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MacBook Air Confuses Airport Security
Ant writes "MacNN reports that the thin design of Apple's MacBook Air is causing some confusion for the technically ignorant, according to one blogger who says that the ultra-portable caused him to miss his flight. When going through the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) airport security checkpoint, blogger Michael Nygard was held up as security staff gathered around his MacBook Air, trying to make sense of the slender laptop/notebook. One of the less technically knowledgeable staff points out the lack of standard features as cause for alarm..."
TSA agents have a difficult job as it is. How much harder do Apple fanboys have to make it for them by insisting that their toys are "computers"?
I bet during training they are told to look for things that may be designed to "look like" common things, and a laptop without ports would probably gain the notice of less tech savvy screeners.
I am sure those uber tiny laptops get as much attention as well.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Anyone who's ever tried to bring a less-than-common piece of electronics through airport security has probably had them happen to this. I've had TSA agents inquire about my TI-89 on two separate occasions. Is this story really news? or just cleverly embedded marketing?
He should've gotten to the airport earlier. It sounds like he was operating on razor-thin margins, and got bit. Tough. Deal with it.
In other news, the Ooga Chaka tribe brutally murdered a tourist to their village who was carrying a double-blunt-ended walking stick.
Apparently, the "spear with a lack of features" was cause for great alarm among the Ooga-Chakas.
Its a real bummer that these TSA guys end up being no better than night club bouncers, but heck I suppose technology is not their forte, which is kind of ironic given they need to understand recognise what's going through the machine.
Anyhow, my question is if you miss a flight because of these TSA guys, does your airline put you on the next available flight at no extra cost?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Not just any bomb, mind you. It's a really thin bomb. With NO optical drive, which makes it perfectly useless to me.
I'd be a bit careful about water. Everyone who has ever died on this planet has drunk water at some stage in their life. Coincidence? I think not...
The Mothership
Look how small it is, it must be a bomb. I personally would try to make something larger to hold a bomb, but hey thats just me. Steve jobs is the only one trying to make bombs smaller and sexier.
Humm, and I going to go to jail for that last comment, its hard to tell what's a crime any more...
From https://tsacarrers.taleo.net/ Read to the end... I was not scared before I read this, but now...
1802-Transportation Security Officer (TSO) (Screener) - SUN107
Job Description
Apply Online
Description
As a Transportation Security Officer (TSO) (Screener):
You will perform a variety of duties related to providing security and protection of air travelers, airports and aircraft. You will be responsible for identifying dangerous objects in baggage, cargo and/or on passengers; and preventing those objects from being transported onto aircraft. You are required to perform various tasks such as: wanding, pat down searches, operation of x-ray machines, lift and carry baggage (weighing up to 70 pounds), and screening and ticket review using electronic and imaging equipment. As a TSO, you may perform passenger screening, baggage screening or both. You are expected to perform these duties in a courteous and professional manner.
* Communicate with the public, giving directions and responding to inquiries in a professional and courteous manner.
* Maintain focus and awareness within an environment containing numerous distractions, people, and noise.
* Stand and remain standing for periods up to 4 hours without sitting.
* Repeatedly lift and carry an object weighing up to 70 pounds.
* Work within a stressful environment, which includes noise from alarms, machinery, and people, distractions, time pressure, disruptive and angry passengers, and the requirement to identify and locate potentially life-threatening devices and devices intended on creating massive destruction.
* Make effective decisions in both crisis and routine situations.
Work Schedule: Full-time Split-Shift (40 hours per week). A Split Shift schedule is defined as any two shifts, lasting at least two (2) hours each, in one 24-hour period with a break of at least two (2) hours between shifts. Full-time work hours for this position consists of shift-work on any day from Sunday through Saturday, which may include irregular hours, nights, holidays, overtime, extended shifts and weekend shifts, changing shifts, and split shifts. Exceptions include additional shifts to support morning, midday, and afternoon or evening operations. Specific work shifts and schedules will be determined by the airport.
