[HN Gopher] Titan submersible's $62 SanDisk memory card found un...
___________________________________________________________________
Titan submersible's $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at
wreckage site
Author : WithinReason
Score : 411 points
Date : 2025-10-17 06:39 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| asimovDev wrote:
| is this a common setup to have the camera store to external
| storage device without storing to the SD card as well?
| malux85 wrote:
| Yes because external storage is much larger, and theres nothing
| more annoying than being in the middle of doing some science
| with 30 other bits of complex equipment, and then the camera
| stops working with storage full errors and youre 7000m
| underwater in a cramped sub trying to navigate a camera UI to
| find the setting.
|
| Configure your systems so they are in the configuration that is
| less likely to cause random disruption in the field.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| Which makes me wonder why they bother with the SD card at
| all. What was it meant to be storing? If it is not intended
| to be the real storage area, why not just have it in a loop,
| constantly over-writing the oldest material?
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| They probably used it for testing only, hence why it had
| irrelevant footage.
|
| They might have forgot to remove or just didn't care.
| mook wrote:
| The camera was an off the shelf part (from a very specialty
| shelf I suppose). It had an SD card built in because some
| people might not have a thing to stream to; it's probably
| good for demos and cheap enough to be good for a bullet
| point. Given the rest of the components inside they
| probably had enough margin that they weren't optimizing for
| costs. The value add was in the pressure vessel, and that
| seems to have mostly worked.
| intothemild wrote:
| It continues to amaze me how indestructible SDCards are.
| imploded_sub wrote:
| It wasn't in the crushed part, it was in the camera's shell,
| and the camera was mounted outside, if I understood properly.
| netsharc wrote:
| And:
|
| > This still and video camera is rated to withstand depths up
| to 6,000m (19,685 feet, 3,281 fathoms)
|
| Unlike the Titan sub...
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| The picture looks like the camera + storage SD card were in a
| sealed metal tube that was untouched.
| daemonologist wrote:
| Although the entire enclosure was shaken around enough to
| tear bits off the PCB via sheer inertia and crack the CPU
| (hence the need for the recovery process described).
| HPsquared wrote:
| It clearly received a nasty shock when the sub imploded;
| that's why the internal components were so broken.
| gompertz wrote:
| It also amazes me how incredibly unbrowseable tomshardware is
| now with all the ads and pop-ups.
| haunter wrote:
| It also amazes me that people are using the internet w/o an
| adblocker in the year 2025
| bookofjoe wrote:
| I think you mean HN readers.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I haven't bothered working out how to install one on
| mobile. I just don't visit websites with shitty ads.
| squigz wrote:
| Firefox on mobile supports uBlock Origin
| firesteelrain wrote:
| On iOS, every browser is required by Apple to use WebKit.
| I just tried it again myself and FireFox on iPhone has no
| ublock Origin add on possibility.
|
| Firefox Focus does work as an alternative.
|
| Apple created a special system-level API for Safari
| Content Blockers. Apps like Firefox Focus, AdGuard,
| 1Blocker, Wipr can register filtering rules with Safari
| using this API. That's why Focus can block ads/trackers
| inside Safari if you enable it under Safari
| hexagonwin wrote:
| use orion browser? or ubo lite on safari
| scrollaway wrote:
| > On iOS, every browser is required by Apple to use
| WebKit
|
| Didn't this change recently?
| rs186 wrote:
| In EU only, and to my knowledge no mainstream browser
| vendor has shipped a real browser with their own engine
| yet. Too much work, and they need to maintain two
| different versions (EU and non-EU). The whole situation
| is a mess.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Only for EU.
| zero_bias wrote:
| Safari on iOS support uBlock origin too
| pajamasam wrote:
| Just use the Brave browser. No plugins necessary.
| qingcharles wrote:
| It has poor compatibility on the iOS version that I've
| got installed, sadly.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| i was also in shock, then someone reminded me there are
| iphone users.
|
| the horror.
|
| paying thousands of dollars just to be forbidden to block
| ads.
| haunter wrote:
| ?
|
| There are countless free and paid options on iOS too
|
| Firefox Focus, Brave
|
| AdGuard Pro, $9.99 once and you can use any blocklist you
| want (you can just copypaste from uBlock Origin if you
| wish) and it works system-wide with Safari
|
| etc
| jamiek88 wrote:
| what? there are many fantastic ad blockers on ios. Weird
| thing to crow about.
| InMice wrote:
| Lockdown app for ios - if you arent using your single
| active vpn connection on iOS lockdown app runs as a local
| vpn and even app telemetry, ads everything is blocked.
| Many options on ios, sir.
| pwg wrote:
| With UblockOrigin blocking the ads, there were no ads and
| pop-ups.
| gruez wrote:
| It's a solid piece of silicon encased in epoxy, so there's
| nothing really to get crushed. Contrast this to something like
| a cellphone that's made of hundreds of separate parts and has
| void space that will get crushed.
| amelius wrote:
| Why isn't a cellphone filled with epoxy?
| bell-cot wrote:
| That would be a problem for the mic and speaker, and has
| relatively few use cases.
| tom_alexander wrote:
| How would you do screen replacement? That is a common
| repair since people drop their phones and currently you can
| get your phone repaired by some teenager in a booth at the
| mall. If you fill the phone with epoxy, how are you
| detaching the screen, and getting a new ribbon cable
| through the epoxy?
