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"
A "damaging" leak of tools from a five eyes exploit developer?
Concerning. We need to know what's under this rug.
Big picture: "trusted, vetted" private sector players offensive cyber are not immune to losing control of tooling... with national security consequences 1/
2/ If true, a tooling leak at boutique firm Trenchant wouldn't be the first time that exploits from commercial offensive vendors wind up... in the wrong place.
Many questions.
In the meantime. Remember when Russian APT29..was caught with exploits first used by NSO & Intellexa?
3/ There will always be a push for states to turn towards the private sector to meet offensive needs.
It's appealing. For some, it's very lucrative.
But in practice it brings unavoidable counterintelligence & national security downside risk that shouldn't be downplayed.
NOW: US court permanently bans Pegasus spyware maker from hacking WhatsApp.
NSO Group can't help their customers hack @WhatsApp, etc ether. Must delete exploits...
Bad news for NSO. Huge competitive disadvantage for the notorious company.
Big additional win for WhatsApp 1 /
2/ Although the massive punitive damages jury award against NSO Group ($167m) got reduced by the court, as is expected in cases where it is so large (to 9x compensatory damages)...
This is likely cold comfort to NSO since I think the injunction is going to have a huge impact on the value of NSO's spyware product.
Comes as NSO Group has been making noises about getting acquired by a US investor & some unnamed backers...
3/ NSO also emerges from the @WhatsApp v NSO case with just an absolute TON of their business splashed all over the court records..
NEW: fresh trouble for mercenary spyware companies like NSO Group.
@Apple launching substantial bounties on the zero-click exploits that feed the supply chain behind products like Pegasus & Paragon's Graphite.
With bonuses, exploit developers can hit $5 million payouts. 1/
2/ Apple is introducing Target Flags which speeds the process of getting exploits found & submitters rewarded.
This faster tempo is also a strike against the mercenary spyware ecosystem.
And the expanded categories also hit more widely against commercial surveillance vendors.
3/ If I contemplating investing in spyware companies I'd want to carefully evaluate whether their exploit pipeline can match what @apple just threw down.