<story><title>American Airlines Has Cameras in Their Screens Too</title><url>https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/american-airlines-planes-entertainment-system-cameras</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cbhl</author><text>Most of these are just COTS Android tablets. When they reboot the IFE, you sometimes see the Android soft home&amp;#x2F;menu button on the bottom.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s easy enough to repair, too -- just apply some opaque tape to the camera.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>objclxt</author><text>&amp;gt; Most of these are just COTS Android tablets&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t quite true. They&amp;#x27;re not off-the-shelf (COTS) Android tablets - the hardware is custom, especially in terms of industrial design (although the chipset is pretty standard). IFE manufacturers aren&amp;#x27;t going to OEMs and re-purposing commercial tablet designs.&lt;p&gt;You couldn&amp;#x27;t use off-the-shelf tablets anyway, because they have lithium batteries in them - and whilst the form factors might work for economy seating, in business and first class you often see very large units, larger than any tablet available today. IFE systems also need a much wider variety of I&amp;#x2F;O than &amp;quot;consumer&amp;quot; Android tablets provide.&lt;p&gt;There are also requirements vis a vis safety and impact that make commercial tablets unsuitable. For example, the display is usually made of plastic rather than glass, since these units have to survive a lot of abuse.&lt;p&gt;Some example components from one of the two big manufacturers: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.panasonic.aero&amp;#x2F;inflight-systems&amp;#x2F;x-series&amp;#x2F;key-components-2&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.panasonic.aero&amp;#x2F;inflight-systems&amp;#x2F;x-series&amp;#x2F;key-com...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Source: I worked in the IFE industry when they were transitioning from Linux based systems over to Android. One of the primary drivers for doing so was software, rather than hardware.</text></comment>
<story><title>American Airlines Has Cameras in Their Screens Too</title><url>https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/american-airlines-planes-entertainment-system-cameras</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cbhl</author><text>Most of these are just COTS Android tablets. When they reboot the IFE, you sometimes see the Android soft home&amp;#x2F;menu button on the bottom.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s easy enough to repair, too -- just apply some opaque tape to the camera.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>52-6F-62</author><text>I appreciate your use of the word &amp;quot;repair&amp;quot; in this instance.</text></comment>