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| use pogo pins or a board to board connector
| bluGill wrote:
| Which means air space that can get crushed. Either the
| phone is solid or it isn't.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Which means air space that can get crushed_
|
| Would note that air isn't the only substance in a phone
| that compresses under 38 MPa. (Batteries come to mind.)
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Just like they do it today - a lot of grinding, swearing
| and overall understanding what the civilization is going
| in not quite the right direction.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| So what if you can't replace a screen on an epoxy-filled
| cell phone? That's a small price to pay for knowing that
| your camera will survive if you take a one-way trip to
| crush-depth.
| blackoil wrote:
| Is this sarcasm? 99.999% people will never take it beyond
| a meter in a pool.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| Poe's Law never fails. I should have accounted for that.
| userbinator wrote:
| I'm sure there are some companies who want to do that, as
| long as they can convince people it's better for security
| or something.
| numpad0 wrote:
| It's just not necessary, while having reliability problems
| of its own.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > Why isn't a cellphone filled with epoxy?
|
| Added cost and weight are two things that would put off
| consumers. The phone would also be neigh irreparable, but
| consumers don't seem to care for that other than replacing
| their screen.
| amelius wrote:
| A conformal coating wouldn't give much more weight.
| dotancohen wrote:
| A conformal coating isn't "filled with epoxy", which is
| the concern I was answering.
| amelius wrote:
| There is very little empty space in a phone, so conformal
| coating is practically the same as filling it.
|
| Anyway, I wasn't disagreeing, just reasoning a bit
| further.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| The point of filling it is to remove the compressible
| empty space so that large pressure gradients won't crush
| it.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| No, conformal coating and _potting_ are extremely
| different things done for different reasons.
| amelius wrote:
| I'm not talking about which methods are being used, I'm
| talking about which methods could be used. Further,
| potting, where you let the epoxy drip off, gives you a
| conformal coating.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Conformal coating is much less viscous and would leave a
| layer orders of magnitude thinner then letting potting
| epoxy drip off. It's not at all comparable.
| amelius wrote:
| You are talking about a conventional conformal coating.
| NuclearPM wrote:
| Neigh?
| ohyes wrote:
| Some claim we are centaurs, we say Neigh!
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| This joke seems like it would make more sense if centaurs
| didn't have human vocal tracts.
| tagawa wrote:
| I think they meant "nigh on irreparable".
| dotancohen wrote:
| I didn't notice that, I was dictating to Gboard. If
| that's what was heard, then I should probably go eat some
| hay and get my tail brushed.
| rob74 wrote:
| OTOH, adding epoxy on top of everything else would
| probably only reduce their iFixit repairability score
| from 1 to 0, so...
| jjk166 wrote:
| When was the last time your phone stopped working due
| mechanical PCB damage?
|
| Typically the limiting factor on your phone is the screen
| breaking, your battery life getting too short, wear and
| tear on components like buttons or the charging port, and
| factory defects. Epoxy isn't going to help with any of
| those. The only thing it would help with is exposure to
| water, but if other parts of your phone like your screen
| aren't water proof, what's the point?
|
| Epoxy adds weight and manufacturing cost. It introduces
| design challenges as you need to balance the thermal
| expansion of the various parts. It's an extra step that can
| go wrong, and makes repair of other defects far more
| difficult. What benefit is there for the typical consumer
| that outweighs these costs?
| withinboredom wrote:
| To add to that. My son got his phone caught in a
| reclining chair without realizing it. The fact that the
| phone bent in half instead of destroying the chair is a
| nice bonus. Replacing the phone was cheap, replacing a
| chair would not have been -- yes, both are insured, but
| replacing/repairing a chair takes a hell of a lot longer.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| I think most would disagree XD.
|
| Phones these days are often more expensive than the chair
| and can be pretty inconvenient to replace, especially if
| you have nonrecent backups.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah not sure about you guys but me and everyone I know
| buys their stuff in ikea where a chair definitely doesn't
| cost more than a good cell phone
| xvector wrote:
| I got an Eames chair recently and would be devastated if
| my phone damaged it!
| withinboredom wrote:
| And for just a few bucks per month, it can be insured and
| replaced for a couple hundred bucks. My chair is also
| insured through homeowners insurance (the US equivalent
| name, called something different here in the NL), and
| they would give me the value of the chair... but now I
| have to find it again, get it delivered, take my old
| chair to the dump, etc. The phone was a quick visit to
| the Apple Store and restore from backup.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| The GoPro Session actually took this tack to achieve
| waterproofness without a secondary case.
| scrumper wrote:
| Well, most cellphones aren't subjected to the conditions
| found under three miles of frigid sea water. Epoxy is also
| really, really expensive.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Thermal concerns perhaps - how does epoxy dissipate heat?
| amelius wrote:
| Some types of epoxy actually conduct heat quite well.
| Aurornis wrote:
| The heavy components on a cell phone PCB are reinforced
| with spot applications of adhesive to the PCB.
|
| Filling the entire cell phone with epoxy wouldn't help. The
| parts that break on drops are external like the screen.
|
| This SD card was enclosed in a sealed metal container so it
| wasn't exposed to water.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I don't need any extra grams in my phone!
