No neither black box stores video. One stores audio on flash memory and the other stores flight details, sensors etc.
I don’t think video is a bad idea. I assume there is a reason why it wasn’t done. Data wise black boxes actually store very little data (maybe a 100mbs), I don’t know if that is due to how old they are, or the requirements of withstanding extremes.
This isn’t true. This was a 787. It does not use a separate recorder for voice and data (CVR, FDR).
(Most media outlets also got this wrong and were slow to make corrections. )
Rather, it uses a EAFR (Enhanced airborne flight recorder) which basically combines the functions. They’re also more advanced than older systems and can record for longer. The 787 has two of them - the forward one has its own power supply too.
There should be video as well, but I’m not sure what was recovered. Not necessarily part of the flight data recording, but there are other video systems.
That's really interesting. From reading air crash reports there's a lot of times I've seen."Nothing is known about the last 30 seconds because the damage broke the connection to the flight recorders in the tail"
In the US, the NTSB has been recommending it for over 20 years. The pilot unions have been blocking it, due to privacy and other things.
I'm not in aviation. But my between-the-lines straightforward reading is that unions see it as something with downsides (legal liability) but not much upside. It could be that there are a million tiny regulations that are known by everyone to be nonsensical, perhaps contradictory or just not in line with reality and it's basically impossible to be impeccably perfect if HD high fps video observation is done on them 24/7. Think about your own job and your boss's job or your home renovation work etc.
Theoretically they could say, ok, but the footage can only be used in case the plane crashes or something serious happens. Can't use it to detect minor deviations in the tiniest details. But we know that once the camera is there, there will be a push to scrutinize it all the time for everything. Next time there will be AI monitoring systems that check for alertness. Next time it will be checking for "psychological issues". Next time they will record and store it all and then when something happens, they will in hindsight point out some moment and sue the airline for not detecting that psychological cue and ban the pilot. It's a mess. If there's no footage, there's no such mess.
The truth is, you can't bring down the danger from human factors to absolute zero. It's exceedingly rare to have sabotage. In every human interaction, this can happen. The answer cannot be 24/7 full-blown totalitarian surveillance state on everyone. You'd have to prove that the danger from pilot is bigger than from any other occupation group. Should we also put bodycam on all medical doctors and record all surgeries and all interactions? It would help with malpractice cases. How about all teachers in school? To prevent child abuse. Etc. Etc.
Regulation is always in balance and in context of evidence possibilities and jurisprudence "reasonableness". If the interpretation is always to the letter and there is perfect surveillance, you need to adjust the rules to be actually realistic. If observation is hard and courts use common sense, rules can be more strict and stupid because "it looks good on paper".
You also have to think about potential abuses of footage. It would be an avenue for aircraft manufacturers, airlines, FAA, etc to push more blame on the pilots, because their side becomes more provable but the manufacturing side is not as much. You could then mandate camera video evidence for every maintenance task like with door plugs.
I wonder how the introduction of police body cam footage changed regulations of how police has to act. Along the lines of "hm, stuff on this footage is technically illegal but is clearly necessary, let's update the rules".
If you work in a job where the lives of hundreds could be ended in seconds due to an error or intentional action then there is no excuse to not have critical control surfaces recorded at all times. Non-commercial/private flights/flight instructors and trainees have cameras, trains have camera, stores have cameras, casinos have cameras, buses have cameras, workers who work for ride hailing services have cameras as do millions of other people who just drive.
Hopefully other countries will start deploying recording systems or start forcing manufacturers of planes to have these integrated into cockpits.
> The answer cannot be 24/7 full-blown totalitarian surveillance state on everyone.
Surveillance is actually pretty common in many high-risk environments. And piloting is very much not just any other job but an exceedingly rare situation where the lives of hundreds of people are in the hands of only two people without anyone else being able to do anything to influence the outcome.
That pilot unions don't want surveillance is to be expected (the union is there to act in the pilots interest) but ultimately it isn't just up to them.
> Should we also put bodycam on all medical doctors and record all surgeries and all interactions?
Yes. We are finally starting to do so for police. These are all situations where an individual or very small team has direct control over the life of others who can't defend themselves.
Just that: my experience has been roughly the same in an EU country and the US: there was not some magical interface or customer-centric viewpoint the imbued everything by virtue of the EU.
I recently learned that the New York City Police Department has international presence as well. Not sure if it directly compares, but... what a world we live in.
What about the threat model that goes, "Trump threatens to impose 1000% tariffs if Chinese don't immediately turn over copies of all data captured by their AI products from users in the US?"
Compounding the difficulty of the question: half of HN thinks this would be a good idea.