TSA will not pay any pre-employment travel expenses (e.g., travel to and from testing, medical examination facilities and assessment sites). As part of the evaluation process you will be required to travel to a TSA specified medical facility within commuting area of the airport for which you applied.
Qualifications
1. You must be a U.S.Citizen or U.S. National; AND
2. You must have a high school diploma, GED or equivalent; OR at least one year of full-time work experience in security work, aviation screener work, or x-ray technician work.
Possess the following job-related knowledge, skills, and abilities:
* English Proficiency (e.g., reading, writing, speaking, listening)
* Mental Abilities (e.g., visual observation and identification, mental rotation)
* Interpersonal Skills (e.g., customer service, dependability)
* Work Values (e.g., responsibility, honesty, integrity)
* Physical Abilities(e.g. repeatedly lifting and carrying baggage weighing up to 70 lbs, bending, reaching, stooping, squatting, standing, and walking and identifying objects by touch).
All TSOs must meet the following standards:
* Distant vision correctable to 20/30 or better in the best eye and 20/100 or better in the worse eye
* Near vision correctable to 20/40 or better binocular
* Color perception (e.g., red, green, blue, yellow, orange, purple, brown, black, white, gray) note: color filters (e.g., contact lenses) for enhancing color discrimination are prohibited.
* Hearing as measured by audiometry cannot exceed:
Hey man. I have never drank water and I AM DEAD, you insensitive clod!
wait...
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Everyone else should read the original blog post, and note that his flight was taking off AS he was talking to customs. Meaning he showed up at or after boarding time. Airlines suggest showing up 1 to 1.5 hours before takeoff, not at the last minute. Furthermore, I call bullshit on this story. I've recently traveled internationally and went through 8 major airports (plus 'random selection' secondary inspection in Philadelphia) throughout the world, with a laptop, Nintendo DS, two Ipod Mini's, and a case of DVD's all stuffed into my laptop bag, while returning from an Islamic nation and nobody asked me to show them anything.
Perhaps those technically adept people choose not to stand behind an X-ray scanner for 12 hours a day.
What kind of world of hurt would the person in TFA have had to go through if the battery was flat, or the laptop was defective?
Since the purpose of the TSA isn't to stop terrorism but to act as a social placebo, would you really want to waste hundreds of thousands of intelligent and educated man-hours on it?
It really boils down to the technically ignorant doing work that requires at some point a certain minimum level of technical competence. Kind of like a PHB making computer and networking decisions. I have not flown commercial in many years. The more stories I hear from my friends who still fly, the more I will take the train. There may be a case where I will fly again some day, but not if a viable alternative is available. I used to like to fly. I liked zipping into different cities, doing my job and popping back. It was exciting. Now, it would just be painful. Not my cup of tea.
BTW, if you fly on private craft, my experience so far has been a decided lack of idiots to deal with. Kind of makes the cost and time to get a pilots license that much more attractive.
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
No irony is misspelling the word "first" in a first-post.
It's not even Alanis ironic.
The whole story is part of a viral marketing campaign intended to establish the Air as different, iconic.
Behind me, I hear the younger agent, perhaps not realizing that even the TSA must obey TSA rules, repeating himself."It's a MacBook Air."
It's 1984 all over again..."I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I too have been through countless security check points with enough electronics in my bags to make my back hurt. I have never had a problem with the people at security. However, I travel with a wife and colleagues who are not always so lucky. The difference? I am a white guy and they are not. Sad but true. Next time you are in line watch who is being searched or detained.