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Because then it gets a 0/10 repairability score on ifixit
| :)
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| That can be avoided by filling it with a fluid that the
| repairman can simply drain instead.
|
| People hydromod digital quartz wristwatches by filling
| them with oil. This gives them truly absurd water
| resistances and even improves the readability of the
| screen somehow.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| "My phone needs an oil change"
|
| "I dropped my phone and all the oil leaked out making a
| mess"
|
| Yeah that's not going to happen my dude.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Imagine how much drama they could have avoided if they
| filled the entire submersible.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Filling dive watches with oil (hydro modding) is pretty
| popular. It mainly helps with visibility but also increases
| the depth rating.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| Shhhh - don't give Apple ideas.
| shadowpho wrote:
| Because then it'll become unrepairable. It's a tricky
| trade-off that cell phones/tablets-laptops have to deal
| with. Easy to repair vs durable vs cost/time. And Apple
| (for example) cares about repairability because they also
| need/want to repair phones (warranty/trade in for example)
| pfdietz wrote:
| This comment made me wonder how much easier proximity fuzes
| would have been to develop in WW2 had they had transistors
| (or integrated circuits). I assume making modern solid state
| electronics 20,000g shock resistant is much easier than doing
| the same to vacuum tubes.
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| No need to wonder, proximity fuzes are still used today.
| And yes, they are much smaller, cheaper, more reliable, and
| precise.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I was wondering _how much_ easier it would have been,
| specifically in dollar terms. Order of magnitude?
| dylan604 wrote:
| So that's the next phase of making devices thinner? /s
| chrsw wrote:
| Are consumer grade cards really reliable though? Not so much
| against physical damage, but of data integrity over extended
| periods? "Industrial" SD cards can be 10 times or 100 times
| more expensive than consumer grade cards.
| MBCook wrote:
| So were the flash chips on the SSDs they found. It didn't
| save them.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| the plural part is the key here, the bigger area means any
| uneven forces have more chance of bending and cracking
| stuff.
|
| It was also in casing already prepared for that type of
| environment
| hinkley wrote:
| Say for argument's sake there was a small air bubble in the
| resin. Couldn't that result in cavitation?
| stefan_ wrote:
| The SDCard that was in another sub, properly constructed from
| titanium not carbon. The sub housed a camera, no humans.
| userbinator wrote:
| Heat and wear are the greatest dangers to flash memory, and
| this was found in a cold dark place, with presumably plenty of
| life remaining.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _It continues to amaze me how indestructible SDCards are._
|
| Until they're sold as supplemental hard drives ( _cough_
| Transcend Jetdrive _cough_ ). Then they'll fail if you even
| look at them strangely.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Put one in a Raspberry pi and it will be dead in a month.
| foobarian wrote:
| remember the noatime mount option for the root fs!
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| A month? Those are rookie numbers!
|
| Write an image to a smallish SD card using dd (to remove
| most of the blocks from wear-levelling circulation), mount
| without -noatime, and you should be able to get the
| lifespan down to a few hours!
| jonas21 wrote:
| The NTSB's original report has more detail on how the SD Card was
| encrypted and how the NTSB managed to decrypt it:
|
| https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=18741602&Fi...
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Does not leave SubC in a particularly flattering light...
| Aurornis wrote:
| They had no idea how their own product worked. They didn't
| even know it used encrypted storage.
|
| This was either outsourced or done by some junior engineer
| who was putting pieces together like it was another Raspberry
| Pi project that just needed to kind of work.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The longer I last in this world the more products I realize
| are the result of telling a few people who don't know what
| they are doing to "make it kind of work."
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| That's my entire experience in embedded. Everything I get
| from other companies basically looks like an internship
| project right down to the pointer arguments with
| unspecified bounds on the function calls. One of the
| companies we bought hardware from keeps representing
| things are working when they only work on devices in the
| lab. Almost nobody in the space produces anything
| professional and everything uses Yocto even for two
| person projects where Multistrap would be more
| productive.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| What kind of hardware projects do you work on?
|
| I'm mostly in the software space but in the past few
| years I've been doing a lot more embedded stuff, and the
| trend I notice is that companies are making great
| hardware, and then completely ruining its usefulness with
| bad software and firmware. It's kind of mind blowing to
| me because I always considered software to be the easy
| part of making a product, compared to, you know, etching
| microscopic patterns onto sand to make magical
| transistors appear in just the right way to do the task
| you want.
| kiba wrote:
| It's all about what works enough according to a rather
| low bar.
| homebrewer wrote:
| It's almost as if hardware was developed by actual
| engineers, unlike, you know, the other half of the pie.
| dboreham wrote:
| This is in fact the case.
| Symbiote wrote:
| It survived the pressure, does the rest matter?
| nativeit wrote:
| In this context? Certainly. This is more examples of their
| using untested, uncertified equipment. Anyone who's ever
| worked in O2-enriched pressurized environments should at
| least be instantly concerned about whether this device had
| been properly rated for fire prevention.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| The System on Module board is an Inforce 6601 SOM. [0]
|
| It uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 and they provide prebuilt
| Ubuntu Linaro distros for it, preconfigured for the board.
|
| The camera manufacturer likely just tossed it straight in as
| configured and thus didn't know how the full disk encryption
| was setup.
|
| This whole camera design looks like one of those 'we gave this
| project to some undergrad engineering students who've never
| designed a commercial product before and had no price target
| and thus it has a whole damn embedded linux system inside it
| for merely taking some HD video and stills triggered by some
| external wiring and saving them to an SD card'.
|
| See also: almost any specialty medical electronic device ever
| manufactured.
