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posted by janrinok on Saturday December 24 2016, @09:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the changed-name-back-to-'bomb' dept.

An American flight was delayed due to a passenger changing the SSID of a device to "Samsung Galaxy Note 7_1097":

Lucas Wojciechowski was on Virgin America flight 358 from San Francisco to Boston and told BBC News he photographed the hotspot after noticing it when he opened his laptop. A call went out for any passenger with a Note 7 to press their call button. Mr. Wojciechowski subsequently tweeted the crew's announcements from the late night flight after the pilot warned passengers they would have to make an emergency landing.

"This isn't a joke. We're going to turn on the lights (it's 11pm) and search everyone's bag until we find it. "This is the captain speaking. Apparently the plane is going to have to get diverted and searched if nobody fesses up soon." The owner came forward confessing there was no Samsung Galaxy Note 7 on board, but they had changed the name of their SSID wireless device to 'Samsung Galaxy Note 7_1097.'

The real world is funnier than any joke.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by EEMac on Saturday December 24 2016, @02:31PM

    by EEMac (6423) on Saturday December 24 2016, @02:31PM (#445540)

    I must be misunderstanding the tone of the comments on this thread. Does nobody get how serious this is?

    This is the electronic equivalent of shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater, only worse. Fire on a plane is A Big Deal. There's limited air, people are crammed together, there's nowhere to go to escape flames or smoke, and you're in a flying machine thousands of feet in the air.

    So when someone makes a credible claim (via SSID) that they have a device known to burst into flames randomly, _I want the crew to take this seriously_. According to the article, no further action was taken against the passenger after he confessed. If true, that's waaaaaay more than reasonable.

    I'm glad it all worked out, but . . . . c'mon. Doing this kind of thing, even as a joke, is just a bad idea.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @02:59PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @02:59PM (#445546)
    The note 7 is a phone not a bomb. Duty free vodka and a lighter can do about as much damage. So once the prankster owned up there no need to over react. Tell him not to do it again or he gets banned.
    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by kazzie on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:09PM

      by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:09PM (#445549)

      Duty free Vodka and a lighter require some concious effort on someone's part to do damage. A note 7 can (and has been known to) do it all on its own.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @05:05PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @05:05PM (#445580)
        Yeah but this wasn't actually a real note 7. Just an SSID.
        • (Score: 2) by kazzie on Saturday December 24 2016, @06:13PM

          by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 24 2016, @06:13PM (#445605)

          And how were the cabin crew to know that until the owner explained what they'd done?

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 25 2016, @02:47AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 25 2016, @02:47AM (#445714)

        Also ECigs can go boom http://abc30.com/news/1-injured-after-e-cigarette-explodes-on-fax-bus/1667422/ [abc30.com]

        It seems anything that can catch fire, will, alone or with "help". So the question is, if "turrorizm" is a problem, why so many things allowed? Puncturing a battery is not impossible, vodka and lighter are also easy, and so on.

        Ah, yes, vodka is profits for someone, and the rest is security theatre.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:04PM (#445548)

    So when someone makes a credible claim (via SSID)

    *rotflmao* I used to call my wireless "FBI Surveillance Vehicle" and one of my neighbor's was "It hurts when IP" does that mean I should be arrested for impersonating law enforcement and my neighbor be quarantined for a pending STD? Get real here. This was just hysteria plain and simple.

    And fire in a crowded theater? Um no, since you have to have a device out and looking at the display of networks in range. Not something most people do, rather than just have sound vibrations hitting a sense organ designed to sense sound vibrations, most people have and can't shut off. More hysteria. I can say that I deliberately named my wireless in a hope that someone would read it and at least do a double take and laugh. I highly doubt any government organization for any country would ever use such an obvious name.

    No further action? The actions taken were more than enough to cause distress to not only the victim of this harassment (as I will equate these actions with) but to everyone in the plane. The pilot might as well said there was an active ticking bomb on the plane (and it will go off if we travel slower than 50 mph).

