crack the CPU (hence the need for the recovery process described).
- HPsquared 1y agoIt clearly received a nasty shock when the sub imploded; that's why the internal components were so broken.
- gompertz 1y agoIt also amazes me how incredibly unbrowseable tomshardware is now with all the ads and pop-ups.
- jonas21 1y agoThe NTSB's original report has more detail on how the SD Card was encrypted and how the NTSB managed to decrypt it: https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=18741602&FileExtension=pdf&FileName=Underwater%20Camera%20-%20Specialist%27s%20Factual%20Report-Rel.pdf https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=18741602&Fi...
- jeffrallen 1y agoDoes not leave SubC in a particularly flattering light...
- Aurornis 1y agoThey had no idea how their own product worked. They didn’t even know it used encrypted storage. This was either outsourced or done by some junior engineer who was putting pieces together like it was another Raspberry Pi project that just needed to kind of work.
- ryandrake 1y agoThe longer I last in this world the more products I realize are the result of telling a few people who don't know what they are doing to "make it kind of work."
- throwaway173738 1y agoThat’s my entire experience in embedded. Everything I get from other companies basically looks like an internship project right down to the pointer arguments with unspecified bounds on the function calls. One of the companies we bought hardware from keeps representing things are working when they only work on devices in the lab. Almost nobody in the space produces anything professional and everything uses Yocto even for two person projects where Multistrap would be more productive.
- bschwindHN 1y ago
- Hamuko 1y agoBut how did anyone figure out it was a SanDisk SD card? Card details were redacted.
- Macha 1y agoThere's only 3 manufacturers of SD cards in any volume, you can compare the branding and font choices and see who's it is.
- serf 1y agoSanDisk is one of the big three on SD-3C/SD Association.. so kinda regardless of the MFG it's 'one of theirs' in a roundabout way.
- matja 1y agoPresumably because it looks identical to a Sandisk extreme pro 512gb, with grey boxes drawn over the logo.
- MBCook 1y agoThe report has a heavily redacted interview with a submarine expert. Who directed Titanic and The Abyss. They’re not good at redacting.
- siliconunit 1y agoalso basically if enough companies agrees on helping the cause your crypto secrets are quite more likely to be exposed...
- yread 1y agoIsnt the weakness here that there was nothing encrypting the actual key? On a laptop luks key stored in a tpm would usually be encrypted using your passphrase
- XorNot 1y agoThe NTSB report noted that if the TrustZone secure enclave system was being used, then yeah this data would be toast. But it speaks more to Oceangstrs negligence that this situation even existed: why wasn't any potential encryption keys escrowed ashore to ensure they could be recovered later? This shouldn't have even been an issue.
- daemonologist 1y agoIt seems the manufacturer of the camera didn't even know (at least in the part of the org communicating with the NTSB) that their storage was encrypted. In any case the media recovered were from testing/non-dive environments, and during an actual dive footage would presumably be recorded directly to the onboard computers (which were irrecoverably destroyed). Oceangate should take the blame for a lot of things but probably not this.
- dmix 1y agoSince not everyone reads articles: > Somewhat disappointingly, the images and videos shared in the report were taken in the vicinity of the ROV shop at the Marine Institute, also in Newfoundland. The location was the logistical base for Titanic dive missions. No deep-sea shenanigans around the Titanic wreck were revealed.
- withinboredom 1y agoWouldn’t it have been streaming it to disk without creating the file? Kinda like how if your camera dies while it’s recording, there is no recording. You have to manually recreate the file.
- MBCook 1y agoI think that’s what they think. It was being recorded by the onboard PC to its SSDs, which were completely destroyed in the implosion.
- RandomBK 1y agoI see a lot of discussion in this thread stemming from some confusion+not reading the actual report[0]. Some key points: 1. The Camera+Card was encased in a separate enclosure made of titanium+sapphire, and did not seem to be exposed to extreme pressures. 2. The encryption was done via a variant of LUKS/dm-crypt, with the key stored on the NVRAM of a chip (Edited; not in TrustZone). 3. The recovery was done by transplanting the original chip onto a new working board. No manufacturer backdoors or other hidden mechanisms were used. 4. Interestingly, the camera vendor didn't seem to realize there was any encryption at all. [0] https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=18741602&FileExtension=pdf&FileName=Underwater%20Camera%20-%20Specialist%27s%20Factual%20Report-Rel.pdf https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=18741602&Fi...
- nxobject 1y agoIf the encryption was that easy to bypass, was it worth it at all?
- anakaine 1y agoSure. If the card was recovered without the camera motherboard then the decryption key would not have been recovered.
- trenchpilgrim 1y agoStealing a camera is much harder than stealing an SD card out of a camera.
- Y_Y 1y agoCitation needed. It might be slightly easier, but most cases where you can get part of the camera, you can get the whole camera. This isn't a little point-and-click with a handy spring-loaded slot either.
- trenchpilgrim 1y agoYeah but the Camera's owner is much more likely to notice "my camera is missing" than "the SD card is blank for some reason... the SD card must have failed" EDIT: The linked PDF has a photo, the camera literally opens up to access the SD card.