|
| [0] https://linuxgizmos.com/tiny-rugged-com-runs-linux-or-
| androi...
| Interesco wrote:
| The 3D-printed (and hot glued?) part in Figure 3 further
| support this theory (not that 3D prints can't be used in
| production).
| userbinator wrote:
| Indeed this is massively overcomplicated, as one only needs
| to see what dashcams use to know that you don't need, or
| perhaps want, an entire OS on it.
| Neywiny wrote:
| I'll admit I only watched a video on it not the report, but
| it had pictures reportedly redacted at manufacturer request.
| It showed a teensy 3 and some adafruit qwiic board in there.
| Obviously the real engineering is in the enclosure. Otherwise
| it could just be a webcam. But still, it's clearly not a very
| in depth electrical design. I'm all for SoMs if you can but
| they don't guarantee you the adventure of custom hardware
| bringing moving through all the software stacks and whatnot.
| 15155 wrote:
| No serious commercial product should be using a Teensy
| under basically any circumstance.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| Can I ask why? I'm not really into microprocessors.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Usually (not always), something like a Teensy or a Pi
| Pico or an Arduino is treated like a development board
| for prototyping.
|
| A person builds out their circuit using hardware they can
| solder/wire-up by hand on a workbench, maybe even with
| relatively-giant solderless breadboards, to prove the
| concept and the general design.
|
| And a dev board can be great for spinning a few
| prototypes. It's quick to get started (code can begin
| being tested on-chip after just plugging in a USB cable),
| and to try different things and to make (and correct!)
| mistakes. (Blow up a Teensy? No worries; just grab
| another from the drawer, try not to make that same
| mistake again, and keep moving -- no esoteric soldering
| required)
|
| But when the design is finished-enough and it becomes
| time to spin up custom-built PCBs for a final product
| that will be sold, a separate dev board like a Teensy
| tends to lose much of its initial charm.
|
| Instead, it's more-typical just put the microcontroller
| IC plus whatever supporting hardware is necessary for the
| overall device's actual functions on the main board.
| Don't need USB, or an Ethernet PHY, an LED, a button, or
| a separate voltage regulator? Want more or less flash?
| When including the MCU on a board of one's own design
| instead of a kitchen-sink dev board, one is empowered to
| use exactly the parts that are required.
|
| This can save a substantial amount of space and greatly
| improve the flexibility of the layout, while also
| improving mechanical and electrical robustness by having
| fewer connections between the MCU and the world around
| it. Plus, fewer parts tend to be less costly than more
| parts are.
|
| (But again, it's not always done this way. This camera
| from the submarine is an example of one instance where
| the whole dev board was put inside of a finished product.
| Sometimes that's a good idea, and sometimes it isn't. I'm
| not attempting to suggest that it was or was not a good
| move in this instance.)
| BikiniPrince wrote:
| That's entirely true for manufacturing at scale. I really
| doubt they are selling a lot of these.
| 15155 wrote:
| JLCPCB will stick an IMXRT1064 and an oscillator on 5
| custom PCBs for you for <$100 - the Teensy is basically
| $25-$35 for the same thing.
| nativeit wrote:
| $25-35/ea, so well over $100 for 5 boards.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I suspect you're right about the quantities. In support
| of that notion, when looking closer at the (linked in
| another user's comment) PDF of the report, I can see that
| a lot of this camera's internal structure quite clearly
| appears to be the product of an FDM 3D printer. This
| suggests that quantities are low.
|
| And I don't know when that camera was manufactured or
| designed.
|
| But these days, it's possible to get even hobbyist-
| quantities of custom PCBs delivered with difficult-to-
| solder ICs installed from sources like JLCPCB.
|
| (Depending on the features and functions wanted, it
| doesn't take a whole lot of extra parts to get an MCU to
| do its thing: There's not a ton of parts on a Teensy to
| begin with.)
| gambiting wrote:
| Everything you said makes sense except you haven't
| explained why you can't just seal up a Teensy in an
| enclosure and sell it that way, except for "you're not
| supposed to do that". Are Teensies prone to random
| failure or something? Because if they _just work_ and you
| 're only selling <50 devices for extremely specialized
| nieche then I really don't see a problem with this?
| ssl-3 wrote:
| (I previously wrote something rather crude. I am
| attempting to revise that into something more positive.)
|
| In this context, all people are free to do whatever they
| want. It is beyond me to suggest that any person cannot
| do a thing.
| gambiting wrote:
| Well, but it's not about whether someone can or cannot do
| something. Since you seem experienced with these devices
| I'm just asking if there's any technical reason why this
| might be a bad idea other than the fact that it just
| doesn't seem like a very professional thing to do. Like
| for example even though I'm far from an expert I know
| Raspberry Pis would be awful for any commercial
| application because they are notorious for killing their
| SD cards rendering the device useless.
| nativeit wrote:
| The Teensy wasn't engineered, tested, rated, or certified
| for any sort of continuous duty, let alone within a
| pressurized O2-enriched environment (assuming it was
| inside the vessel), especially not within deep sea
| Helium-enriched environments (that have been shown to
| break things like MEMS devices), and present unnecessary
| risks for an entirely inefficient choice (see: comment
| above, Teensy's are ~$30-40/ea where small PCBs populated
| with the same circuit features can be had for under $20).
