Phones

Plane stupidity: my waking flight-mare

The skies above the Atlantic As airplane doors and Boeing stock prices continue to fall, I think it’s time to tell the story of my iPhone and how it spent almost a week last October trapped inside the belly of a Boeing 767. A few hours into a United flight home from London, I was standing up to check on my then-five-month-old daughter, who was sleeping sweetly in the bassinet beside her father, when I felt my iPhone slip between the armrest and the window. It was still plugged into the outlet, so naturally I gave the charging cord a little tug, hoping to rescue the phone without incident. Instead, I felt it disconnect. No big deal, I thought. I scoured the area around my seat: no phone.

phone plane

America’s undersea lifelines

It is out of sight and usually out of mind, but recent events are forcing Americans to focus on the security of a vast network of undersea cables that the nation depends upon. In early February 2022, cables connecting Taiwan to its Matsu Islands off the coast of China were cut in what appears to be an act of sabotage that Taipei later ascribed to Chinese vessels. It took nearly two months for the internet to be up and running again, highlighting the importance of a largely ignored element of a country’s critical infrastructure.  According to TeleGeography, a telecommunications research and consulting firm, there are around 552 undersea cables, connecting almost every inhabited landmass. Most are fiberoptic, utilizing light to transmit massive quantities of data.

cables