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I thought this one was the most interesting: ‘Hairdryer or lighter?’: French police look at claim of sensor tampering to win weather bets https://www.theguard
by mithras 4mo ago
I thought this one was the most interesting:
‘Hairdryer or lighter?’: French police look at claim of sensor tampering to win weather bets
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/23/hairdryer-or-lighter-french-police-look-at-claim-of-sensor-tampering-to-win-weather-bets https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/23/hairdryer-or-l...
- mschuster91 4mo agoWhoever did that deserves a few years in prison. Normally I'm not too much of a friend of draconian BS - but accurate reports of temperature, air pressure and wind speed are incredibly important for the safety of air travel. It's bad enough when such systems fail due to whatever sort of issue, but the last thing aviation needs is people intentionally blowing holes into the swiss cheese security model -.-
- Eduard 4mo agoAlso bad if such crucial information is based on a single sensor with barely any physical security
- bell-cot 4mo agoIf you need serious physical security for every little bit of infrastructure, then your society will be able to afford far, far fewer nice things.
- cindyllm 4mo ago[dead]
- sebastiennight 4mo agoThis logic is how we ended up with TSA. "What do you mean, people used to just walk up to planes with their shoes on and a FULL 8-ounce water bottle in hand with barely any physical security?" It's easier to stop incentivizing people to ruin the commons, vs. trying to strengthen the commons against all possible adversarial behavior.
- mothballed 4mo agoWe ended up with locked cockpits that the pilots won't open for anybody, plus passengers willing to fight back due to the tragedy of the terrorists. We ended up with the TSA because Karen needed security theatre and the government was all too happy to increase the funding and scope of DHS with the nod of the useful idiots.
- Chaosvex 4mo agoAnd the locked cockpits have been indirectly responsible for a huge number of deaths. Best intentions and all that
- echelon 4mo agoIIRC, there was one commercial passenger flight where the captain locked himself out of the cockpit that led to everyone dying. Have there been multiple separate incidents? The other side of the coin is that hijackings used to be a frequent and regular occurrence. Now they're not anymore.
- danem 4mo agoYou mean the incident where his copilot intentionally locked him out of the cockpit and crashed the plane into a mountain? Hardly seems like an indictment of locked doors to me.
- cyphar 4mo agoThere was also Helios 522 where one of the cabin attendants only managed to enter minutes before the engines flamed out, there is a strong argument if the door wasn't locked he could've entered earlier. And my understanding is that the current theory for MH370 is that the pilot locked out the copilot and then depressurised the cabin. There are non-fatal cases like Ethiopian Airlines Flight 702 where the copilot locked the captain out when we was in the restroom (though loss of life was still a possibility, one of the engines had flamed out and was on emergency fuel). As with all incidents, there are many factors that lead to them, but in these cases the presence of locked and reinforced cockpit doors contributed to the incident (in malicious cases the fact the door was impenetrable was clearly part of the decision-making, and in accident cases it was obviously an impediment to any positive outcome once the incident occurred).
- datsci_est_2015 4mo agoWell usually there isn’t an incentive to mess with this type of critical infrastructure, and yet, behold, the externalities. Even foreign actors during war time wouldn’t go through the effort of messing with individual temperature sensors.
- cortesoft 4mo agoOh man, I thought from the headline that it was going to be about a new prediction wager on the site about whether the manipulator had used a hair dryer or lighter. That would have been perfect.
- tommica 4mo agoBecause the picture already shows it is a hair dryer, now the prediction market would be what make and model...