On my plane ride here to Hong Kong, I flew with Air Canada on a Boeing 777. Boy was that flight teched out. Every seat in the Economy class had a personal television (its a wide-ish touch screen built into the headrest of the seat in front of you), an AC plug for laptop power, and a USB port.
The AC plug was a lifesaver for me. I brought my X200 along with me in my carry-on luggage, so I was able to keep entertained for the 16 hour flight. But the USB port was really nagging at me. I guess the original purpose of it is to let people charge their iPods or gadgets without the use of a computer. But this got me thinking, did they simply power the USB plug and not connect the data lines, or could you actually plug something in and get access to the system?
Curiosity eventually got the best of me and at about 10 hours in, while I was somewhere above eastern Russia, I decided to plug in the USB adapter for my wireless mouse (a Microsoft Arc, if you’re curious). Nothing happened at first, but about a minute later, a mouse showed up on the screen in front of me and I was able to use the mouse! All of the mouse buttons worked; I even got a right-click menu and found out that it ran on Flash.
With my curiosity satisfied, I quickly unplugged the adapter and put the mouse away. I got up to go to the washroom, and when I came back, I heard a troubling announcement from the captain. It went something like this: Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m sorry for the disturbance but our in-flight media system has crashed. We seem to fix it so we’ll have to reboot the system. This will take about 20 minutes.
I’m still not exactly sure if it was the mouse that caused the system to crash, but that was a huge “oh shit!’ moment for me at the time. Maybe I should experiment some more on my return trip home? I’m not too sure though, you know what they say about curiosity and the cat: it killed it 