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"
#Paragon's carefully constructed image of being a clean mercenary spyware company that wasn't susceptible to abuses has been replaced by a more familiar tale of...
Abuses...
And #Italy is now saddled with an unfolding crisis around spyware abuse.
VPN advertising is the most common source of security misinformation that I encounter.
By far.
So many people misplace their trust in dubious consumer VPN products.
The industry is a scourge.
VPNs don't do most of the things that podcasters imply they do.
Security:
Coffee shop attacks on unencrypted logins are a thing of a decade ago.
VPNs won't stop even the dumbest spyware & phishing.
Privacy:
Advertisers still know it's you when you turn on a VPN... they use many other identifying signals from your device, like your browser & advertising IDs. Those don't change when you turn on a VPN.
Trust:
A lot of VPN companies are shady.... and the industry is consolidating fast around some questionable players with concerning histories.
When you turn on a VPN you entrust all of your data to those companies.
BREAKING: NSO Group liable for #Pegasus hacking of @WhatsApp users.
Big win for spyware victims.
Big loss for NSO.
Bad time to be a spyware company.
Landmark case. Huge implications. 1/ 🧵
2/ In 2019, 1,400 @WhatsApp users were targeted with #Pegasus.
WhatsApp did the right thing & sued NSO Group.
NSO has spent 5 years trying to claim that they are above the law.
And engaged in all sorts of maneuvering.
With this order, the music stopped and NSO is now without a chair.
3/ Today, the court decided that enough was enough with NSO's gambits & efforts to hide source code.
Judge Hamilton granted @WhatsApp's motion for summary judgement against the #Pegasus spyware maker.
The judge finds NSO's hacking violated the federal Computer Fraud & Abuse Act (#CFAA), California state anti-fraud law #CDFA, and was a breach of contract.
What happens next? The trial proceeds only on the issue of resolving damages stemming from NSO's hacking.