- two_handfuls 1y agoWhat I also learned from this article is that Scott Manley is still on Twitter.
- MBCook 1y agoScott Manley’s 45 minute video covering the NTSB report this information comes from went up today, it’s quite interesting. https://youtu.be/qMUjCZ7MMWQ https://youtu.be/qMUjCZ7MMWQ
- Vexs 1y agoFigure 3 from the report- that's an Adafruit sensor module on a 3d printed bit of plastic with a teensy-brand microcontroller just sitting in there! Actually, the entire electronics enclosure appears printed. Very funny to see in what I assume is a million-dollar product.
- hinkley 1y agoWhat was the water condensation situation like in this submarine? Semi bare electronics sounds very very bad.
- MengerSponge 1y agoAny money spent coating those semi-bare electronics would have been wasted. There's an engineering lesson to be taught here, I'm sure.
- progbits 1y agoThis is a camera outside the sub, and the electronics are inside sealed enclosure. If that had any leak for water to get in some conformal coating isn't going to save you, it will get pancaked. Of course random arduino module and teensy used for product is amateur hour, even for low volume production. They must have crazy margins on that camera and producing custom board is very cheap.
- thereisnospork 1y ago>They must have crazy margins on that camera and producing custom board is very cheap. It's expensive in time and expertise to do a custom board, and to debug a custom board. All to what, save 20$ on a bom which might not even be 1% of the profit per unit? Far more efficient to just ship the dev board. They could have perhaps picked a better dev setup to start with, but if it looks stupid and it works...
- progbits 1y agoPoint isn't to save BOM cost, margins are high already and they can eat into them. Unless they are making literally less than 10 of those, custom board will be easier to manufacture than that mess of dev boards and more reliable than random wires and headers all over the place. Plus they can spend money where it makes sense, using better regulators etc.
- Buttons840 1y agoIf a hardened camera can survive, I'm surprised subs don't have a floating black box that can survive an implosion and then float to the surface and begin emitting a radio signal. I guess the trick would be finding a way to securely attach the black box in a way that would ensure its release in a catastrophic disaster.
- bamboozled 1y agoI guess he wasn’t planning for a catastrophic failure ?
- hinkley 1y agoHe ridiculed anyone who told him he should, taking it as evidence that he was disrupting an industry. There is something slightly romantic about dying in such a way that his body turned to mist and floated away in the current. A bit like having your ashes spread at sea. With fewer steps.
- Filligree 1y agoI keep thinking about the teenager. Who didn't want to go and didn't feel safe, but who was pushed to come along by his father because it was his father's birthday.
- bamboozled 1y agoSuper tragic that one.
- toofy 1y ago> There is something slightly romantic… if he was alone i would absolutely agree with you full stop. but it looks like they may have been entirely underselling just how backyard amateur their company was just to get people to give them money. i totally adore books and documentaries and tales of explorer types pushing their ideas to the limit but it quickly crosses a line when they: a) downplay dangers to innocent people, and b) refuse to understand their own ignorance and believe the people who have already literally done their idea are somehow “fools” the person who is trying to “disrupt” but doesn’t have a deep understanding of the often very good reasons why an industry may do things a certain way is the fool. not the ones who already repeatedly make it work. we need to encourage adventurousness but also wisdom.
- TZubiri 1y agoIt might be advertising, but I'll allow it because it's so metal
- rdtsc 1y ago> No deep-sea shenanigans around the Titanic wreck were revealed. Manley explains in his Twitter thread that “the camera had been configured to dump data onto an external storage device, so nothing was found from the accident dive.” Nothing particularly pertinent to the tragic accident, that is. This is about camera hardware and how it survived. It provides no information or footage about the incident (in case you were looking for it like I was).
- boppo1 1y agoThank you, this post saved me time.
- alwahi 1y agobut what about the Logitech controller?
- 34679 1y agoDear Tom's Hardware, Tech users get upset when you make me do what you want instead of what the user wants. Sincerely, The Back Button
- eth0up 1y agoThem sandisks need to be pretty tough to not vaporize whilst cooking your USB ports. Ever notice how infernally hot they get under large file transfers? Completely killed one of my ports after 50gbs
- atum47 1y agoIs the memory card actually more expensive than the controller?
- pinkmuffinere 1y agoI know the default policy is to use the source headline, but I feel the mention of $62 is kindof unfair. It evokes cheapness. Many many aspects of the craft were cheap and underbuilt, but it’s not clear to me that the memory card was one of those areas. Seems like it was an actually useful COTS part
- everforward 1y agoYeah, and the title doesn't mention that is for a camera either. This seems perfectly reasonable for camera data storage, and apparently a camera that's manually operated as well. It'd be worrying if it was storing the binaries to operate the sub, but this is a decent quality SD card for camera storage.
- bArray 1y ago> (Image credit: Scott Manley, David Case at the NTSB) Why are they crediting Scott Manley instead of just grabbing the images from the reports themselves? It sounds to me as if they wrote an article based on the video, and not based on the report. Very lazy journalism.