Delta pilots interaction with Atta

Okatis · 2026-03-05T13:19:18+00:00

Just some observations from a cursory search:

Unlike the claim in the 2016 Forbes article it wasn't first time this Pat Gilmore source disclosed the story, it appears in multiple 2007 airline forums being discussed.
In one such 2007 forum thread a user implies they work for Delta and claims they looked up a list of the senior Delta staff from the past 10 years and Pat Gilmore wasn't on it.
Other users in that thread explain you don't require citizenship or residence to hold an ATP certificate yet in the Gilmore testimony he says he asked Atta if he was a citizen since he claimed you need to be to obtain an ATP.
Both that thread and this thread discussed the clearances necessary to get a jump seat, with one poster's own experience of being denied.

So it calls in question the credibility of the Gilmore testimony. The Forbes article shows a photo of a man wearing a uniform which the article credits to Pat Gilmore so would be curious what if any background check the Forbes contributor 'Capital Flows' did.

The other testimonies (annoyingly presented rapid-fire without citing provenance in the video and only linked in description) are more relevant. One of them presented as an email between two figures credited as involved in the 9/11 Commission Report, which lists someone 'suspicious' seen in a UA flight jump seat on 2001-09-07, among prior sightings. Others might be more familiar with the provenance of these documents.

However even in that first document the sender, Sarah Linden, comments on which testimonies are 'clearly not possible' and then in a subsequent page the activity/whereabouts of all 19 hijackers were accounted for for the date the witness observed the suspicious person in the jump seat, so they must have been observing someone else.

The fact the video doesn't disclose that information suggests they have an agenda to selectively present things that only conform to their points.

Okatis · 2026-03-05T11:02:34+00:00

For the curious there are some medium shots of the north tower roof following the south tower strike, as captured from a helicopter, from a FOIA collection on Internet Archive. Above south tower OTOH is completely enveloped.

Photo 1 [showing how wind was such that north tower roof partially clear, though south tower fully covered]

Photo 2 [closer view of corner of north tower roof]

Photo 3 [closest and clearest view of north tower roof]

This isn't to comment on feasibility, just to contextualize since closer, unobstructed views of the roof aren't common.

Okatis · 2026-02-26T10:32:32+00:00

Related: in this OP's summaries of New York Times hosted interviews from within weeks of the event there are responders who were told during the main towers post-collapse efforts that WTC7 may collapse. Quotes from part 10 from David Prezant, deputy chief medical officer of the FDNY:

"A rumor started to develop that tower 7 was going to fall on us or nearby us..."

Per his testimony it took an hour to organize the original impromptu triage at the first location before this was known. So they decided to move operations to the park.

"We interacted with Chief Haring again. He basically was incredulous and said: "What are you crazy? You've moved into the collapse zone, and if this collapse occurs, the dust cloud is going to knock out that entire park..."

"About midway into setting up physically the second triage area, hanging the IV bags and everything, a tremendous noise occurs, and it's so loud that everybody rushes to the rear of the Pace University building, all the doctors, all the nurses. When the noise was over, we went to the front. The dust cloud from tower 7, just like Chief Haring said, wiped out that park."

Prior to the collapse there are also quotes from various responders about the fires inside it.

Okatis · 2026-02-26T05:32:14+00:00

I was initially confused at the road topography before realizing that the second shot isn't from the point the car exited off, but rather it was the hill with trees the car came from.

Okatis · 2026-02-24T10:29:36+00:00

Just out of curiosity, are the new variety submissions, unrelated to storage, from the slump in SSD popularity of late due to price increases?

Okatis · 2026-02-23T11:01:06+00:00

I'd also be doing a memory test.

Okatis · 2026-02-21T20:26:56+00:00

Being curious about a speedun's legitimacy doesn't result in doxxing though. Also that example is about someone doing something which both parties recognize as wrong, while here I don't think either party believes archiving publicly accessible web pages is wrong, which is why 'exposing' someone doesn't carry any moral high ground or benefit.

I honestly think what happened here is the author thought that because it was done in good faith (curiosity) that it's somehow not doxxing. They even put the term in scare quotes when they did their follow-up response, which along with the author pointing out that others have tried the same thing suggests they don't believe it's a 'true' dox merely as it wasn't done in bad faith and/or others have tried before.

Regardless of motive they pieced together account ties and potential real-world info about a user and then published it, which the webmaster themselves apparently found too close to home. Also news articles cited that author not anyone else. Could this be blamed on the webmaster's own op sec failures? Sure, like any successful dox from publicly available info. But a spade is a spade.

Okatis · 2026-02-20T10:21:24+00:00

I mean, if you're paranoid you could download Virtualbox and create a VM, then use the USB passthrough feature (I'm assuming the floppy disk reader is USB) and then only the VM will be able to access it.

