runciblespoon

Was this written by the advertising department of Intel?

@mindgam3 .. “Minor quibbles about truth and meaning of words aside, I have to support any article that skewers the soft underbelly of the phony AI ecosystem as effectively as this one does.”

I fully concur ..

Retrospective ass covering, Boeing installed MCAS to save money, and in the process took control of the airplane away from the pilots. They should be looking at jailtime for this.

“Everyone knows how fragile these systems are”

How about not connecting your ICSs directly to the Internet?

> With two sensors, you can detect failure

You get a reading of 20 on one sensor and get a reading of 34 on the second, which one is correct. To achieve reliability a minimum of five sensors need be used. four primary and one back-up. If three primary agree then system normal. If two primary disagree then switch to backup.

“After Boeing removed one of the sensors from an automated flight system on its 737 Max, the jet’s designers and regulators still proceeded as if there would be two.”

No, no, no. This is just more of shifting the blame from Boeing upper management. They couldn't use two Angle of Attack (AOA) sensors as when there was a differing reading there would be no way to know the correct reading, which is why MCAS used a single AOA sensor on the right-hand side.

“the system would enable the .. National Security Agency, to instantaneously share select classified information with America’s closest allies in the fight against the Taliban”

Would it also help them figure out who is facilitating the heroin trade out of Afghanistan and where all the money goes ;]

> Leave the testing until the end? Is that best practice in some places still?

What testing, we'll let the end-user find the bugs and then fix them in the next version.

Do you think these security defects are really bugs or are back-doors left in for the state security apparatus? Who or what department is tasked with testing Cisco devices for security vulnerabilities. I mean didn't anyone test the devices for potential remote root access and the ability to bypass the Trust Anchor? Lastly I don't know how an internet router can be not connected to the Internet and still function?

“Boeing Believed a 737 Max Warning Light Was Standard. It Wasn’t.”

This is retrospective ass-covering, to distract us from the fact that the the pilots were never informed as to the existence of MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) and therefore could not even know how to disable it. The presence of or lack thereof of a warning light being rendered specious. And MCAS read only the one AoA sensor, from the captains side.

So to summarize, the pilots don't know about MCAS, MCAS is still engaged even when the auto-pilot is disengaged. A single AoA sensor failed, triggering the MCAS into a nose-down mode, the pilots begin ignorant of this, repeatedly tried to regain level flight using the trim wheel. This they failed at.

“The warning light notifies pilots of a disagreement in the sensors that measure which direction the plane is pointed”

This wouldn't even work in the way described, in a two sensor system, the computer can't tell which sensor is giving false readings. That's why they hooked up MCAS to only the one sensor. And Boeing didn't tell the FFC or the pilots as they would of had to get the plane re-certified and the pilots retrained.

"in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 incident, a video of the encounter was shared and viewed widely by members aboard the Princeton and Nimitz via an internal military email system"

I hadn't realized that the US navy possessed wireless email capable of handling video back in 2004. Seriously though, what's this UFO waffle doing on a respectable tech blog such as HN.

> The Linux world has a lot of conventions you just 'need to know about' in order to navigate. It works very well for experienced people, but it isn't helpful for newcomers. When I was first starting out I didn't understand the versioning system or what it meant. Were releases named something like "Ubuntu Standard 18.04", or "Ubuntu Preview 19.04" it would have helped clarity. LTS doesn't mean anything to average people. Small things like would help me convince family members to switch

Are you posting from some parallel universe, I've sat Windows users down in front of this Ubuntu desktop and they can't tell the difference. What's complicated about clicking on 'software Updater'?