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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 thin

• luxuryballs 5mo ago
  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
  • Eridrus 5mo ago
    The approach to flight security is a great example of why regularly erring on the side of caution is a terrible approach.
• 866-RON-0-FEZ 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  • HNisCIS 5mo ago
    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.
    • 866-RON-0-FEZ 5mo ago
      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.
      • HNisCIS 5mo ago
        [flagged]
        • JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
          > 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.
          • HNisCIS 5mo ago
            The issue wasn't really git master, that was a side effect. Google what MISO means and maybe go learn some actual kernel development.
        • 866-RON-0-FEZ 5mo ago
          > 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.
          • pastor_williams 5mo ago
            At my work at also got rid of build cop because that was considered offensive.
        • fwipsy 5mo ago
          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.
          • Larrikin 5mo ago
            Why not spend the 5 seconds it takes to do that refactor and then tutor the kids?
    • ghaff 5mo ago
      My personal experience is also that some of the more extreme noninclusive language policing in some circles has faded away to a significant degree.
  • nilamo 5mo ago
    I've never heard of that before, is it common behavior?
    • 866-RON-0-FEZ 5mo ago
      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.
    • happymellon 5mo ago
      All new code projects at work cannot have a master branch. However I never heard of anyone complaining about recording masters or golf masters.
    • userbinator 5mo ago
      [flagged]
  • Eridrus 5mo ago
    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.
• claw-el 5mo ago
  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?
  • JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
    > 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.
  • phlakaton 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    • s5300 5mo ago
      [dead]
  • amelius 5mo ago
    You watched too many movies.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
• deadbabe 5mo ago
  [dead]
• neilv 5mo ago
  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.
  • Zak 5mo ago
    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".
    • dualvariable 5mo ago
      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.
• legitster 5mo ago
  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.
  • input_sh 5mo ago
    I'm sure whichever fictional panic you've imagined would've been far more serious than the one caused by this absolute overreaction.
  • zamadatix 5mo ago
    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.
• ryandrake 5mo ago
  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]."
  • throw310822 5mo ago
    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.
• st_goliath 5mo ago
  > 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.
  • lotu 5mo ago
    It treating every BomBeat RT-SF16 radio as if it contained a bomb would be a moronic reaction to that
• blks 5mo ago
  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.
  • skeeter2020 5mo ago
    maybe not, but a terrorist would call in a fake bomb threat to inflect terror; that's kind of the point.
• drew870mitchell 5mo ago
  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.
  • thomastjeffery 5mo ago
    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.
    • simulator5g 5mo ago
      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.
      • thomastjeffery 5mo ago
        If the communication medium is made ambiguous by high entropy, then the language needs to reduce that entropy somehow. The entropy we are taking about is temporal, like packet loss. The solution is for the speaker to be redundant and for the listener to be uncertain. What you are advocating is silence, which implies confidence in the communication stream, which is the opposite of what we want. We already knew that silence is hard to distinguish from signal noise, which is why we say copy instead.
• karlgkk 5mo ago
  > 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
  • echoangle 5mo ago
    > 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.
• cybrexalpha 5mo ago
  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.
• lwansbrough 5mo ago
  “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.”
• jancsika 5mo ago
  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!
  • linkregister 5mo ago
    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.
• im3w1l 5mo ago
  > 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.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• rbanffy 5mo ago
  > 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.
• nephihaha 5mo ago
  Genuine terrorism relies on the creation of fear and alarm in their target group... not just concealment.
• godelski 5mo ago
  > 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 [1] https://www.govexec.com/management/2012/11/tsa-killing-us/59651/ https://www.govexec.com/management/2012/11/tsa-killing-us/59... [2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=677549 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=677549
  • Balgair 5mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings 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.
• dataflow 5mo ago
  > 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.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • dfedbeef 5mo ago
    I don't think people would be mocking bombing victims
    • dataflow 5mo ago
      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.
    • brigandish 5mo ago
      [dead]
• dap 5mo ago
  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.
  • bugufu8f83 5mo ago
    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.
    • dap 5mo ago
      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.
    • frankacter 5mo ago
      >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.
• clnhlzmn 5mo ago
  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.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
• furyofantares 5mo ago
  > 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.
• srean 5mo ago
  > 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.
• neya 5mo ago
  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.
  • stephbook 5mo ago
    > Just let anyone fly with a dozen devices with the names BOMB and CRASH? That sounds terrible. Please get me the manager.
  • bonesss 5mo ago
    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.
• incompatible 5mo ago
  I wouldn't have thought so, but until now I didn't even realise that there were Bluetooth devices with configurable names.
• thomascountz 5mo ago
  You can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater…
• _3u10 5mo ago
  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.
• dguest 5mo ago
  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.
• beng-nl 5mo ago
  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.
  • tuumi 5mo ago
    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.
• hinata08 5mo ago
  >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
  • sdthjbvuiiijbb 5mo ago
    >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.
    • hinata08 5mo ago
      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
• crjohns648 5mo ago
  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."
  • malfist 5mo ago
    Why would they choose bomb? They could just pick any bluetooth name. That means any bluetooth name is as threatening (or non-threatening) as another.
• vidarh 5mo ago
  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.
• HeyLaughingBoy 5mo ago
  The comment reminded me of the time that we (developers) were told to avoid the use of the word "abort" in any text displayed to the user in a medical device. e.g., an error message that may have included the words "Operation aborted" would now be "Operation terminated." Some industries just have trigger words to avoid. To your point about a terrorist not naming the phone "bomb," I can foresee exactly that happening. Someone building a remotely triggered explosive device has a considerable incentive to not blow themselves up. Part of the safety behavior in that scenario could indeed include clearly naming the device "BOMB" or similar and then forgetting to rename it before sending it out the door.