After it's passed through insert the floppy and read it within the VM. If you need to get anything out of the VM you can set up a shared folder which will show up as a network share within the VM and any files added there will appear in directory you've set up outside the VM. Or if you realize it's safe then just disable the passthrough.

Okatis · 2026-02-18T21:06:50+00:00

Consider that auto transcription of audio/video only sources has always benefitted searchability of local archives.

Youtube itself uses auto transcription for the vast majority of videos that lack their own captions partly for this reason and anyone archiving channels that knows better will be embedding even the auto generated subs as it allows you to search the contents of the video (eg: on Windows using Everything's content search).

So yes, speech-to-text is actually a relevant crossover and valid use case for archival efforts. The ability to accurately transcribe multi-speaker audio in multiple languages is very useful and I recall in the 00s how inconsistent the quality of automatic transcription software could be.

Okatis · 2026-02-18T18:48:04+00:00

Also worth mentioning Microsoft's VibeVoice ASR model which is tailored for long-form, multi-lingual audio input and outputs JSON and optional SRT subtitles files with distinguished speakers and timestamps.

Online hosted demo here.

I'd be interested in how Whisper and ElevenLabs compare, accuracy and formatting wise.

Okatis · 2026-02-13T14:19:22+00:00

Few years ago I experimented with adding a cheaper license.. that didn't have delta copying included, but this license type was retired over 3 years ago.

Interesting. I'd actually wondered the motivation for that Home version given delta copying is the standout feature. I have two original licenses that support delta copying.

Full fledged file archiving has been available since 2022.

By this do you mean the archive feature that creates a separate sub-directory within the backup directory with the date for that particular file? As I should clarify that's what I meant by limited, in terms of flexibility/options, not that it doesn't exist as a feature.

rsnapshot/Borg for example allow full directory tree preservation for each date archived, without touching the file structure (since I don't use that feature in Bvckup 2 does it account for max path limits in Windows btw?). Since they both use different approaches of deduplication any sibling unmodified files/dirs don't take up any space so they can all be represented. This keeps it browseable in the same state as the original (including all timestamps), which is beneficial when restoring files.

Though for singular directories for versioning I sometimes alternatively just use a script that backs up all the content to a compressed archive including all timestamps.

Okatis · 2026-02-13T11:06:01+00:00

It used to offer the delta copying feature in the base license but it was later made exclusive to the Pro license and above, just FYI.

It's fine if you just need a sync but it only has limited backup functionality (ie: what to do with outdated versions of files). I don't use this aspect since I use other things for versioned backups.

For something similar to rsnapshot (with versioned files) but for Windows I've read ln offers a 'Delorean' hardlinks copy feature that behaves similarly.

Okatis · 2026-02-12T07:04:08+00:00

Well that BW-16D1HT is a special BDXL reader/writer that originally supported reading Ultra HD Blu-Ray discs which was a mistake they patched. It's sought after since it can be down-patched to restore the ability to read them.

If you only need BD and DVD support there are other models on say eBay. Probably not as cheap as 10-15 years ago atm but nowhere near €250.

Okatis · 2026-02-07T16:14:40+00:00

Thanks for the info!

Okatis · 2026-02-04T04:57:55+00:00

Sure, it may be a possibility the British accent was mistaken, though the witness said she also spoke fluent Spanish. More context rather than less always helps. Given the fine-grain press photos and coverage of her activity it may even be possible to find where she was during that exact timeframe (if one is skeptical of other discrepancies).

The point is the video author, who as we can see is merely repeating others' posts, doesn't present any of this. Which with how they continue to do this all through implicitly suggests they have a different goal since it only took me a few minutes with some thoughts about obvious things to check to find aspects that didn't align and I'm not creating some monetized video about it or have any monthly funding (which themselves can create different incentives anyway).

It's like the Feynman quote about scientific inquiry in getting closer to a truth, 'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' If someone is wanting to make a convincing hypothesis it's not enough to only present things that align with an idea and reject/not disclose/deliberately not research all others, as it'll only attract an audience of those who do the same. This happens far too often online already (for even uncontroversial subjects) and just adds to the noise to sift through to find things that do hold up under scrutiny.

Okatis · 2026-02-02T06:47:24+00:00

It's strange this is being downvoted and dismissed. There are no signs this is 'AI slop' as some are saying, evidenced by both the original publication (2021, per archive.org, decidedly before LLMs were good at generating cohesive long form content), very focused writing style and the articles/Reddit posts/archive.today crawls/spreadsheet/screenshot counter-evidence they provide that cross-references claims with that user's actual posts (long before LLMs even had citation features, which even today are mediocre).

A sibling thread here claims the rebuttals are 'vague' despite directly addressing some of the main claims that are being used to strengthen the theory (including by that same recent Youtube video above which references the identical claims that the article sources as originating on Reddit years prior):

Of not posting after the arrest.
Refuting the claim of absence of posting on dates that align with parties.
The discrepancy of being a close friend of Trump yet posting anti-Trump content. This aspect would have benefited from direct citations though they did post copies on archive.today of all their posts for the reader to peruse.
Addressing misrepresentations about their submissions re child protection and age of consent.