|
| I'm probably not as qualified as the person you replied
| to, but that's my intuition as someone with a passing
| familiarity with electronics engineering (I have an
| associates degree in EE).
| ssl-3 wrote:
| People do whatever they want. It doesn't have to make
| sense.
|
| Perhaps disturbingly: I even know of one bit of critical
| public safety communications infrastructure that is is
| expensive, low production volume, and has a Raspberry Pi
| 3 embedded inside. I won't name names because that's
| getting a little too close to home for my liking, but I
| was quite surprised to find this inside of a very nice
| waterproof box with chonky, expensive, olive-colored
| milspec connectors to connect it up to the outside world.
|
| Which, well: Yeah. There's a ton of good reasons not to
| do that. But building a whole Linux system on a custom
| board using individual parts is hard, so it can make
| sense to buy someone else's work instead.
|
| Except... that's what the CM3 is designed to provide,
| including on-board eMMC instead of an SD card. I'd not
| have been surprised at all if there was a CM3 in there,
| but there is instead an entire Pi 3.
|
| But MCUs, like on the Teensy, aren't like that. They
| aren't hard to integrate on a custom board like the
| Broadcom SoC on a Pi 3 or CM3 is.
|
| The primary purpose of an MCU is not to be stuffed onto a
| dev board like a Teensy, but instead to be stuffed onto
| the board inside of a microwave oven or an air fryer or a
| fancy remote control and be easy to interface with other
| things and to program.
|
| It really doesn't take much to get them going: Some
| require external ROM or flash, but a _lot_ of them have
| internal flash memory and only need power and programming
| pins wired up to let them run code and do whatever IO is
| needed within a system.
|
| This camera already had at least one very custom board
| inside. It could have integrated the MCU, as well,
| instead of the kitchen-sink Teensy.
|
| Doing so is not just style points; it's quite often
| easier, cheaper, and more flexible.
|
| This allows a person to use all of the IO pins on the MCU
| to do stuff with, instead of just the functions that the
| designer of a dev kit decided to build out through
| whatever interfaces they decided to include.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| > This whole camera design looks like one of those 'we gave
| this project to some undergrad engineering students who've
| never designed a commercial product before and had no price
| target and thus it has a whole damn embedded linux system
| inside it for merely taking some HD video and stills
| triggered by some external wiring and saving them to an SD
| card'.
|
| > See also: almost any specialty medical electronic device
| ever manufactured.
|
| These are not design mistakes.
|
| When building products in short runs and where the costs of
| part have little impact on your margins compared to R&D, it
| completely makes sense to go for a full computer rather than
| bother with embedded development where everything is more
| complicated. Medical also has to deal with certification
| which is a much more significant concern than saving on parts
| and will often reuse already certified components.
| Hamuko wrote:
| But how did anyone figure out it was a SanDisk SD card? Card
| details were redacted.
| Macha wrote:
| There's only 3 manufacturers of SD cards in any volume, you can
| compare the branding and font choices and see who's it is.
| serf wrote:
| SanDisk is one of the big three on SD-3C/SD Association.. so
| kinda regardless of the MFG it's 'one of theirs' in a
| roundabout way.
| matja wrote:
| Presumably because it looks identical to a Sandisk extreme pro
| 512gb, with grey boxes drawn over the logo.
| MBCook wrote:
| The report has a heavily redacted interview with a submarine
| expert. Who directed Titanic and The Abyss.
|
| They're not good at redacting.
| siliconunit wrote:
| also basically if enough companies agrees on helping the cause
| your crypto secrets are quite more likely to be exposed...
| yread wrote:
| Isnt the weakness here that there was nothing encrypting the
| actual key? On a laptop luks key stored in a tpm would usually
| be encrypted using your passphrase
| XorNot wrote:
| The NTSB report noted that if the TrustZone secure enclave
| system was being used, then yeah this data would be toast.
|
| But it speaks more to Oceangstrs negligence that this
| situation even existed: why wasn't any potential encryption
| keys escrowed ashore to ensure they could be recovered later?
| This shouldn't have even been an issue.
| daemonologist wrote:
| It seems the manufacturer of the camera didn't even know
| (at least in the part of the org communicating with the
| NTSB) that their storage was encrypted. In any case the
| media recovered were from testing/non-dive environments,
| and during an actual dive footage would presumably be
| recorded directly to the onboard computers (which were
| irrecoverably destroyed).
|
| Oceangate should take the blame for a lot of things but
| probably not this.
| dmix wrote:
| Since not everyone reads articles:
|
| > Somewhat disappointingly, the images and videos shared in the
| report were taken in the vicinity of the ROV shop at the Marine
| Institute, also in Newfoundland. The location was the logistical
| base for Titanic dive missions. No deep-sea shenanigans around
| the Titanic wreck were revealed.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Wouldn't it have been streaming it to disk without creating the
| file? Kinda like how if your camera dies while it's recording,
| there is no recording. You have to manually recreate the file.
| MBCook wrote:
| I think that's what they think. It was being recorded by the
| onboard PC to its SSDs, which were completely destroyed in
| the implosion.
| RandomBK wrote:
| I see a lot of discussion in this thread stemming from some
| confusion+not reading the actual report[0].
|
| Some key points:
|
| 1. The Camera+Card was encased in a separate enclosure made of
| titanium+sapphire, and did not seem to be exposed to extreme
| pressures.
