Hacker News Reader

Comment by mithras | Hacker News Reader

I thought this one was the most interesting:

‘Hairdryer or lighter?’: French police look at claim of sensor tampering to win weather bets

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/23/hairdryer-or-l...

Whoever did that deserves a few years in prison. Normally I'm not too much of a friend of draconian BS - but accurate reports of temperature, air pressure and wind speed are incredibly important for the safety of air travel.

It's bad enough when such systems fail due to whatever sort of issue, but the last thing aviation needs is people intentionally blowing holes into the swiss cheese security model -.-

Also bad if such crucial information is based on a single sensor with barely any physical security

This logic is how we ended up with TSA.

"What do you mean, people used to just walk up to planes with their shoes on and a FULL 8-ounce water bottle in hand with barely any physical security?"

It's easier to stop incentivizing people to ruin the commons, vs. trying to strengthen the commons against all possible adversarial behavior.

We ended up with locked cockpits that the pilots won't open for anybody, plus passengers willing to fight back due to the tragedy of the terrorists. We ended up with the TSA because Karen needed security theatre and the government was all too happy to increase the funding and scope of DHS with the nod of the useful idiots.

And the locked cockpits have been indirectly responsible for a huge number of deaths. Best intentions and all that

IIRC, there was one commercial passenger flight where the captain locked himself out of the cockpit that led to everyone dying.

Have there been multiple separate incidents?

The other side of the coin is that hijackings used to be a frequent and regular occurrence. Now they're not anymore.

You mean the incident where his copilot intentionally locked him out of the cockpit and crashed the plane into a mountain? Hardly seems like an indictment of locked doors to me.

There was also Helios 522 where one of the cabin attendants only managed to enter minutes before the engines flamed out, there is a strong argument if the door wasn't locked he could've entered earlier.

And my understanding is that the current theory for MH370 is that the pilot locked out the copilot and then depressurised the cabin.

There are non-fatal cases like Ethiopian Airlines Flight 702 where the copilot locked the captain out when we was in the restroom (though loss of life was still a possibility, one of the engines had flamed out and was on emergency fuel).

As with all incidents, there are many factors that lead to them, but in these cases the presence of locked and reinforced cockpit doors contributed to the incident (in malicious cases the fact the door was impenetrable was clearly part of the decision-making, and in accident cases it was obviously an impediment to any positive outcome once the incident occurred).

I don't even think Karen got involved, it was just the Bush administration seizing the opportunity for more corruption, pork barrels, surveillance and harassment of the population at large full stop.

> It's easier to stop incentivizing people to ruin the commons

It's impossible. No matter how good of a job you do, there will _always_ be people out to watch it all burn.

When underlying problems are left untreated the number of unreasonable responses increases as a symptom of that. For sure, you'll always have that tiny minority who are just misanthropes. But a lot of the people who end up causing destruction do so because there's some problem affecting them that's not being dealt with. The modern world incentivizes creating underlying problems because not only can you profit from the unreasonable responses, but you can sell protection against them as well. A large portion of the economy actually revolves around this as a consequence of the shift towards service rather than production.

> But a lot of the people who end up causing destruction do so because there's some problem affecting them that's not being dealt with.

I think solving the socioeconomic, geopolitical, and religious tensions that lead to plane hijackings is a much harder problem to solve than simply putting doors on cockpits and forcing people to do body scans.

But it the long run we should maybe still attempt to solve it, before there are mandatory body scans everywhere and cars only start, if you do a mental examination first?

Exactly. That's treating a symptom, which creates more and more extreme symptoms. After a while though it's far more costly and complex to keep treating the wide variety of symptoms than it ever would've been to treat the cause, but because so much infrastructure has been built around treating those symptoms it's too difficult to dedicate resources to treating the cause.

How do you stop the hijacker blowing up the TSA queue instead?

Well that's easy, just add metal detectors and a pat-down at the entrance of the airport, before people queue up for TSA!

Just because it's impossible to solve a problem 100% doesn't mean that it's impossible to improve the state of things. Perfect is the enemy of good. There aren't that many people doing random chaotic damage, and it's not worth it to protect against all their potential harm.

Well usually there isn’t an incentive to mess with this type of critical infrastructure, and yet, behold, the externalities.

Even foreign actors during war time wouldn’t go through the effort of messing with individual temperature sensors.

If you need serious physical security for every little bit of infrastructure, then your society will be able to afford far, far fewer nice things.

Oh man, I thought from the headline that it was going to be about a new prediction wager on the site about whether the manipulator had used a hair dryer or lighter.

That would have been perfect.

Because the picture already shows it is a hair dryer, now the prediction market would be what make and model...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com