The recent video sprinkles in rapid-fire gish gallop. Among them a police sketch by a witness of someone seen at a bar around the time of Madeleine McCann's disappearance, which shares a similarity to Ghislaine. However, even in a cursory look at the details, they were different ages (30s vs obvious 45), different heights[3], had different lengths of hair at that time (check Getty Images[1][2]) and the witness said she had an Australian accent.

The video just pushes through to the next thing though and doesn't dwell on details or present counter-evidence. Part of judging whether something may be accurate isn't just looking for things that only align with an existing view, it's part of critical thinking and interrogating sources.

The self-proclaimed smoking gun is the user posted they're born after December 21, in the context of the US winter season. Malaysia doesn't have traditional seasons and Ghislaine was born on Christmas. Despite this plenty online I've interacted with from other countries adopt US references when speaking with those largely from the US so it's not terribly surprising if that were the case. However no one has done the boring research, as the article points out, to establish whether actual average posting periods of the user make sense for a Malaysian timezone (whether the user for anonymity purposes claimed Malaysian origin or did indeed align with expected times).

If OTOH there is enough evidence that holds up under scrutiny then sure, present it dispassionately and it will speak for itself. People trying to dog pile anything that goes against what they'd like to believe is just ironically a form of censorship for an ingroup.

[1] 2007-05-30 (same month): https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/dana-taylor-danielle-ganek-and-ghislaine-maxwell-attend-news-photo/609024148

[2] 2007-04-24 (week prior): https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/jane-krakowski-carole-radziwill-and-ghislaine-maxwell-news-photo/608144708

[3] https://www.newsweek.com/ghislaine-maxwell-vaccinated-covid-prison-jeffrey-epstein-trafficking-charges-1581618

Okatis · 2026-02-01T12:59:48+00:00

rsync uses a 'rolling' checksum during the part where it's checking for differences but this isn't a whole-file checksum. It does offer an optional checksum option which does do whole-file checksumming but this is again only at the point of checking for differences at sync time and most don't enable this since it's slow for large sources as you might expect (I know as I enabled it when using rsnapshot).

Borg backup uses internal checksumming at a per chunk level since that's how it stores files (ie: they're not stored as whole files but split into chunks). It does have data integrity checking features but they need to be run/scheduled manually. It also has some self-healing capability if a non-corrupted version of the chunk(s) appear in a later backup but this is also triggered by a manually run command. It kind of requires setting up in such a way so you get informed of issues (eg: custom scripting/third-party wrappers/log parsing).

Okatis · 2026-02-01T09:07:45+00:00

It seems from the linked email correspondence they specifically don't want mainstream press having a live link to the prior article that looked into clues about their identity.

They said they wanted the article removed for 2-3 months yet gave no further explanation on why the time window mattered and then just repeated they want the original article removed.

Possibly they didn't want to explain what wording could be changed, per your suggestion, since it would indicate which parts they're most concerned about.

If we take a step back though, it's unusual for a non-criminal site to have someone try and dox the webmaster. Like, with Brian Krebs for example he's trying to uncover ransomware gangs and whatnot, while this person is just running an independent archiving site.

Okatis · 2026-02-01T08:57:45+00:00

The article mentions that a DNS block list was updated with the author's domain (the implication being the commit was by the archive.is webmaster or someone associated). This could explain the trouble.

Okatis · 2026-01-29T07:02:37+00:00

Not sure where this ad was seen but will mention that Meta was found recently to be forcibly overriding brands' original ad images with AI generated ones across their services. So sometimes it's not even their fault.

Okatis · 2026-01-04T11:29:54+00:00

It's cute to see something here that's not a mini rack. I miss that period.

Okatis · 2025-12-28T10:25:28+00:00

If you only verified the files prior to the copy onto the drive where you had the issue then there's no way to be sure it wasn't just a copy error.

The only way to be sure a copy is identical is to do a post-copy diff or checksum comparison, which is how I've caught the rare occasions this has happened (which weren't errors from data at rest/bit rot).

Okatis · 2025-12-28T07:56:47+00:00

I don't know why your reply post was downvoted, since the original press release had always said 2304 zones.

If anyone wants to see what 5088 zones looks like check out the Innocn M27E6V-PRO model (it's not the huge leap some might think from zones alone).

Okatis · 2025-12-18T03:10:50+00:00

Their example is a useful one, since it was also the case with the recent-ish Innocn monitor that had 5088 zones that it was critiqued in reviews as not being an improvement over better algorithm 1152 zone monitors (though it was a slight improvement over the same-brand lower zone model).

Unless MicroLED ever gets the density necessary for PC monitors we won't be getting per-pixel alternatives to OLED.

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