The history of tariff talks seems to indicate that rather than oblige, China would stop all shipments of semiconductors to the US and Trump would back down after a week or two.
Russia is more known for poisoning people. But of all of them China feels the least threatening if you are not Chinese. If you are Chinese you aren't safe from the Chinese government no matter where you are
Man wait until you hear what's in DC (and the surrounding area). In any possible way China is a threat to my health, the US state and corporations based here are a far greater one.
The point is, when Jobs was around, there was an overarching (unstated?) policy at Apple of “nobody do anything to make us look like cheap tasteless shits”. Whereas now, Tim Cook is very happy to sell out for a quick buck. He's a logistics guy, not a product guy, and at his core is a bean counter; he neither has taste nor appreciates that it has value unto itself.
There were ~60M iPhone users when Jobs was the CEO. There are about ~1.4B right now. Both respectively accomplished very respectable things. It’s not selling for a quick buck if he was able to scale the business to such degrees. That being said, I agree that Apple makes a lot of wrongs.
One google shows that’s considered the “current active user” count, not total sales. 2.3 billion by Jan 2024 (so more now) is the estimate for total sales.
I used a llm to sum your percentages and counted only 785,644,479 people. That's just over half the 1.4B claim.
However, it also linked to articles that showed that as of 2025, there are approximately 1.38 to 1.56 billion active iPhone users worldwide. So the percentages may be misleading but the number is correct.
Part of the appeal of Apple was that not everyone and their mom just had an Apple device. They heavily played on that, similar to how fashion does. That "exclusivity" (sort of) is gone now, and it shows with Apple trying to create likable, noncontroversial designs for the larger crowd. They try to make up for it with prices, but it misses the point.
I promise you, in 2005, everyone and their mom had an iPod. If you couldn’t afford the full fat iPod, you bought any of the various cheaper stripped down models. If anything, Apple has gotten more exclusive through their pricing.
Jobs had won complete cultural dominance of desktop pcs with the iMac 27". If you saw a desktop on a tv show for the past 20 years it was an iMac 27". Tim saw they could cancel it and go against their policy of minimal cords and sell separate Mac minis and Mac Studio displays.
The entire reason Apple made devices that were a level above competitors is because the design wasn’t just the aesthetic. Ive was chief designer and so obviously had a key impact.
It might be a complete misinterpretation but it seems like Ive went completely haywire when Job's was gone with the ultra thin, portless, overheating Macs with a crappy keyboards and pointless touch bars that sort of looked cool but provided no other real value.
Neither did your second sentence, and you still wrote it. Sometimes we write things down to draw attention to the fact, not to inform a naive audience of facts that they did not know.
1800 ish devs from the last figure I could find. 700 ish on Firefox.
Now there is no way 700 people actually work on Firefox code. Throw in team leads, QA, dev tools, UI, specialized developers like WebRTC and that number makes a little more sense. But still seems inflated.
Most of Mozilla is already remote.
I mean Mozilla and Firefox should survive. But I do imagine we’ll lose Thunderbird and anything not Firefox related. And dev will drop heavily. CEO salary of almost 7 million will need to go as well.
It may be good for Mozilla to return to a streamlined company. Rather then a bloated one as it is now.
Thunderbird is (amazingly) funded entirely by donations from users. The money is hypothecated for that purpose. There are so few good email clients now they get enough donors.
You can! Thunderbird lives in a separate entity outside the main Mozillasphere called MZLA. I've given a few times in the past and use it for personal use, but my workplace recently banned Thunderbird.
Almost nothing noticeable has changed with Firefox for years. A couple of minor features here and there, and just keeping up with standards. It does seem pretty excessive. Definitely seems that Mozilla has become massively wasteful and misguided over the past ~15 years.
That’s actually the point. An army of people are keeping up with standards so things just work. I’m curious as to what it looks like when only certain browsers are maintained.
That's one of the main problems with Google controlling not only the top browser but also the rendering engine behind most of the competition. They don't have to care about standards at that point. When they do, it's mostly to put a veneer of openness over their operations.
Yeah okay. How many dogs bit children in the same amount of time? How many people did cars kill in that same amount of time? How many fingers pinched by doors?
Opening an animal crossing next to a school in an area where there are many coyotes is a lot different than fingers pinched by doors. But if you’re making the argument that this animal crossing is so important than the occasional child being killed by animals is as trivial as fingers being pinched by doors, I know all I need to know about you.
I don’t think video is a bad idea. I assume there is a reason why it wasn’t done. Data wise black boxes actually store very little data (maybe a 100mbs), I don’t know if that is due to how old they are, or the requirements of withstanding extremes.