3 ms·

Ask HN: Cons of open sourcing MH370 investigation data?

• dandrews 13y ago
  (I do not think open source means what you think it means.) Some of the data may be products of military signal gathering, capabilities of which those agencies would be loathe to disclose.
• _delirium 13y ago
  > I'm certain that many benefits from OS development would carry through to equivalent investigations, especially through harnessing the collective problem solving abilities of communities like HN. Given the recent high-profile incident where internet crowdsourcing converged on identifying two innocent people as responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing, and then attempted to spread their personal information as widely as possible, I don't think this approach currently has a good reputation. I think it's an interesting question what crowdsourcing works well and poorly for. But I'd put criminal investigations way down the list of good candidates, due to the danger of devolving into mob justice, and even raising the risk of innocent people being lynched.
• krapp 13y ago
  Do you believe there is some necessary domain-specific expertise which the Malaysian authorities don't already have access to? They have "open sourced" it to the degree that they allow other governments and their resources to be involved. But I don't understand what it would even mean beyond that context.
  • malandrew 13y ago
    Certainly, not only do large open datasets about tragedies that need to be solved attract many curious minds, they tend to attract: 1) people with domain experience but in different specialties in that domain that may prove to have a different viewpoint or hypothesis to explore or may have access to technologies or useful knowledge that the current domain experts the Mayalasian government has employed do not. 2) people without domain expertise, but have a strong expertise in another field that could offer novel strategies. These people are probably already autodidacts and would just spending enough effort to learn about specific parts of the domain that allow them to apply their knowledge. Both have a lot to offer in addition too (not instead of) what Mayalasia's own expert already are doing.
• dandelany 13y ago
  There are a couple of potential concerns of national security which explain Malaysian officials being cagey about the radar "blip" which (presumably) turned out to be MH370: 1. The exact locations and ranges of military radar capabilities is considered secret, if other countries knew their exact locations/abilities it would make an attack easier. This would make them reluctant to say where they picked it up/lost it on radar as it could reveal the range of the radar. 2. If the radar blip wasn't MH370, what was it? It could have been a drone from any number of countries, or a spy plane flying over, or any number of potentially embarrassing possibilities that a military commander would have trouble admitting had gone mostly unnoticed for 72 hours.