One morning the fate of the free world depended on my screener's determination on if a pair of Vibram Five Fingers was a shoe or not. Never mind that I own bulkier socks than this, but apparently it's a shoe.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Back in 1996 or 1997 I got some funny looks from security after the wire connecting the main AA cells in my Psion Series 3a PDA broke, in the International terminal at Boston Logan. The button cell that served as backup power for the memory wouldn't last the duration of the flight to London (where I might have gotten it fixed professionally), and I had data in it that I'd need after I got there. So I bought a travel sewing kit* at the newsstand (the safety pin made a good fine tool), got out my tweezers and Swiss Army knife* to help disassemble the PDA and to strip the wire a little, and spent the half hour before my flight in the waiting area at the gate, hunched over the "device" and performing emergency field surgery to make a solid connection between the AAs and the electronics. I snapped it all back together just as they called for boarding.
And the in-flight movie? Executive Decision, in which the Bad Guy uses a Psion Series 3a as the remote control for a bomb on the plane.
*Did I mention that this was way before Sept. 2001?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
This seems very reasonable. No ports, no disc drive, completely metallic instead of plastic. I could see how it would set of some warning bells that there might be more to this guy's laptop than he claims. Taken in this light it actually raises my views of the TSA and certainly makes it seem like they're actually looking out for potential safety threats.
Either way, had he been there a little earlier he could have had plenty of time to explain his new gadget and boarded the plane. TSA (and common sense) - 1, jackass blogger - 0.
Don't bother. End of this year the government has a new tax package and special user fees that will increase the costs by over 400% (proceeds going to fund tax breaks for the airlines, of course) and "increase security" for private airfields as well. It was nice while it lasted but the party's over.
well, water IS 2/3 hydrogen, and 1/3 oxygen... and thats what they use to launch the space shuttle, so water must be an explosive!
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
When faced with new and strange technology first
A) Strike with hand, grunt and run away.
B) Strike with rock, grunt and run away.
C) Strike with club, grunt and run away.
D) If first three methods fail strike passenger with club, grunt and run away.
"It really boils down to the technically ignorant doing work that requires at some point a certain minimum level of technical competence. Kind of like a PHB making computer and networking decisions."
I don't think you are being fair.
Protecting travelers from new attack vectors in real time based on an x-ray and basic visual inspection is not a job that can be performed reliably with any standard skill set. What the TSA actually appears to be aiming for is people who can identify a gun/knife/conventionally designed incendiary device, so that nobody has to stand in front of the cameras after an incident and explain how we missed the conventional threat during screening.
Unconventional threats cannot reliably be prevented through the methods the TSA is currently employing, but no one wants to admit this and pierce the illusion of security that these measures provide the average traveler.
Instead of relating TSA grunts to PHBs making decisions they are not qualified to make you could keep it simple and call it what it is: Politicians fronting like they have solutions, and average citizens (TSA workers) set up to take the blame when those flimsy solutions fail.
"I'm sick of some guy with a triple digit income and a double digit IQ rooting around inside my bag and never finding anything" -- George Carlin
Ace
The fear of a laptop carrying explosives is valid, seeing as how a radio-cassette stereo player - a medium size boom box - with a pound of plastic explosive in it - brought down a 747 - pan am 103 - over Scotland.
I categorically resent that. Historically our business transformation architecture achieves multipoint synergies by the close-tracking of business channel optimisation strategies, and our decision workshopping with regard to procurement of necessary infrastructure precludes the detail assessment quid-pro-quo with regard to non-executive decision makers. If I say we need duplicate DHCP servers then by god I want them to be exact duplicates, from their highly redundant address lists right down to the tiny little rubber feet!
And I have great hair! Just ... not much of it any more.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
See.... "private craft" is all well and good, but unless you can afford a Gulfstream or some other such ridiculousness, you're stuck in a Cessna 172 doing about 140knots. After paying for the aviation fuel and spending and hour dicking around getting it out of the hangar, checklists, etc, then worrying about where to put it when you arrive... and what to drive...
Your break-even distance is almost 8 hours... in other words... if you aren't expecting to have to drive 8 hours, use your car or take a bus.
