> the solution would be to respect and pay workers more

Not to worry, they're furiously working on an alternative which will ensure no worker must ever be respected or paid ever again!

because the solution would be to respect and pay workers more,

They're already quite well-paid (and so are pilots). In fact the operating margins of airlines are infamously thin, so unless you want plane tickets to be several times their current price, it won't work.

> That trust was what led to this incident where someone just walked into the airplane dressed as a maintainence worker and nobody stopped him.

O, it can be even worse, when you realize its a 30 year old problem ...

During the 1998 television show Schalkse Ruiters, presenters Bart De Pauw and Tom Lenaerts dressed in fake pilot uniforms. They bypassed security at Brussels Airport (Zaventem), entered a Boeing cockpit, and left undetected to expose safety flaws

The TV show got cancelled not long after this incident because of pollical backlash.

The show had a reputation of finding security flaws (like being able to transfer money from people bank accounts) and other issues, but the airport one was the end of the show.

People loved the show, as it forced companies, ... make changes to their processes that they normally never did. They even did follow-up episodes to see if the companies actually made changes.

Bit of public shaming to fix security issues... worked great. Until the show was cancelled. The number one rated show of the country ... Yea, there was absolute no correlation between its cancellation and the airport incident. Really ;)

You conveniently left out the part where he walked through a hole in the airport fence.

Airfields are expected to be secure areas. If you can walk through a hole in a fence there's issues.

Remember a guy stole an entire airplane a few years ago (RIP Sky King). Airplanes don't have ignition keys.

> Also pilot suicide isn't something new and the aviation world has tried to come up with several regulations to ensure it doesn't happen

As AI171 has shown, turning the engines off on rotation does it reliably and there’s nothing that the other pilot or regulations can do to prevent it.

There's literally millions of people driving newfangled EVs where the car manufacturer has full remote access to their vehicle and can upload software however and whenever they like.

This part has been beyond baffling to me. The last thing I want, is to hit the brakes in my car, and suddenly they're less/more sensitive, due to an update the night before, and it really does matter especially on snow/ice. And such updates happen.

I also don't want a perfectly good, 100% working car to suddenly degrade in experience because "Wups! Sorry! Last update broke <whatever>, we'll update within the month to fix!". It's just pure, unbridled dumb.

I recently bought a car, and the dealer tried to sell me an extended warranty. What? It's under a full warranty right now, and yes, my region has very strong warranty and anti-lemon laws. But my point is, they kept saying "there's a lot of complex and expensive electronics in this car, you're going to need an extended warranty".

Um, what? Hello? You just explained that the car breaks down a lot because it's complex? So complex that there are more frequent, highly expensive issues?

How is that a plus?

If a car is "too complex" to roll out the assembly line, without needing updates to modules on a monthly basis for years, it's the opposite of positive. I've had multiple BCM(body control module) updates, updates to every single module in the car. There shouldn't be enough code to cause issues here, it should be simple, simple, simple.

But it's not.

It's complex and difficult to make bug free.

And that makes me oh so very comfortable as I drive down the road.

> Wait until they find out your mechanic has unfettered access to your car's OBD port when you hand them the keys

Surprise! “They” did find this out and UN155/156 regulate a bunch of protections against local “attackers,” often to the detriment of right to repair.

Getting security to work reliably in such scenarios can be hard. And your customer really don't want their up to hundred million in cost pieces of equipment sit there doing nothing because maintenance is unable to do something with it.

Much simpler just to instruct to physically secure the conduit around... Even better if that is already approved and demanded process.

I have little faith any of it would stop someone who was a) devoted, b) prepared, and c) had physical access for a reasonable time.

It’s still worth doing because the vast, vast majority of people will fail at a or b without even reaching c.

That’s sort of less so with planes, though. You don’t generally decide to take out a plane without being dedicated at the very least.

Well, the EU, being very much dictated by Germany, who have a large car industry, has a vested interest in making sure that if people want to have a better car they pay for a better one new rather than upgrade with an aftermarket chip.

A huge part of the security of Macs is that the security domain is a single chip. Hard to do with an airplane which is inherently a physically-distributed system.

But what if the device contained an explosive?

> The question is more - how hard is it to get airside without a pass?

Depends. Did you fly in with a random unlocked Cessna from a remote field?

Really funny when you see a random rural airport with an unattended gate with a sign on it telling you the code is "SQUAWK VFR" and you just look at the crusty keypad and slap 1200 in like everyone else before you did on the rubbed-off 1, 2, and 0 keys.

Interesting take on things - of course “outside” airside was protected by locked doors, so passengers couldn’t just wander onto the apron… but all you’ve got to do to get outside these days is to book with the sort of airline that’s too cheap to pay for a proper stand and makes you walk to the plane (and accidentally walk the wrong way, etc)…

Another question on my mind is - how hard is it to land a job with an airside pass nowadays if your intention is to just get physical access to an aeroplane ? Pretty easy back then. Not sure about now…

Irony/point of view from an attacker.

No one should be paying for this journalism. Calling wired journalism is a stretch, it’s more a blogspam ad farm site

It's all so bizarre. They don't want to pay but expect in-depth articles.

It's akin somewhat to the open-source crowd demanding features (and security updates) all without donating to the project.

Jeff Bezos, probably. The internet really is the death of quality journalism, and democracy slowly dies with it.

Google, serving adds to the article reader? Adds are annoying, but we’re free to leave if we don’t like how a website is managed.

I personally loves the way HN pages are served as they are loading very fast even on not-high end devices, and volunteers contributes to the content (comments).

Paywall are annoying and there’s always someone that post an archive link to circumvent it but I’m not sure about the ethic of a rule requiring to do so.

Paying for individual publications you like is fine.

Paying for all the publications that get articles on the HN front page would be very expensive. Only a minority of people reading HN would have subscribed to any one publication. The result is that paywalled articles can only be properly discussed by a minority people. It also encourages discussion of the headline instead of the article.