NTSB Wants PDF Removed After It Exposed Final Cockpit Audio From UPS Crash (cnn.com) 29
The NTSB temporarily closed public access to nearly all investigation dockets after people used a spectrogram image from a PDF in the UPS flight 2976 crash file to reconstruct approximate cockpit voice recorder audio and post it online. "We show our work and we've been doing this type of thing for years. Nobody was aware that you can recreate audio from a picture," a spokesperson for the board said. "NTSB is looking to make sure there's nothing else in the docket that could compromise anybody's privacy... now that we understand the possibility of a digital recreation." CNN reports: Cockpit voice recordings, often referred to as the CVR, capture everything commercial pilots say and are valuable during NTSB investigations, but are almost never released out of respect for the victims and their families. UPS flight 2976 crashed on November 4, when an engine separated from the wing while it was taking off from Louisville, Kentucky. The three crew members onboard were killed along with 12 people on the ground. During a two-day investigative hearing this week, the board released a docket full of details about the crash. Besides thousands of pages of reports and video showing the engine separating, it included a transcript of the CVR and a PDF file showing an analysis of the spectrogram of the audio it recorded.
A spectrogram is a still image that is a visual representation of the audio, showing the ups and downs of the frequencies. Using that still image, members of the public were able to recreate the voices of the pilots in the moments before the plane crashed and post the results online. The clip, which included background noise and echoes, covered the last 30 seconds of the flight as the pilots struggled with the disabled aircraft as well as recordings of testing the NTSB did on another aircraft.
In a statement on Thursday, the board made clear it "does not release cockpit voice recordings" due to federal law and because of the highly sensitive nature of what they include, but it was "aware that advances in image recognition and computational methods have enabled individuals to reconstruct approximations of cockpit voice recorder audio from sound spectrum imagery." Investigation dockets are made public for transparency, but this week, the board took the rare step of closing public access to all dockets, including the one for the UPS crash. [...] The NTSB is urging platforms like X and Reddit to remove posts with the audio.
A spectrogram is a still image that is a visual representation of the audio, showing the ups and downs of the frequencies. Using that still image, members of the public were able to recreate the voices of the pilots in the moments before the plane crashed and post the results online. The clip, which included background noise and echoes, covered the last 30 seconds of the flight as the pilots struggled with the disabled aircraft as well as recordings of testing the NTSB did on another aircraft.
In a statement on Thursday, the board made clear it "does not release cockpit voice recordings" due to federal law and because of the highly sensitive nature of what they include, but it was "aware that advances in image recognition and computational methods have enabled individuals to reconstruct approximations of cockpit voice recorder audio from sound spectrum imagery." Investigation dockets are made public for transparency, but this week, the board took the rare step of closing public access to all dockets, including the one for the UPS crash. [...] The NTSB is urging platforms like X and Reddit to remove posts with the audio.
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Re:Hmmmmm... (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing.
There is a 30 year old law that prohibits releasing audio from aircraft black boxes. They accidentally "released" the audio by publishing a spectrograph, which is effectively a violation of the law.
So now they're going through all their stuff making sure they aren't accidentally releasing data they are legally prohibited from releasing.
No conspiracy needed.
=Smidge=
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No, they did not release audio.
A spectograph is not audio, it's an image of the timing, signal, frequency of a signal.
The fact that it could be reverse engineered into coherent audio is not consequential.
That's like saying that someone released public source code to a program when all they did was release the binary. Or, more accurately, released a use video of the software, which someone then reverse engineered.
Re: Hmmmmm... (Score:5, Informative)
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It's more like someone claiming they didn't violate copyright for copying a song without permission, because they shared a video that included a sound track containing the song, and not the song itself.
Or it's like spycraft that encodes messages into the pixels of an image.
It doesn't matter how the audio was encoded, if it can be decoded as audio, it's audio.
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Given you can find the audio online and see it matches the official transcript which they *did* release, they aren't hiding anything.
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The only thing they could possibly be covering up is that they have vast teams of ultra-specialised uber-gurus who have no meaningful cross-domain expertise (which is understandable, you can't be an ultra-specialised uber-guru if you do) but also that they've essentially nothing else and therefore nobody who can red-flag when a skill in one domain allows a person to exploit information that is released by another.
There is nothing wrong, at all, with having ultra-specialised uber-gurus for something like the
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They're clearly trying to hide the fact that the pilot was of a specific ethnic classification, one which is already well known for causing a very large percentage of road accidents with tractor trailers.
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Indeed...
Like Scott Manley says, going from a frequency domain image representation to a time domain sound file is something that is extremely old and does not and has not required AI the last 50 years. It's just that they vibe coded the extremely old, extremely normal algorithmic solution. AI did not recreate the dead pilots voice, it just made data preparation and coding a bit less work.
It's almost certain you've used software or seen/heard software output today that transformed between frequency domain and time domain. It's ubiquitous.
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In other words, it's like saying someone violated copyright by making a MIDI version of a popular song.
Anyone gather all the past data? (Score:2)
Wonder if anyone grabbed old crash data and is running analysis for us now.
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Not sure what you hope to gain from this. For the most part where audio was captured complete transcripts were released. In this case too.
That should work well (Score:2)
The NTSB is urging platforms like X and Reddit to remove posts with the audio.
Yes, that should work. Barbara, what do you think?
What's wrong with people (Score:2)
Like . . come on.
Hmmm. (Score:2)
A spectrogram is basically a description of the sound and Daphne Oram pioneered technology for turning the informational sections of a spectrogram into sound back in 1958. That would be.... 68 years ago, by my reckoning.
Now, technology has moved on a great deal in 68 years. Exactly what you could do today, relative to what she did back then, is obviously significant. But this really should not have come as a shock.
The lack of understanding of this sort of stuff shows what happens when you have too many nich
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It wasn't a spectrogram though. It was a picture of a spectrogram. I haven't had a chance to watch Scott Manley's video yet, but unless somebody screwed up and embedded the actual spectrogram, or maybe an unreasonably high resolution image of it, it is pretty impressive to reconstruct 30 seconds of recognizable audio from what should have been a random JPEG figure in a PDF.
Please (Score:2)
Please sar remove the audio spectograph sar it's very important sar
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Any university s
Why ... (Score:2)
On the other hand, when I worked for Boeing, we would produce thick certification documents chock full data of questionable value. To impress the FAA, I suppose. And to keep them from actually bothering to read the interesting bits.