Saturday, March 15, 2014

The Atlantic: "Malaysia 370: Landing Strips, Cell Phones, and More-- Has Plane Landed At A Secret Site? Probably Not; Here's Why"

The Atlantic: "Malaysia 370: Landing Strips, Cell Phones, and More-- Has Plane Landed At A Secret Site? Probably Not; Here's Why"

March 15, 2014 China , Derek Thompson 1 Comments
By James Fallows
The ongoing Malaysia 370 investigation coincides with my being in transit, with family, and away from the Internet most of each day. (Writing this from the passenger seat of a car on a four-hour drive, hoping that my TMobile hotspot via Samsung Galaxy III holds up.) Here is a quick update on some of the developments since the inflight dispatch yesterday:

1) Derek Thompson sums up recent news for the Atlantic. You can see inhere.

2) Rupert Murdoch loses his mind. You can see it here. What's most amazing about the response below is that it happened before anything was known about the flight -- whether it had blown up, ditched in the sea, been hijacked, landed safely by mistake somewhere, etc.
Source:  The Atlantic / Twitter
It's possible that the jihadist interpretation will turn out to be true. But the word "confirms," before anyone knew (or yet knows) what happened to the flight, from perhaps the single most powerful "journalistic" figure in the world is ... well, it "confirms" a lot of judgments about Murdoch.

3) What about those cellphones?  We all know that cellphones can minutely track our movements as we walk or bike through cities or drive through the countryside. So why aren't they being used to track this flight?

One answer: We don't know whether all the phones were seized and disabled, if this was a hijacking. Another: planes can track us in our normal life because we're operating right at ground level, and in places designed to offer phone coverage. At airliner-flight levels, 35,000 feet in the case of this plane, and at airliner speeds, there usually is no coverage. (Try to make a call from 30,000+ feet on your next cross-country flight.) At any altitude there is usually no coverage over open water or in remote, jungle, mountain, or desert areas, which describes most of the path of this flight. More in a good AP explainer here. 

Read the full article:  www.theatlantic.com

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1 comment:

  1. Gregg WeberMarch 15, 2014 at 10:29 PM

    Go up to 45,000 ft and use portable cell phone RF signal detector to find, disable everyone's phones. That means more than one to pilot and others to subdue, control, collect phones.

    ReplyDelete

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