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US To Ban Laptops in All Cabins of Flights From Europe (thedailybeast.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article: The Department of Homeland Security will ban laptops in the cabins of all flights from Europe to the United States, European security officials told The Daily Beast. An official announcement is expected Thursday. Initially a ban on laptops and tablets was applied only to U.S.-bound flights from 10 airports in North Africa and the Middle East. The ban was based on U.S. fears that terrorists have found a way to convert laptops into bombs capable of bringing down an airplane. It is unclear if the European ban will also apply to tablets. DHS said in a statement to The Daily Beast: "No final decisions have been made on expanding the restriction on large electronic devices in aircraft cabins; however, it is under consideration. DHS continues to evaluate the threat environment and will make changes when necessary to keep air travelers safe."
Is there actionable intelligence to back up this ban or is this an attempt to whitewash the racist origins of the original anti-Muslim ban by including Europe?
Bring back the travel by ship. I don't want a cruise. I just want a cheap way out of North America that doesn't involve the bullshit. Only things I need on the boat are a bed, washrooms, a place to stuff whatever bags I want to bring, and a cafeteria (I'll bring my own food, but you're welcome to sell me some if you like). I hear they got boat travel down to 2 days across the Atlantic.
Would be nice to bring my car along, for a fee.
As a US academic who is deeply concerned about people not willing or wanting to go to US conferences, this is going to make everything much worse. We've had enough trouble as is trying to get people to keep going to conferences here given the current climate. This is going to make it much harder.
If this is true, I'm horrified that the airlines would put up with having all those lithium batteries in uncontrolled luggage in the cargo hold. If it were my airline I'd refuse the fly the routes. I certainly won't get on a plane full of cargo hold batteries. I'm equally horrified that any business would put up with the loss of time and potential loss of assets due to theft, never mind the potential loss of employees if a cargo fire brings down a plane.
This will be a huge boon to Canadian air travel. If this astounding idiocy is enacted, my Europe travel will all be going through Toronto, assuming that it occurs at all.
Congressmen are basically stupid, scared children. They've got a surprising amount of shit to sift through, no bandwidth, and sheer impulse to run on; and they have to weigh in as experts on every issue, regardless of timeline or personal understanding. When national security, Internet crimes, or child pornography come up, they can't even understand what's possible and what's just nutty; they see the maximum threat, and they respond by screaming and flailing.
One day, I want to get myself voted into the House largely so I can respond to any topic that's not central to my interests with blunt detachment and input that's given on the stated condition that my understanding of the topic is limited and my interest is largely in bothering people with questions nobody's thought to ask. For most of it, I can cite firm attention to economics and risk as a primary reason to not take action for trivial things that might be real and scary, but also unlikely to happen with any frequency or to any great severity.
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The theory is that if you press the laptop up against the fuselage in the passenger cabin, you can bust a big enough hole to bring the airplane down; if it's in the hold, there's no opportunity to do that.
SSL/TLS happened. In 2012, most sites & apps didn't use SSL. Now, they do... and a bunch of SSL handshakes for ephemeral connections from multiple users at once can make a formerly-tolerable slow data link grind to a complete halt. First, the handshakes start failing, because TLS has strict time limits to limit replay attacks & make MITM harder. Then, the repeated handshaking attempts end up saturating the link so nothing else -- not even DNS lookups -- can get through. Even with a few hundred kbps, it doesn't take many iphones & Android phones making nonstop background connections to bring a shared slow connection to its knees... or some other user attempting to navigate to an ad-saturated web page that literally needs to establish TLS connections to several DOZEN hosts just to finish loading. And most of those requests can't be cached, so they keep generating more and more.
That's why there's now a RFC making its way through IETF to allow a server to be configured to send unencrypted-but-signed files over TLS (instead of encrypting everything)... the idea is that a bank's logo images, css stylesheets, or Javascript libraries aren't a secret, but have to be sent via TLS to prevent MITM. By allowing signing-without-encryption, networks will be able to inspect & cache files the remote host marks as 'not sensitive'.