The nanny state of frighten Trump voters who have never seen a brown person is coming for our laptops and cameras. This is what happens when people who donât understand actual threats to the US lead the country.
How is this productive? Trrsts⢠can hide bombs in anything. Are we all to ship our luggage and fly naked? What if the bomb is sewn into my body? Didnât think about THAT did ya? Oops, now you canât not think about that. Sorry!
[quote]U.S. officials have said the decision⌠wasnât based on
any specific threat but on longstanding concerns about extremists
targeting jetliners.[/quote]
There is nothing more to say. This may not even be related to Trump idiocy, just the idiocy of bureaucracy where to protect their asses, the high level official want to substitute an unknown and probably small risk of terrorists smuggling bombs into airliners under the guise of laptop batteries by a probably larger risk of lithium batteries catching fire in flight.
âYou need a lot of time to inform them and a lot of time for it to enter peopleâs heads until it becomes a habit,â he said. âAfter a week of quite big difficulties, 95 percent of people will understand the practicalities.â
Nope. They will not. and it means everyone must check their bag now, right? no carry-ons?
Interesting observation⌠Extra $25/passenger for each airline although admittedly its a lot of unnecessary logistics and labor.
On the other hand, my son was considering a trip home this summer on Turkish airlines through Istanbul and apparently, they still treat the electronics as check-in. I have not looked too carefully since the schedule did not work out, but I think a passenger takes the electronics to the gate as a carry-on and then it is checked at the gate, packed into Turkish Airline suitcase, marked with passengerâs name and returned upon arrival with the ID check (again, I did not look carefully).
Of course, right now Turkish Airlines tries to deal with a competitive disadvantage. If all airlines have to check in electronics, the motivation to go an extra mile for passengers goes away.
My son-in-law travels overseas often; heâs in London right now. He does a lot of work while flying there (not affected yet) and back, and heâs hardly alone. I think thereâs going to be tremendous pushback. Same goes for Europeans who are traveling here for business.
So cell phones with exploding batteries are OK then?
Only the EU? Not Britain (and not Russia)? Is it co-incidence this comes so soon after the Russian visit from which American press were excluded?
I canât see how this could stop determined terrorists at all. A laptop is a full-fledged computer. It can be programmed to be operated remotely from a cell phone. Anyone who really wants to blow something up can write or obtain the software to do that with a laptop containing a bomb, even if itâs in the cargo hold. It could even be operated by someone on the ground on the other side of the planet. The âbombâ could simply be a modified Lithium battery. An attacker could compromise an innocent passengerâs laptop to set that up (if able to get at the laptop for a few minutes.)
Not only that, most (all?) computers have the ability to self-start. It usually requires they be connected to a power adaptor but that would be a rather easy programming hack to get around that. You wouldnât even need to operate it remotely, in luggage where NO ONE can see whatâs going on, it could start up, run a script, purposefully overheat, trigger something inside (or trigger something in another nearby piece of luggage via bluetooth), etc⌠This strikes me as being a monumentally stupid idea just on the safety reasons alone. When business and first class passengers chime in, I suspect this will go nowhere.
I remember when having to turn on a laptop was standard for domestic flights. But I guess thatâs too complicated for todayâs TSA.
Oddly enough, I think that this will hit business travelers less. They can just keep a laptop/tablet on each end of the flight and go with it, rather than face the high (and about to get higher) likelihood of damage or theft. Tourists are not in a position to add a couple grand to the cost of every trip.
And tourists with children will pretty much stop traveling by air until this is worked out, because nowadays having a kid device-free for the length of a flight â much less the whole rest of the vacation â really doesnât go very well.(Or maybe airlines will have special âinspectedâ tablets you can rent for the low, low price of $50 a segment.)
That doesnât seem like a practical solution at all.
Does this ban really really to only EU countries, not Britain? Something fishy there, if true.
Iâm pretty sure that since lithium batteries are prohibited in the baggage area, you canât check your laptop (besides the potential for theft and/or damage)
So no laptops at all?!!
âBan laptops.â Good grief. Thatâs ridiculous.
Edit: No, wait. not according to this:
Chief among the concerns are whether any new threat prompted the proposal and the relative safety of keeping in the cargo area a large number of electronics with lithium batteries, which have been known to catch fire.
When you gate check your bag, cuz EVERYBODY tries to do carryon to avoid the baggage fees, the 1st question you are asked is, are there any lithium batteries in your bags?
So, I donât see how checking your laptop would work?
You must not fly very often. More like eight hours.
This will, of course, be a real boon to those airline workers who are in the baggage theft profession.
Insurance can cover the loss of a laptop or camera from your checked bag. The bigger problem is sanitizing the laptop sufficiently to prevent huge identity theft problems if someone swipes the laptop from your suitcase. And no, putting a password on the laptop wonât take care of it.
AWESOMEâŚWTF do the âbusinessmenâ BOZOs think THIS will accomplish other than fk up trade, legal immigration, tourism, etc. etc. Global industry? FK IT.