|
| 2. The encryption was done via a variant of LUKS/dm-crypt, with
| the key stored on the NVRAM of a chip (Edited; not in TrustZone).
|
| 3. The recovery was done by transplanting the original chip onto
| a new working board. No manufacturer backdoors or other hidden
| mechanisms were used.
|
| 4. Interestingly, the camera vendor didn't seem to realize there
| was any encryption at all.
|
| [0]
| https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=18741602&Fi...
| nxobject wrote:
| If the encryption was that easy to bypass, was it worth it at
| all?
| anakaine wrote:
| Sure. If the card was recovered without the camera
| motherboard then the decryption key would not have been
| recovered.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| Stealing a camera is much harder than stealing an SD card out
| of a camera.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Citation needed. It might be slightly easier, but most
| cases where you can get part of the camera, you can get the
| whole camera. This isn't a little point-and-click with a
| handy spring-loaded slot either.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| Yeah but the Camera's owner is much more likely to notice
| "my camera is missing" than "the SD card is blank for
| some reason... the SD card must have failed"
|
| EDIT: The linked PDF has a photo, the camera literally
| opens up to access the SD card.
| Y_Y wrote:
| The camera's (former) owner may very well notice, but
| that will have little effect. It's much more common that
| cameras (security, photography, phones) get stolen with
| cards inside, rather than someone extracting the card and
| leaving the camera.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| This is professional equipment, used for surveys. Think
| espionage, not consumer hardware.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Worth mentioning that I would immediately know if a
| different SD card was in my camera the moment I turned it
| on or ejected the card. If somebody knew to buy the same
| exact model and storage size that would be truly
| impressive.
| ZiiS wrote:
| Industrial espionage is far far more often done by hard
| work then being clever. Checking the SD cards you use and
| buying matching ones before executing a swap isn't
| noteworthy.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| If you look through my case of SD cards I have all sorts
| of sizes and makes/models. I also have a procedure for
| dumping and formatting, and someone who is handling this
| most likely would as well. The moment the storage on
| screen looks funny or I see the card I don't recognize,
| I'll notice.
|
| I'm not saying it's impossible or I'm somehow immune to
| being tricked, but you would be surprised how easy it is
| to leave evidence of tampering through the simple act of
| trying to take an SD card, whether you swap it out or
| not. And people like me who handle them regularly would
| likely notice it in a split second. Maybe we won't even
| catch the perpetrator, but it would not be written off as
| "oh interesting I guess it didn't record," if for no
| other reason then I would go straight into CYA mode and
| start looking for any hint that I didn't make a mistake.
|
| At that point if you have a basic security SoP in place
| and adhere to it you can start auditing.
|
| Anywho again nothing is airtight and a determined
| individual could of course get past me. But you would be
| surprised how many hurdles they have to get over, and it
| _certainly_ wouldn't go unnoticed and be brushed off as a
| read /write quirk, that's really all I'm saying
| phire wrote:
| The manufacturer didn't even know encryption was enabled,
| because as long as the camera was working, it would just
| provide all files over USB without any encryption.
|
| It was basically enabled by accident, and the only thing it
| prevented was recovery of files directly from the SD card
| when the camera was damaged.
| astrange wrote:
| There are some reasons you'd want to encrypt even without a
| secret key. One is it makes it easier to erase data (just
| erase the key).
|
| It also makes bit flip errors a lot more obvious, which is
| another way of saying harder to ignore, so that can go either
| way.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Can't bit flip errors also destroy encrypted volumes much
| more easily?
| dgoldstein0 wrote:
| I think it depends. Encrypted filesystems typically
| encrypt contents of each file separately - that way you
| don't need to read / write the whole disk to read it
| write any individual file contents. Of course that means
| metadata may be in plain text or may be separately
| encrypted - again possibly folder by folder instead of
| all metadata at once. Exact details would vary with
| different file system encryption schemes.
|
| Whereas if you image the disk and encrypt the image
| properly, that gives you all the great confidentially
| guarantees but no random access.
| astrange wrote:
| > Encrypted filesystems typically encrypt contents of
| each file separately - that way you don't need to read /
| write the whole disk to read it write any individual file
| contents.
|
| Ah, that's not true of "full disk encryption". It usually
| encrypts the disk blocks.
|
| File-based encryption is stronger; you can use different
| protection classes on different files, you can use
| authenticated encryption, etc. iOS does it this way and I
| assume other systems have caught up, but don't know any
| in particular.
| tliltocatl wrote:
| File-based encryption leaks metadata (which in some cases
| is bad enough to render it unusable).
| cyphar wrote:
| Most FDE systems are not authenticated so you would only
| lose one block (16 bytes for AES). Can this be bad? Yeah,
| but it's not that bad for data recovery.
| cyphar wrote:
| Not to mention that most drives start having issues with
| dead sectors rather than bitflips, and that's (usually)
| 4K.
| shim__ wrote:
| Encryption does not make bit flips obivous, authenticated
| encryption would.
| rawling wrote:
| A single bit flip would mess up the block, and hopefully
| the rest of the stream and the padding, no?
