martin f krafft <madd...@debconf.org> writes: > … at least not while we're flying in airplanes where toys with bluetooth > are taken off children (just happened…). Since the aircraft can be > disturbed with Bluetooth, I think we have a slew of other issues anyway, > so it's hard to see the tree in all that forest.
Note that the second sentence doesn't really follow from the first. The idea that this stuff interferes with airplane navigation equipment is mostly nonsense. (I only say mostly because there have been some *remarkable* security flaws in airplane software.) Unfortunately, air transportation safety in the last thirty years or so has entered some bizarre zero-fact zone where the public statements from the people responsible for safety protocols are completely unbelievable nonsense, like the idea that a cell phone might interfere with airplane navigation, or like the idea that 95% of the stuff confiscated at checkpoints has anything whatsoever to do with aircraft safety. In some cases, these policies may be hiding real security threat models. I suspect there are more legitimate threat models underlying this crap than we're giving them credit for. But because nearly all of the public statements are such total absurdity, and because at least in the US the screeners are so maniphestly incompetent given even their own internal testing, they've burned their credibility so completely that it almost doesn't matter any more. We're in this weird state where actual legitimate policy may or may not be buried under a layer of unjustified ass-covering, but all one can actually see is the ass-covering and blame-shifting. Airline safety has been a completely bipartisan failure in the United States. The last three administrations have been equally bad, regardless of political affiliation. The FAA and the TSA just pile new rule on top of new rule with no defensible public justification other than furious flag-waving and vicious attacks on anyone who questions them. It's sad; the TSA was never any better than marginal, but I used to have real respect for the FAA as a fact-based, thoughtful, methodical investigative body grounded in real science. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> _______________________________________________ Debconf-discuss mailing list Debconf-discuss@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-discuss