What's happening at the #Titanic site will likely be a tragedy.
@OceanGate's page on why they didn't seek certifications / classing for the Titan submersible & that design safety regulations are slow & constrain innovation... reads differently now.
Imagine if a car manufacturer told you: this car isn't crash certified because it won't prevent people from driving the car badly.
"No other submersible currently utilizes real-time monitoring...we want to know why"
Hubris from @OceanGate even as they dismiss the existing standards derived from many tragedies that came before.
There's a nuanced, necessary risk balancing whenever you push at edges.
Innovation is hard if you over-constrain yourself to old rules... but scrap them all & you should expect to experience some irreversible lessons.
Nowhere more so than in the sea's unforgiving depths.
Exploration & adventure have unavoidable risks.
This is fine.
But I sincerely hope that the souls on that submersible truly understood them, and that @OceanGate objectively explained them *without* being colored by the kind of rhetoric found on their website.
"if you are lost so are we"
Comms failed & the #OceanGate submersible was lost for several hours on an earlier #Titanic dive.
The dark irony of what is unfolding is not lost on maritime historians
Those familiar w/marine environments will find the consumer grade electronics beyond puzzling.
Salt water, condensation, humidity, etc. are kryptonite to electronics.
And exactly the kinds of things you'd find in a submersible diving into cold places.
Thinking on @mercoglianos' point that the #Titanic is what got us the first convention on Safety of Life at Sea aka #SOLAS.
It continues to save uncountable lives.
101 years later & an outcome we can hope for is a fresh focus on safety regs for subsurface adventure tourism.
While the game controller (CEO said they had spares) is something we can all understand...
I think it's important to think of it as a indicator of the overall risk management & minimum-viable-submersible philosophy that seems to have been at work all over.
Pics: ballast.
"#OceanGate offers you the the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity ...[of] SAFELY diving to the Titanic wreckage site"
The breathless 2023 #Titanic dive promotional video puts safety in the first sentence.
UPDATE: an #OceanGate employee was allegedly fired for refusing to greenlight manned tests over safety concerns.
"the current 'experimental' approach... could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry"
WHOA @USTreasury just sanctioned leadership at 🇷🇺Russian antivirus company @kaspersky.
Comes on heels of yesterday's @CommerceGov ban on sales of their antivirus to the US.
Huge-but-somewhat-anticipated blow to #Kaspersky whose fortunes in the US have been falling since the 2017 @DHSgov binding directive to remove their products from gov systems.
Will be fascinating to see if other governments echo some of these actions.
2/ The case of @Kaspersky is a good teachable moment to talk about some painful truths about antivirus software.
1- Massive marketing has instilled the instinctive and INCORRECT belief that in regular users that antivirus products are the most important security step.
This is massively out of step with expert security recommendations. Source: a consistent finding in surveys of expert vs regular user security perceptions.
People continue to get soaked by AV companies selling products that don't provide nearly as much protection as they think.
3/. It's not just that Antivirus products don't provide users the kind of security they think they do...
Antivirus products themselves must have, by design, a ridiculously invasive view into what you are doing on your computer.
How else could they check every file for badness, right?
And for the company to keep detecting new things, lots of information about your files are going to be headed up into their systems when you run scans.
And the access to files doesn't end there.
You can learn a lot and, potentially, do a lot with the kind of access users have to grant an antivirus for it to work.
This is an under-appreciated privacy and security concern for anyone with an antivirus installed.
It is a big reason why the US, and every other government, is worried by the possibility that an antivirus vendor might be untrustworthy.
Great. Just someone claiming to offer some #Pegasus spyware source code for sale.
True or scam, this reminds me of 2018, when an NSO employee stole code & did exactly that.
As I testified to Congress: the mercenary spyware industry continues to recklessly proliferate very sophisticated capabilities once limited to a handful of governments.
Given how many times the industry has gotten caught, I have a hard time believing that these companies can maintain enough control over all facets of their capabilities...
.... to prevent parts of their tech from inevitably leaking to criminals & other non-state actors, turbocharging cybercrime & disruptive ransomware attacks.
2/ Now for some grim good news in this case: even if the person is in fact offering some portion of Pegasus spyware source code, and not trying to scam people, they are not even claiming to have the working exploits used to infect phones.
Important distinction, since even if the spiciest & most-helpful-to-criminals aspects of NSO Group's codebase were leaked & incorporated into cyber criminal toolkits... criminals would still need to source the (expensive & complex) exploits required to actually infect phones. And then make them work reliably, etc etc.
3/ Here's the 2018 story of an employee stealing code.
Reading this? Your blood probably contains some amount of toxic forever chemicals made by @3m.
How much & is there enough to spike your risk of certain cancers & illnesses?
Without complex blood testing you have no idea.
Why is their toxin running in your veins? Well, the companies that made this stuff (3M & DuPont) kept their discoveries of the harms secret... even as their toxin was incorporated into...everything.
From french fry bags to chairs.
They even gaslit their own scientists.
And they regularly dumped & released their chemicals into the environments around their plants, creating toxic zones.
You should read this shocking profile of corporate greed and cynicism @fastlerner & @propublica.