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Most unauthenticated encryption modes only mess up a few
| bits of a block, sometimes the following block too. A few
| only flip the exact bit in the plaintext.
| Keeblo wrote:
| Unless I misread the article, the key was stored in the NVRAM
| and _not_ the TrustZone.
|
| IIRC, the article stated that if the key(s) had been stored in
| the TrustZone then the data would have been irrecoverable.
| RandomBK wrote:
| Good catch; it was somewhat ambiguous in the report.
| Fnoord wrote:
| 0. They were too cheap to use an industrial grade SD. Mind
| boggling.
| jychang wrote:
| If you read the article, the SD card was placed there by the
| camera manufacturer and then the device was sealed so it
| would withstand pressure, and then sold to divers. Blame the
| camera manufacturer's engineers.
|
| Seems like the SD card of all things performed just fine, so
| it hardly seems like the weak point.
| ahoka wrote:
| They are surprisingly resilient! There was a blog post a
| couple of years ago by someone who found a digital camera
| in the sea which must have been in the water for months.
| The author could look at the photos to see if they can find
| the original owner of the camera.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| > 1. The Camera+Card was encased in a separate enclosure made
| of titanium+sapphire, and did not seem to be exposed to extreme
| pressures.
|
| I wonder what the price of the enclosure was then. Feels a bit
| like click bait...
| spacecadet wrote:
| Alot. Just google cameras for deep sea and space. Several
| companies make these and despite all the covering up, none of
| the tech is that special.
| squigz wrote:
| Clickbait? Where? How? It's literally in the NTSB report, and
| it's not like, a crazy concept?
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Here; the title focusing on the price is implying that the
| cheap SD card survived ocean floor environment alone. A
| surprising amount of stress for its price.
|
| Instead, a pressure-proof deep sea camera module was found
| at the wreckage site. It's less interesting that an
| expensive thing rated for ocean depths was intact at ocean
| depths.
|
| Its like "missing child found after 4 days in Alaska
| temperatures!"
|
| _gasp! How did they survive!_
|
| "The child was on holiday in their grandparents' holiday
| log cabin, with their grandparents, a log fire, food,
| water.."
|
| Oh. Clickbait. Hiding the boring bit to make the story
| appear more of a tease.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| That was a laugh I needed and I'm using that in the
| future. The timing was perfect and I lost some coffee.
| Thank you!
| quuxplusone wrote:
| I noticed a pattern a few months ago in my phone's
| newsbait feed of headlines in the format "[Large familiar
| company] to close 500 stores on [date]" -- and then below
| the fold "because it's [Independence Day, Rosh Hashanah,
| etc]" or "because they are moving to summer hours" or
| whatever.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Here; the title focusing on the price is implying that
| the cheap SD card survived ocean floor environment alone.
| A surprising amount of stress for its price.
|
| I certainly did not read that implication into the title,
| so it's entirely possible that the author didn't mean it.
| rtkwe wrote:
| It might have been filled with mineral oil, those external
| enclosures often setup that way so that the enclosure is less
| extreme to manufacture. Not sure if that would work for
| camera lenses though unless those were also filled.
| two_handfuls wrote:
| What I also learned from this article is that Scott Manley is
| still on Twitter.
| MBCook wrote:
| Scott Manley's 45 minute video covering the NTSB report this
| information comes from went up today, it's quite interesting.
|
| https://youtu.be/qMUjCZ7MMWQ
| Vexs wrote:
| Figure 3 from the report- that's an Adafruit sensor module on a
| 3d printed bit of plastic with a teensy-brand microcontroller
| just sitting in there! Actually, the entire electronics enclosure
| appears printed.
|
| Very funny to see in what I assume is a million-dollar product.
| hinkley wrote:
| What was the water condensation situation like in this
| submarine? Semi bare electronics sounds very very bad.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Any money spent coating those semi-bare electronics would
| have been wasted. There's an engineering lesson to be taught
| here, I'm sure.
| progbits wrote:
| This is a camera outside the sub, and the electronics are
| inside sealed enclosure. If that had any leak for water to
| get in some conformal coating isn't going to save you, it
| will get pancaked.
|
| Of course random arduino module and teensy used for product
| is amateur hour, even for low volume production. They must
| have crazy margins on that camera and producing custom board
| is very cheap.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| >They must have crazy margins on that camera and producing
| custom board is very cheap.
|
| It's expensive in time and expertise to do a custom board,
| and to debug a custom board. All to what, save 20$ on a bom
| which might not even be 1% of the profit per unit?
|
| Far more efficient to just ship the dev board. They could
| have perhaps picked a better dev setup to start with, but
| if it looks stupid and it works...
| progbits wrote:
| Point isn't to save BOM cost, margins are high already
| and they can eat into them.
|
| Unless they are making literally less than 10 of those,
| custom board will be easier to manufacture than that mess
| of dev boards and more reliable than random wires and
| headers all over the place. Plus they can spend money
| where it makes sense, using better regulators etc.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| On-brand, though. And speak some respect to Adafruit's name!
| Lady Ada's product isn't what failed.
| blueflow wrote:
| Lol, and the censored controller is a teensy 3.2
| Buttons840 wrote:
| If a hardened camera can survive, I'm surprised subs don't have a
| floating black box that can survive an implosion and then float
| to the surface and begin emitting a radio signal.
|
| I guess the trick would be finding a way to securely attach the
| black box in a way that would ensure its release in a
| catastrophic disaster.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I guess he wasn't planning for a catastrophic failure ?
| hinkley wrote:
| He ridiculed anyone who told him he should, taking it as
| evidence that he was disrupting an industry.
|
| There is something slightly romantic about dying in such a
| way that his body turned to mist and floated away in the
| current. A bit like having your ashes spread at sea. With
| fewer steps.