If you're going further than 8 hours by car, it's going to be like 5+ hours by Cessna and just suck up the 45 minutes to get through security (and the $500 in fuel) and take Southwest Airlines for $99.
I've only ever heard of about 3 situations where it was actually ECONOMICAL (both time and money) to take a private plane, unless you're god-awful rich and can afford a pilot to handle the checklists before you arrive.
SI
I don't know who is dumber, the TSA screeners, or the guy who paid $3100 for an SSD MacBook Air.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
That sort of thing is not their fault.
;).
The whole thing is actually more of a "show" nowadays, put on to make people feel safe and that the government is doing something. I mean banning liquids= joke.
After 9/11, the odds of such an incident being repeated went down a lot. In fact one of the planes didn't hit the target because of the passengers (who learnt what was happening), so that proves my point.
Now:
1) Cockpit doors are reinforced
2) The "unwritten rules of hijacking" have been invalidated- so more than a few passengers might think it is worth losing their lives to take down hijackers (esp if they think the hijackers are going to kill them all anyway). More importantly, serious hijackers know that (the crazy ones are a different matter).
3) The bomb scanning stuff has already been around for years, so the small stuff is invalidated by 2).
So, if terrorists now wanted to use planes to kill lots of people, they'll use private aircraft like you suggest
AFAIK private planes don't have as stringent luggage requirements as long as you know the pilot (or are the pilot). Those stars don't appear to have problems putting illicit drugs and stuff on their planes.
It's entirely fair! The airport "security" is just silly "security theatre" and does nothing to improve safety. At the risk of a holiday in Cuba: it's trivially easy to knock an airliner out of the sky with ordinary, innocuous materials. No amount of "security" checks can prevent this!
I mean... what did he expect? He wasn't using the MacAir properly.
The commercial clearly shows that it should be MAILED to its destination.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
A former boss of mine owned a Mooney prop plane (a bit faster than the Cessna, I think about 170 knots) and I found the routine at private airports refreshingly easy - go to the plane, walk around it to make sure nothing's fallen off, run up the engine and take off. The checklist isn't that hard, and much of it can be done during the brief wait for a take off slot.
I loved the freedom associated with being able to take off and land at any time, at any airport. In this particular case, he could leave out of Van Nuys airport, about 15 minutes from his home, instead of LAX which would have taken a grinding hour and a half to get to.
I will admit that flying a private plane is disappointingly non-luxurious - his interior felt more like a Subaru than a Mercedes - but even though I was not very good at physically flying the plane I enjoyed changing the frequencies on the radios and navigation systems. (This was before GPS took off in a big way - we used the old beacon system.)
I would have surely preferred a jet but I liked flying private better than commercial. As I remember it cost him about $55 per flight hour to run, including overhauls, and he certainly believed it penciled out for him economically. He had to carry fairly heavy amounts of baggage for the trade shows we went to and that definitely helped.
D
You must appreciate the IT Director who demands (and I mean vehemently demands) that all 5000 computers deployed MUST HAVE FEET. I think it's so that they can evacuate in case of fire. Makes sense to me.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
It doesn't even succeed against known threats. They have regular security screenings where a TSA agent sneaks through a fake bomb disguised as a back brace or something innocuous. Less than a 50% success rate at stopping it. If "the terrorists" actually get to that point, it's more likely than not that TSA will let them through.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
"I've only ever heard of about 3 situations where it was actually ECONOMICAL (both time and money) to take a private plane"
How many of them did not involve drugs?
After 9/11, the odds of such an incident being repeated went down a lot. In fact one of the planes didn't hit the target because of the passengers (who learnt what was happening), so that proves my point.
Hell, before 9/11 the odds were slim to none. If security was so piss-poor before, then why had there only been maybe half a dozen or so (I don't have a list in front of me at the moment) incidents of, say, bombs being used to blow us U.S. originated airliners? And hardly any incidents of hijackers actually taking control of a plane and crashing it? For that matter, why have there never been mass suicide bombings in our malls or other public places a la what happens in some other corners of the world? In theory, it should be stupidly easy to walk into the Mall of America at lunchtime and blow yourself up, taking a few dozens shoppers with you.
