ACARS Drama(acarsdrama.com) |
ACARS Drama(acarsdrama.com) |
Fortunately, nobody on the internet has the urge to break things just for the hell of it, so I'm sure everything will be fine.
Only 4 active connections allowed per site on a popular HAM webring? Never hogged by bots.
Site that allows minimally authenticated posting of aircraft ACARS messages? Never seen it hijacked for ads.
Physics-limited space for nearly untracable HF radio transmissions that can span half the US? Handfull of trolls that voluntarily relegate themselves to the 'troll freqs'.
It's no surprise the site allows unauthenticated JSON; in the rest of the hobby the FCC makes most types of security outright illegal.
Hams make an entire sport of of this ("fox hunting"), and the FCC has a network of automated monitoring stations dotted across the country specifically to determine the location of rogue radio transmissions.
That said, most of the time it's easier to just ignore the radio trolls.
0: https://acarsdrama.com/fmc.webp
Unrelated, this one is cute: https://infosec.exchange/@acarsdrama/114194436695883209
QWERTY predates electronic devices.
Every aircraft that I've ever flown has an alphabetical keyboard. Typically horizontal space is valuable, yet vertical space is less valuable, so it's easy to make the keyboard long but not wide. However, as others pointed out, it seems to be changing in newer jets.
For one thing the ASCII ordering is now suddenly jumbled up. Maybe our great supreme intellectual leader Elon will issue Magacode to supersede Unicode, kym epcy epc ngy vky yxcohy!
Only until you're used to it. Then it's just as natural as switching between a keypad with a 1 in the top left versus one with a 7 in the top left. Your brain just takes the wheel.
Now that's changed, but changing the keyboard now would ruin older pilots' muscle memory.
You get used to it, same as you got used to a QWERTY keyboard.
(note: this based on my experience often interacting with another device with an alphabetic keyboard, not an FMC)
Changing anything significant on an aircraft requires certification though. So you typically have to have a very good cause to do it.
A very common flow for me when I see something weird on adsb or fr24 is to grab the ICAO address of the plane and search it on https://app.airframes.io/ to see if it was sending out any ACARS messages so I can... see what the drama was ha!
It's a really fun hobby if you find this stuff interesting. You can pick up an SDR online for like $30 USD and be able to do all this without Internet, above your own home.
Clearly I need more coffee.
Message: DISPMORNING. NEED LEO TO MEET THE AC. A PAX WAS INAPPROPRIATELY TOUCHING ANOTHER PAX IN THE ROW INFRONT OF THEM. THE FAS HAVE THE SEAT NUMBER ANDMANIFEST. FYI AND THX
https://infosec.exchange/@acarsdrama/114195325338601167
[edit: Ahh, its a Frontier flight] https://www.jetphotos.com/photo/keyword/N387FR
- I know what ACARS, is and understood less of what's going on here after reading the "What is ACARS drama?"
- It's an uncomfortable mirror, a reminder that not everything has to become puerile entertainment. I wouldn't call anything I read in the messages "drama"
- The odd obsession over framing it as "drama" & humorous, to the point it is difficult to understand the "what is this?", and collaborators are invited to "Feed the drama"
- Open endpoint for anyone to contribute "drama", meaning, anyone can feed anything they want, into this very official-looking feed, without any sourcing / clarification / anything
I see how this can read quickly as negativity unfairly directed at creative spirit, the motive power behind man.
What tipped me over into "well, it's worth expressing the ick" is that a full 20% of the comments, 14/64, are communicating, speculating, then riffing on, a passenger being molested.
Comments riffing on the LEO request for PAX TOUCHING PAX is just typical forum stuff. Not something that I condone and somewhat unsavory, but it’s the internet and people riff on much more horrible stuff online. Doesn’t mean it’s okay but just not a specific flaw of this project, imo…
18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(g)(ii)(I/IV):
"It shall not be unlawful under this chapter or chapter 121 of this title for any person to intercept any radio communication which is transmitted by any station for the use of the general public, or that relates to ships, aircraft, vehicles, or persons in distress;... or by any marine or aeronautical communications system."
But so were analog mobile phones and pagers, and in some countries, even receiving unencrypted voice ATC radio isn't legal.
Message: LOOKS LIKE WORKING NOW. WE TURNED OFF THEN ON FROM FLT DECK THX
Different industries, same procedures :-D
Well, that would be awkward.
HOWDY, WERE GOING TO NEED LEO MEET THE AIRPLANE FOR A PERSON TOUCHING ANOTHER PAX.
DISPMORNING. NEED LEO TO MEET THE AC. A PAX WAS INAPPROPRIATELY TOUCHING ANOTHER PAX IN THE ROW INFRONT OF THEM. THE FAS HAVE THE SEAT NUMBER ANDMANIFEST. FYI AND THX
NO VITALS. NO MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS ON BOARD
By why show the ones with only an ETA and FOB? Is FOB code for something interesting?