| Filligree wrote:
| I keep thinking about the teenager.
|
| Who didn't want to go and didn't feel safe, but who was
| pushed to come along by his father because it was his
| father's birthday.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Super tragic that one.
| toofy wrote:
| > There is something slightly romantic...
|
| if he was alone i would absolutely agree with you full
| stop.
|
| but it looks like they may have been entirely underselling
| just how backyard amateur their company was just to get
| people to give them money.
|
| i totally adore books and documentaries and tales of
| explorer types pushing their ideas to the limit but it
| quickly crosses a line when they:
|
| a) downplay dangers to innocent people, and
|
| b) refuse to understand their own ignorance and believe the
| people who have already literally done their idea are
| somehow "fools"
|
| the person who is trying to "disrupt" but doesn't have a
| deep understanding of the often very good reasons why an
| industry may do things a certain way is the fool. not the
| ones who already repeatedly make it work.
|
| we need to encourage adventurousness but also wisdom.
| jopsen wrote:
| Probably commerical subs aren't a common thing with lots of
| regulation.
|
| Just guessing here? :)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The ones that aren't accompanied by a surface ship are
| military, and they really don't want anything that might
| automatically deploy at the wrong moment.
| waste_monk wrote:
| This was part of what complicated the response to the Kursk
| disaster - they had a rescue buoy but it was welded in place
| so it couldn't deploy.
| foxglacier wrote:
| There are a zillion applications for black-boxes, so why not
| start somewhere more accessible and with more impact? Your own
| house, car, and person, for instance. Think of how many elderly
| people die at home and nobody knows the details leading up to
| it. I'm being a bit facetious here - perhaps we don't need to
| know in those cases, nor in the Titan case. It's not as if
| there could be any data there which advances submarine safety -
| unless somebody is planning to build a Titan v2 with the same
| technology, marginally improved safety, and similar lack of
| testing?
| gambiting wrote:
| Just fyi - if your car has been manufactured in the last 10
| years by a modern corporation(ie - not a Lada) it will have a
| black box already that records everything about the car's
| systems. They don't record sound from the cabin, but your
| speed, throttle position, movement of the steering wheel -
| it's all recorded.
| kijin wrote:
| In my country, people call dashcams "black boxes". They can
| be quite useful if you also want audio and video.
| gambiting wrote:
| I mean I have them in both of my cars, but in some places
| like Austria it's straight up illegal to have them in
| your car. And in some others like Germany you can have it
| but the footage is inadmissable in court because the
| other person never agreed to be recorded. The built in
| telemetry recording is legal everywhere though.
| dkbrk wrote:
| I'm not aware of anything quite like that, but most submarines
| have something like a Rescue Buoy [0], Submarine Emergency
| Position-Indicating Radio Beacon (SEPIRB) or Submarine
| Emergency Communications Transmitter (SECT). I think those
| might differ based on whether they're attached by a cable and
| allow communicating to the submarine, or just broadcast a
| distress signal with the position. In any case, they're
| designed to be automatically deployed in the event of an
| emergency or catastrophic event, and based on this Quora answer
| [1] they're attached by an independent mechanism with a timer
| which has to be regularly reset to stop it deploying. I think
| it might be a clockwork mechanism, with an electronic alarm
| when it's about to go off to remind the crew to wind it.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_buoy_(submarine)
|
| [1]: https://www.quora.com/Don%E2%80%99t-submarines-have-
| communic...
| baking wrote:
| There were glass spheres outside the main pressure vessel
| containing electronics and filled with mineral oil that were
| damaged during the implosion, but the electronics survived
| mostly intact. This probably would have been a good option for
| a "black box" recorder. Scott Manley discusses the spheres in
| his video.
| TZubiri wrote:
| It might be advertising, but I'll allow it because it's so metal
| rdtsc wrote:
| > No deep-sea shenanigans around the Titanic wreck were revealed.
| Manley explains in his Twitter thread that "the camera had been
| configured to dump data onto an external storage device, so
| nothing was found from the accident dive." Nothing particularly
| pertinent to the tragic accident, that is.
|
| This is about camera hardware and how it survived. It provides no
| information or footage about the incident (in case you were
| looking for it like I was).
| boppo1 wrote:
| Thank you, this post saved me time.
| alwahi wrote:
| but what about the Logitech controller?
| 34679 wrote:
| Dear Tom's Hardware,
|
| Tech users get upset when you make me do what you want instead of
| what the user wants.
|
| Sincerely,
|
| The Back Button
| eth0up wrote:
| Them sandisks need to be pretty tough to not vaporize whilst
| cooking your USB ports. Ever notice how infernally hot they get
| under large file transfers?
|
| Completely killed one of my ports after 50gbs
| atum47 wrote:
| Is the memory card actually more expensive than the controller?
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| I know the default policy is to use the source headline, but I
| feel the mention of $62 is kindof unfair. It evokes cheapness.
| Many many aspects of the craft were cheap and underbuilt, but
| it's not clear to me that the memory card was one of those areas.
| Seems like it was an actually useful COTS part
| everforward wrote:
| Yeah, and the title doesn't mention that is for a camera
| either.
|
| This seems perfectly reasonable for camera data storage, and
| apparently a camera that's manually operated as well.
|
| It'd be worrying if it was storing the binaries to operate the
| sub, but this is a decent quality SD card for camera storage.
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