    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday December 27 2016, @08:26PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday December 27 2016, @08:26PM (#446441) Journal

      And fire in a crowded theater? Um no, since you have to have a device out and looking at the display of networks in range. Not something most people do, rather than just have sound vibrations hitting a sense organ designed to sense sound vibrations, most people have and can't shut off. More hysteria. I can say that I deliberately named my wireless in a hope that someone would read it and at least do a double take and laugh. I highly doubt any government organization for any country would ever use such an obvious name.

      And you're forgetting that even if someone DID have their device out searching for networks, it's still not like shouting "FIRE!" -- it's more like whispering "This lamp looks like a fire hazard" since mere possession of a Note 7 is no guarantee of the thing starting a fire. The probability is pretty low.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @05:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @05:54PM (#445596)

    when someone makes a credible claim (via SSID)

    could you please reread this stupidity you wrote to yourself until you get why it's not a perfectly reasonable response

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Hyperturtle on Saturday December 24 2016, @06:30PM

    by Hyperturtle (2824) on Saturday December 24 2016, @06:30PM (#445612)

    Do phones make up a name based on their model or something? The last few digits look like a BSSID/Mac address, why did no one even check that for accuracy? Do people really not understand how to idenfity what they might be about to connect to?

    No one checked the mac address of the BSSID to determine if the vendor code matched a valid samsung note 7, regardless of what the name is. If this is a real problem -- then the MAC addresses of banned devices based on a vendor code wildcard mask should be on a blacklist on all planes with logging. Anyone faking it would get blocked as well; it would take real effort to do a stunt like this with a different mac address, but would save numerous freak out moments like this if the bar was raised sufficiently high to thwart such pranks.

    They shouldn't be relying on accidentally noticing a hotspot that can be named anything. This is probably a joke the prankster had on the ground and didnt realize it'd cause a scene when someone ignorant saw it. He may even have forgotten until the scare machine went into full gear.

    If people do not know what a fire looks like, then they shouldn't be reporting fire. This was a theatre that has a sign with the word Fire printed on it. The guy that put the sign up did not shout fire. The guy that took the screen shot of the word "fire" and claimed there was a fire without any proof -- HE is the one that shouted fire. And don't give him a pass for not knowing what fire looks like. If he doesn't know, he shouldn't be shouting it; he should draw attention to the sign, but not cause a panic. There are so many ways to get a hold of technical support options; the pilots could have called in to ask how to find it; asked for an IT person to help like when asking for a doctor when a medical issue arises... instead they defaulted to fear. Maybe my logic has no place in this argument.

    That said--don't phones come with connectivity troubleshooters anymore? The blackberry OSes 6.x and 7.x have a site survey program as part of the settings screens that lets one save in a .csv file all the SSIDs around me, with the mac addresses and signal strength and all of that seen around the phone -- you can check the mac address and use that to look up whatever vendor, and if multiple SSIDs are assigned to it... are these details now hidden from everyone in the latest OSes?

    I'll go get off my lawn now.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by vux984 on Saturday December 24 2016, @10:06PM

    by vux984 (5045) on Saturday December 24 2016, @10:06PM (#445664)

    So when someone makes a credible claim (via SSID) that they have a device known to burst into flames randomly,

    How many note 7's spontaneously combusted? Really. Seriously. How many? Estimates are that under 100 out of 3-4 million phones overheated to the point of damaging the phone -- melting the case etc. Only a handful actually created any sort of actual incident (fire, explosion, injury) in doing so. So less than 1 in 30,000 chance of anything happening at all, and an order of magnitude less of it being even slightly serious.

    I'm not pretending it's not a defective product that needed a recall; but this is just hysteria. I mean, what if he'd brought his 2006 ipod nano on board? Would any one even blink twice? Even in 2006?

  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday December 27 2016, @08:24PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday December 27 2016, @08:24PM (#446440) Journal

    So when someone makes a credible claim (via SSID)

    That isn't a credible claim.

    What happened here is nobody on the flight crew has the slightest fucking clue what an SSID even *is*, but upon seeing one they somehow made the determination that it was an appropriate reason to harass their customers and start digging through everyone's personal property anyway. Because that's considered the appropriate response to anything you don't understand these days. Lack of education is now considered a legitimate justification for oppression.