This is trying to sanewash totally insane levels of risk aversion.

Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"? Do you think this behaviour has any meaningful true positives?

This is the kind of brainworms thinking that has people throwing our their 150ml liquids out at TSA and taking their shoes off.

Anecdote: I worked with software for battery EV power-train diagnostics, one of our devs decided to add emojis to success and error messages.

He added a fire emoji to one success message. When testers saw it they were afraid that the customer would think it was a thermal runway problem. Had to do a last-minute revision of the software before shipping the new version.

I was already pretty anti-emoji / personal touch / fun features / easter eggs in professional software. But having to pull a 2-hours overtime to crank out a new release definitely settled me on the side of never again.

edit: To be clear no one actually thought it was a problem, but our QA were very much serious about reducing any potential for confusion when dealing with >1million USD machinery.

Similarly, I worked on in-flight user-facing software, and we were allowed to use a “plane pointing downwards” icon to denote arrival time, because the connotations to crash were too strong.

No one believed that the icon would make the plane crash, but it’s about creating an environment that makes people feel as safe and comfortable as possible. You don’t want people freaking out when they’re locked in a small metal tube in the sky.

If the "terrorists" had changed the name of their bluetooth speaker, as asked, would they have been correct to proceed?

I've heard of stuff like this but I think it's fading. I remember tuning into in-flight radio a few years ago and hearing "love when you hit the ground, girl." If anything, I find the loosening strictures unimpressive, somehow - as though the collective brainpower to enforce them is dissipating.

I remember once a colleague receiving a call about a non-functional test environment during his commute, and he wanted to tell the ops person to restart all the processes. I think fellow passengers in his bus were not comforted to hear someone say over the phone "yeah, kill them all".

Now wait for manufactures introducing mandatory flight mode on devices (with Apple leading the way) that “trusted partners”, like airlines will be able to force-activate themselves.

I read somewhere years ago of panic ensuing when a pilot greeted a colleague on the radio with "Hi, Jack". Whether it happened for real or not, the idea of a simple word causing fighter jets to scramble is just crazy although fully understandable in the world post 9/11.

What do they call a software crash? Rapid unscheduled termination?

I used to work with a small Aviation-related software company. There it was really not like this, the boss made jokes about it. On the other hand engineering-wise things were done really differently: no branches, fail fast, only e2e tests etc. Probably the rift between small companies and corporate culture also applies here.

I was in New York for a conference 4 years ago, I was discussing with someone a previous project I had worked on in the UK that was a tool for companies to forecast certain risk scenarios "...you know like a building flooding or blowing up"

There were suddenly a lot of unhappy faces looking at me. I guess some folks are still a bit sensitive about that...

Aviation documentation in general is expected to use special, constrained variant of english (Simplified Technical English) where one of the requirements is that every word has preferably only one meaning, and there's a standard dictionary of those meanings that were selected.

Similarly there are various things like Aviation English for actual live comms, though they have less specifity, not to that level.

And yes, this is related to being clear and understandable both when communicating something live (you might have to dictate from a manual over the radio!) but also over native language barriers

This reminds me of the story I read of someone trying to take a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorimeter#Bomb_calorimeters onto a flight, in the pre-9/11 era. Fortunately he was allowed to after some questioning, but it did raise some eyebrows. I imagine trying to ship one of those would also arouse some attention.

The abbreviation "BoM" (bill of materials) is commonly used in engineering. It's also pronounced just how you might suspect. I wonder if it's consciously avoided in sectors like these.

So if your name is Gunnar, no chance in breaking into the industry?

I can appreciate the concern over these words among the flight staff.

But at the same time in the wake of these type of incidents and seeing how they are responded to, if I were a group that wanted to harm economic interests I'd invest in malware that I'd spend years silently spreading and then at some future date flip to a mode where infected devices detect when they are likely to be in-flight via GPS data and have them randomly change wifi hotspot and bluetooth identifiers to 'bomb' to inflict chaos and economic damage across a system that is apparently incapable of dealing with that.

I don't blame people who are responsible for the lives of others for overreacting in a one-off situation, but such overreaction could be weaponized.

There's a story (apocryphal or not) that does the rounds among mathematicians: two young PhD students in differential geometry (or topology in some variations) on the way to their first conference. They're eagerly discussing as they board their flight: "… and then, you blow up the points on this plane …" :-)

Sorry but this just sounds like complete lunacy

Here's the thing. If you're going to forbid a bunch of words and names for bullshit security 'reasons', you're going to have to be clear and up front about it.

Just like how we are clear and up front about water bottles, knitting needles, bottle openers, and nunchucks being forbidden in carry-on baggage. We clearly sign all that shit, we don't just keep that list secret.

Put up some wall-sized placards listing the words and device and product names (or the kinds of names, we don't need to be pedantic) that you are not supposed to use in airport, so that there is no confusion on the matter. Just because this is obvious and unwritten in your cultural context doesn't mean that international travelers who may not speak the language well are going to be aware of all the unwritten bullshit rules.

> In this particular case, it sounds like it wasn't the teen's fault, nor even a teen being slightly edgy.

Told to turn it off and refused to do so. Why are you defending the selfish little prick?

I don’t buy it.

I understand protecting people’s sensibilities by avoiding these words. That part makes sense. Same basic politeness as not using curse words in my variable names.

But to turn an entire flight around because of a Bluetooth device name? How does that make any rational sense?

Look at it from a Bayesian perspective. There’s some probability P that there’s a bomb on a random plane. Now, given that a specific plane has a Bluetooth device named “bomb,” what is P for that specific plane?

I argue that P is unchanged. I’d be interested if anyone disagrees with this assessment.

Given the probability is unchanged, why do anything?

I don’t think even the people involved believed there was any danger. They had closer airports they could have diverted to. Going all the way back to Newark makes no sense if you actually think there’s an increased chance there’s a bomb on the plane that might detonate at any time, or a hijacker who might decide to make an attempt, or any other threat.

Going back to the origin airport instead of a closer one is what you do when there’s some mundane problem like the weather being unsuitable at the destination, or a non-critical equipment failure.

So how does this make any rational sense? It doesn’t. It’s performance. Everyone wants to be seen Taking Things Seriously. Nobody is permitted (either explicitly by rules, or implicitly by social expectations) to say “somebody is being a real jerk, but there’s no point in diverting.”