Edit: oh they seem like small numbers. Like 24 or 36, I’m assuming hundreds of pounds?
Could it be they are displayed because they have relatively little fuel left?
Example: https://infosec.exchange/@acarsdrama/114196005649300274
While they can do this if they choose to do so, nothing at the FCC's Enforcement Bureau has a lower priority than amateur radio and CB.
Several years ago I saw a story about the a new record set for fastest Atlantic crossing by a subsonic civilian flight. And due to wind conditions it flew across the US instead of the polar route (it was like LAX to LHW). Basically they just flew with the jet stream and had such a good tailwind they had a supersonic ground speed. 6 or maybe even 700 mph. Their route was much longer than polar but was more efficient because they had a 150 mph tailwind.
https://www.aviationtoday.com/2016/04/27/spectralux-launches...
Remember, also, that not all countries use QWERTY. France, one of the homes of Airbus, uses AZERTY. What should they do about their keyboards?
Some of the most interesting aviation research in the past few decades have been around human factors like psychology, perception, and cognition. If there was some substantial effect to having the buttons be arranged in a different pattern, I do legitimately hope it would have been found by now.
Do keep in mind these devices are cost-prohibitive in the extreme to design, build, and certify. The idea of having separate, parallel processes in order to have a different button layout between regional devices creates a thousand headaches of its own, both before and after production. The issue goes even further, in that just the FAA alone requires simulators of these aircraft to have replicated button look and feel criteria that would make your head spin. Is there even going to be a question as to if you're going to have to have two simulators? Will type-ratings be transferrable? Will there be separate differences training and/or currency requirements between the two distinct input methods?
Some or even most of those answers might turn out favorably for manufacturers or operators or pilots. But just having to ask them drives costs up considerably.
These days everyone types on a keyboard. It's way more universal, to the point where a non QWERTY layout has to impose additional cognitive load.
It was common to type on a keyboard also before, it just was a typewriter's keyboard.
Boeing found a way.
Swedish sorting traditionally and officially treated v and w as equivalent, so that users would not have to guess whether the word, or name, they were seeking was spelled with a v or a w. The two letters were often combined in the collating sequence as if they were all v or all w, until 2006 when the 13th edition of Svenska Akademiens ordlista (The Swedish Academy's Orthographic Dictionary) declared a change.
I'm thinking of the Swedish calendar[1] and Högertrafikomläggningen[2] when they switched which side of the road they drove on.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_calendar: TL;DR: The plan was to skip all leap days in the period 1700 to 1740. Every fourth year, the gap between the Swedish calendar and the Gregorian would reduce by one day, until they finally lined up in 1740... he Great Northern War stopped any further omissions... 1712 had 367 days... 1753... The leap of 11 days was accomplished in one step, with 17 February being followed by 1 March
although f and v would make more sense in terms of the actual sounds made?
Depends on the language. In German, f and v sound similar. And from your profile description I am guessing you are from the Netherlands, which I guess also might have f and v sound very similar to one-another.
In Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish, we have pretty clear distinction between f and v.
This is necessary because the order of words or characters is sometimes only sensibly defined if you know the language a text is written in.
I've seen a YouTube video in the last couple of years that explained the true origins of the QWERTY keyboard. Originally, the keyboard was alphabetical and arranged two rows, based on a piano keyboard, the black keys went A-N left to right, and the white keys went O-Z, right to left. Then it got shortened in width and the letters got folded over (this is why at the right edge of the middle row you have HJKL and the bottom row has MN reversed as NM).
I'm not 100% sure this was the video I saw, but it has some of the points: https://youtu.be/c8f6us-Sjlo
This is sort of like saying a c compiler is there to stop you from dereferencing null pointers
I like it! How else could we describe it?
C compilers exist to prevent developers from writing reliable code.
C compilers caught on because they allow geeks to act macho to other geeks.
C compilers exist because programmers on 32-bit systems were nostalgic for the DEC PDP-11.
C compilers exist because the industry worked out that fast code was way more lucrative than reliable code.
Anyone got more?
What/how is making listening in on that illegal ok?
That said, this is no different than listening to any other unencrypted, non-cellular radio traffic. Totally legal everywhere (except a few rare exceptions, like the UK).
And as I mentioned in my other comment, in the US the ECPA specifically says you can listen to aeronautical radio traffic.
And (after a cursory search) Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, maybe France... In other words, legal in some places, illegal in others.
> Text-based ATC communications is done over a different system called CPDLC (FANS-1/A)
ACARS is both an application and a (legacy) lower layer suite of protocols supporting it, but modern ACARS versions and CPDLC can use the same underlying digital channel, as far as I understand (i.e. VDL Mode 2).
As a result, many of these tracking sites can capture both, as well as presumably "legacy/analog" ACARS.
That said, it's supposedly still being very much enforced against e.g. planespotters at airshows in some places – no idea what the point of that is.
