Actually, I suppose the subject should be something like: "not printed by the pilot". Who knows how reputable the company/person was from which he bought the part... and what their supply chain looked like. But, given the information to hand, there's no reason to believe that the pilot had any knowledge of any possible problem with the part.

From the linked article: "The Cozy Mk IV light aircraft was destroyed after its plastic air induction elbow, bought at an air show in North America, collapsed."

Yes; that more-direct link works too. The link I suggested provides a little more context, perhaps, although to download the document it ends up using exactly the same link that you suggested.

About twenty years ago, I was privileged to be one of the authors of a security specification written at the behest of cable-based telecom companies that described the detailed design of a system for securing phone conversations that were carried over their networks. https://www.cablelabs.com/spec.... The design specifically started with the assumption that the network was penetrated, and was designed to ensure that the attacker could neither disrupt service nor learn anything useful about the traffic (for example, taken from the specification: "All media packets and all sensitive signaling communication across the network [are] safe from eavesdropping. Unauthorized message modification, insertion, deletion and replays anywhere in the network [are] easily detectable and [do] not affect proper network operation").

Once the specification was completed and it came time to deploy, all the telecom companies decided (whether in concert or individually, I do not know) that they were not going to deploy the design. When the lead security VP at one of the major telecom companies explained their decision to me: "We don't need gold-plated security like you've designed: we have firewalls"; I knew that the battle was lost. I also wondered how long it would be before the kind of intrusion like the one described in the article would occur.

Frankly, I'm amazed that it took this long; perhaps, though, what took the time was not the fact of a thorough intrusion, but, rather, the detecting of one.

Not true: I had exactly this happen to me this past week. FWIW, it was the local UPS store... and I got routed to India instead of the phone at the local store despite having called the local number.

Then not only did I have to navigate a phone tree that very nearly caused me to throw the phone across the room, but then (after hitting '0' so many times I lost count) got to speak to two lovely Indians, neither of whom -- as far as I could tell - had more than a very basic grasp of English. I say "as far as I could tell" because both the initial person and her supervisor had accents that were all but incomprehensible. In the end, I slammed the phone down, got into my car, and drove several miles to the store to talk to one of the people there in person (I should mention that they were very nice, sympathetic and apologised for the experience I'd been put through, even though, obviously, there was nothing they could have done about it).

Still, corporate UPS -- like so many companies these days -- are obviously unconcerned about the image they are projecting to the public.

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

Which reminds me that I must be about due to re-read Gödel, Escher Bach.

Similar breakage happened here several years earlier. I used to use Ubuntu on all my machines. In particular, it was very good on my rarely-used but important-for-travel laptop. After several more-or-less trouble-free years, suddenly one of the biannual upgrades caused the laptop to throw a kernel panic when booting. I figured that such a show-stopping bug would quickly be fixed, so kept running with the old version of the kernel and waited six months, when I fully expected the problem to be fixed (filing bug reports, I had already found, was an exercise in frustration that accomplished nothing obvious but an increase in my blood pressure). But nope, that next upgrade also threw a kernel panic. That was the last time I tried to use Ubuntu. Since then, it's been debian stable on the desktop machines and, throwing in the towel, I bought a Mac laptop for travel.

More than two decades ago now, I was privileged to be on a team of security experts that fully defined a system for deploying legal wiretap capability in cable ISPs in a secure manner.

To the best of my knowledge, not a single ISP deployed what we defined. Instead, they listened to the marketing people from various companies that sold them proprietary equipment.

The real problem, it seemed to me then, and still seems to me, is that the people in charge of making deployment decisions really don't understand this stuff (a classic statement from one very large ISP at the time: "We don't need more security; we have firewalls") -- instead, they seem only too happy to be wined/dined/golf-gamed into deploying something that any reasonably competent security expert would recognise as, let us say, sub-optimal.

I find projects and problems that interest me, and write code (and, mostly, make it available). I don't actually care whether no one else finds the projects/problems/code interesting. It keeps me somewhat sane in a world that has essentially forgotten what it is like to be a human being.

Actually, it was about 25% more contacts for the Morse code contest last year... I should learn to check my numbers before posting.

Indeed, in last year's running of the American Radio Relay League-sponsored amateur radio contests in which US and Canadian ham radio operators contact the rest of the world, the Morse Code contest recorded about 12% more contacts than the radio telephony (i.e., speech) contest. In years with fewer sunspots, there are typically about twice as many Morse Code contacts as telephony ones.

Er... I was a co-Investigator on Voyager; the "photos" we are familiar with were actually from an old-fashioned vidicon tube (well, there are two: one narrow-angle and one wide-angle). It took the system 48 seconds to acquire a single monochrome slow-scan image, at 800x800 quasi-pixels. To generate the colour pictures we all know and love, colour filters (red, green, blue) were moved in front of the lens, then three sequential images were taken over the course of (at least) 144 seconds (i.e., 3 times 48 seconds). These were combined back at Earth into a single colour image.

(And between the time the (monochrome) images were acquired and the time that they were transmitted they stored on board... on the DTR -- an actual, physical Digital Tape Recorder.)

https://www.cdc.gov/media/rele...

I went to go and try out this new, improved, proton.me. And quickly discovered that in order to continue to use my regular e-mail client (Thunderbird), I have to have a paid account and download and then download and install the above bridge program. That suggests that something about the client/server interaction is non-standard; in any case, I'm not inclined to get a paid account just to try something out to see if it is actually useful for my situation.

Also, as far as I can tell, the bridge program isn't open source (I could be wrong about that, but pointers to the source weren't obvious on the pages that talk about e-mail); I certainly wouldn't willingly install a proprietary blob into my e-mail chain.

Also also, the idea that if I want to access my e-mail from a different computer using Thunderbird or some other MUA I would have to install the bridge program there as well does not exactly overwhelm me with enthusiasm.

And right there is why Starlink isn't installed here. If it doesn't provide an option for a real, publicly-routable static IP address at a reasonable price, I don't consider it a replacement for a terrestrial ISP. Last I looked (which I admit has been perhaps a year at this point), such an address wasn't available with Starlink at any price, reasonable or otherwise.

I realise that probably more than 99% of people don't care about that capability, so I fully expect Starlink to be a great success. But unless something changes, I won't be a customer.