This. Back in Janurary a client of mine and I had a few meetings. He wanted their company phones to get a push notification every time someone filled out a form on his website. But during our conversation he talked about some friends of his who were into bit coin mining and said we should go into a venture. And I said no. I think I mined 4 bit coins through a pool once many years ago, mainly because I've always been fascinated by various distributed computing things over the past decade and was interested in seeing what they had done. But it was clear to me it was going no where, especially when I read about the ASICS and then all the shenanigans about those a couple years go.

Well when I delivered the solution to the push notification thing two weeks ago I asked him what he though about bit coins now. Apparently his buddies lost nearly everything, something like over a year's worth of coins, when Mt. Gox closed down. Not sure if he ever went in on a new rig with his buddies or not, but he knows I've done fairly well for myself owning and selling a couple of businesses in my young life. He's the the type where he's looking for the next billion dollar idea and will never get there. I look for ideas and projects that have a solid idea with realistic expectations.

Of course, neither political party is anything like they were when Abe was around. In most issues they have swapped position.

Actually, in most places people have been propagandized to THINK they swapped position. But when you look at how they actually voted on various subjects (civil rights laws and Internet censorship, for two of a host of examples) or how the programs they produced actually worked out (The Great Society for just one in a host of examples), expect to find that the alleged swap is mostly smoke, mirrors, and very effective political propaganda.

Yeah, the dribbles of conflicting info is really odd here. I could see why in a national security situation a country might choose to not say much of anything, but these inconsistent messages seem rather odd.

Why keep changing the story?

Agreed, though it is interesting that nobody spotted them on radar if hypoxia were responsible. For that to happen the autopilot would have had to been set to fly a heading away from any land, and then the crew would have to lose consciousness.

Maybe if there were a problem they might put the autopilot into heading mode, but why select a heading away from land? Maybe I could see them turning the setting back towards home and passing out while still turning the dial, but I would think they'd set the heading before selecting heading mode, in which case the aircraft would be following the FMS.

I wonder how efficient ATC is in Asia. Could the airplane have actually flown across a country without actually being noticed? In a hypoxia situation the crew would probably not have disabled communications, though I suppose equipment failure is a possibility. In that case it would have working transponder, ACARS, etc.

The whole situation just seems odd.

Well, over countries this isn't too far from the truth. Sure, in desolate areas there might not be primary coverage, but I understand that after 9/11 there was quite a bit of investment in primary radar around populated areas.

This aircraft was out at sea, however, and what country is going to care about monitoring airspace out there? In fact, that is half the driver for ADS-B adoption - you can track airliners out at sea that way, and by doing so greatly increase airspace utilization.

Not quite correct. The situation is quite a bit more complex than that.

ATC obtains information about aircraft in the area in a number of ways.

One is primary radar - which is in fact radar. It generally has a limited range - maybe 50 miles or so. Usually civilian equipment cannot detect altitude either, and of course it picks up noise from birds and weather and such.

The more useful source of data is secondary radar, which relies on transponders. The transponders generate a pulse when they are interrogated - the aircraft doesn't need to know its own location for this to work - the ground station works it out from the time to receive the reply. The transponder can encode a code to identify the aircraft, and it can also encode the altitude (or at least what the plane thinks its altitude is).

The more recent development is ADS-B via UAT and ES. These involve the aircraft broadcasting its position as determined by GPS. It can be sent out as part of the transponder reply, or it can be sent out without any need for secondary radar at all, potentially even being picked up by satellite.

So, radar is used to track aircraft, but with its limited range civilian radar would not detect an airliner out at sea unless it had a cooperative transponder. Even with a transponder range is only 100 miles or so. You can get much longer ranges with military radar, especially if it is airborne. However, stumbling on one of those would require luck, and a military aircraft probably wouldn't be on the lookout for rogue airliners.

I don't know how much is known vs speculation here. If the NSA has some MySQL manipulation tools, it might not actually be intended for use on the actual internet. It is possible that they infiltrate networks and use these tools on the inside.

It came out that they're tapping dedicated lines, and those are often unencrypted. However, I'd expect most competent mysql use to stay confined to a LAN, even with encryption. Latency tends to cause problems if you separate the database from the application layer. But, I'm sure that not everybody the NSA targets is competent...