It boils down to this: 9/11 was an anomaly. It was so far out of the norm that it had never been done before, and is not likely to be replicated anytime soon. The risk is always there, but it is infinitesimally small in relation to the number of flights and passengers annually. You can be 99.9% safe and, in the process, majorly disrupt and complicate airline travel, negatively affect the economy by costing businesses and their travelers added expense and delays, plus expend billions of taxpayer dollars on added security. Or, you can use the same common sense precautions that had always been used, and still be, say, 99.5% safe. The difference is not worth the expense. Of course, if you happen to have a loved one killed in such an incident, you will say that ANY improvement in security is worth ANY additional effort and expense, but when it comes to the big picture, common sense must trump emotionalism or we will all be held hostage to fear.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
That's not irony, that's just gaming the slashdot first-post delayer (tm). If an otherwise first post contains the word first or post, Slashdot delays it until a second post is available, and posts it afterwards. This is meant to protect against overzealous frist psot hunting. Indeed, in the olden days, you had to first wade across some 20+ posts per story which all called out first post, and it became a distraction. They had to put the delayer in, in order to stop the madness. So nowadays trolls just mipsel.
Devil's advocate: What attributes? Being brown?
This is what vigilantism looks like.
II. Rationality They won't do it again because taking a plane out of the sky really will make airport security like a military check point, thus also limiting the mobility of the enemy for the reward of taking 1 or 2 planes out of the sky with no hard land target in mind. Not going to happen.I'm not so sure. Your argument rests on the assumption that the terrorists make well-reasoned decisions to further their cause. They do have objectives -- "get out of the Middle East, U.S!" -- but in my opinion they are horribly misguided in their decisions: If they wanted to reduce the U.S. military presence there, they sure as hell haven't succeeded.
Some people say, "the terrorists have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams." I don't think so. Rather, the current situation is a dismal failure for all involved, terrorists included. It's a failure for the U.S., which is now engaged in a bloody, costly (we have spent more than we did in Vietnam), no-way-out quagmire of a war. It's a failure for the extremists who downed those planes, who rather than convincing the U.S. to pull out of the Middle East has provoked it to deploy even more troops there. It is a failure for "Iraqi" civilians (even if no "Iraqi" ethnic identity really exists), who might have been oppressed under Saddam but who at least had electricity and drinking water. It is a failure for nearly everyone. The only reason this mess continues is that we, the extremists, and everyone else, are stuck together in yet-another (the world has so many) collective action problem.
[The list of those who have benefited from this situation is short -- mainly politicians (in the US and in the Middle East) and government contractors (Haliburton/KBR, etc) happy to multiply the terror and exploit the situation (see the BBC's The Power of Nightmares -- video here). But these people didn't engineer the attacks; they're just opportunists.]
I got a little sidetracked, but the point is this: The terrorists did not plan a well-reasoned attack to achieve their objectives; by most rational metrics I can think of, they have failed. Therefore, I wouldn't put it past them to do something stupid again -- like stage an attack which will ultimately make their task more difficult. That's the part of your post I was disagreeing with -- that these terrorists make smart decisions. I suspect they don't -- not because they're populated by stupid people (terrorists tend to be well-educated. I'm most familiar not with Middle-Eastern terrorists, but with the Japanese terror cult Aum Shinrikyo that released Sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo subway -- and that organization was full of Ph.D.s and physics students) but because their logical, analytical minds have been short-circuited by a seductive ideology.
In other words, we've got one group of people whose brains have been short-circuited by ideology and anger against another whose frontal lobes have been shut off by a hyperactive fear-and-stress center. I'm not counting on rationality from anyone.