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American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

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Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#181

Post by lotsofpulp »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #178
smcl wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What else could it be? Swimming trunks/swimsuit. Clean indoor trainers for basketball/volleyball/circuit training/etc, or scruffy outdoor ones for cross-country running, orienteering or anything muddy outside. In winter they may need to take something warmer if there's outdoor activities planned, some locations in the north or near mountains may even do skiing or cross-country skiing. In our school in winter time w…

> (casually implies kids have multiple workout outfits/shoes and regularly engage in expensive outdoor activities) Man, sometimes I'll run into a reminder that I grew up poor as dirt, haha

Or as poor as 90% of the world's population.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#182

Post by crznp »

Syzygies wrote: post #111
oxymoron wrote: post #107

I am not convinced that AA is actively trying to block this app. I used to work for a major anti-bot vendor, so from that I know that all airlines suffer heavily from price scraping and try to protect their flight search endpoints. The impact to them is due to fees from the centralized data services that all airlines depend on.

"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence." I fly American between JFK and SFO regularly, including today. They have the best prices these days for an "international" business class on this route. The food is good, the flight attendants are friendly and good at their jobs... Automobile manufacturers offer pathetic "center console" software compared to Apple, Google. American's in-flight enterta…

Corollary: if you think that everyone is incompetent, perhaps you're missing something.

For instance, you fly with AAL because of price, food, service. What sort of entertainment system would change your mind? It is hard to create something that works for everyone, is integrated with a plane that doesn't have a lot of downtime, etc. I'd rather just use my own device, so the best entertainment system in the world is unlikely to change who I fly with. So why invest in that?

Or on the original topic: the problem is not that they can't develop a similar app -- if nothing else, they could license this one or just turn a blind eye. It seems like they don't want it to exist.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#183

Post by dkonofalski »

dpifke wrote: post #166
dkonofalski wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the scraping is happening "on-device", though, then they're not providing their details to a third party. They're simply accessing their schedules. Otherwise, pulling up their schedules in any web browser would be considered giving their credentials to a third party since that's basically what's happening here. It would be like logging in to the aa.com employee site and then installing a Chrome extension that read…

It might be possible to build this app in a way that none of the information ever leaves the device. I would be very surprised if that was the case here. Most large IT departments have a list of approved browsers and browser extensions. The scenario you described would fall under the same policy. If Chrome uploaded the content of intranet web pages to Google, I expect it would be banned as well.

>It might be possible to build this app

Not only is it possible to build it this way but I think it's far more likely that it already is built this way. Since the app is pulling up schedules for individual users, there's no benefit to scraping the info on a server or caching any of it as it would be unique for each user. There's no reason for that info to leave the device. The content is pulled, formatted, and then displayed in a style that matches the rest of the app. This can easily be done on-device and would be less efficient to do off-device.

>Most large IT departments have a list of approved browsers and browser extensions.

This is completely irrelevant considering this is being done on mobile devices. On iOS, at least, it's all webkit and done within the app itself. I was just using Chrome as an example for how this process is done without sending the credentials to a third party. Unless the company wants to ban people checking their own schedules, there's no way they can stop someone from logging in to a web browser and having the content scraped. As an example, let's say they only allowed Microsoft Edge as the "approved" browser and they didn't allow any Edge extensions to be installed. The user can still pull up the page in Edge, save the content once it's loaded, and feed the folder/HTML file to the app to scrape the content. There's literally no way for them to prevent this other than by severely obfuscating the content (e.g., randomly adding invisible characters into strings to prevent string searches or adding bogus HTML elements to prevent searches for element patterns) or ceasing access to it completely.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#184

Post by OJFord »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #176
OJFord wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the reality is that scraping is legal, always possible, but difficult. > This particular case is a bit harder since it's not purely using public data, but may still qualify since it's likely scraping with legally-obtained credentials. No, it's easy: they're employees, they can be told they're not allowed to do that. Doesn't matter if the app's legally allowed to exist or not.

You know, employees are not actually property, and there are actually limits on what an employer can tell an employee. Everything an employer might possibly try to say about using any other software or tools to collect, handle, and redisplay "their" data, applies exactly the same to a blind employees screen reader. Hell it applies to glasses . Thank deity for blind people and other disabilities making it actually ill…

I'm not sure why it reads as 'defending [the employer]'s position', but that's not my position, I don't care at all. (I'm not American, I may very well never have anything to do with the airline even as a customer.)

If you are its employee, jolly good luck to you with your 'well if I were blind what I've been provided with while not blind would not be adequate and I might need to use a different tool to this which works similarly' argument.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#185

Post by scarface74 »

kersplody wrote: post #158
jaywalk wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working remotely for your employer (as in, you're not traveling for work, but working while traveling) is not in breach of any tourist visa restrictions.

THIS IS FALSE ALMOST EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD AND IF DISCOVERED, CAN RESULT IN CRIMINAL AND/OR TAX PENALTIES. In general, it’s not legal to be an unregistered digital nomad unless you have the right to work in the country you are in. If you enter a country on a tourist visa, the primary purpose of the trip must be tourism. If you enter on a tourist visa for the intention of being a digital nomad, you have violated the…

> The bigger concern is usually your employer. Working overseas without approval is usually a friable offense

This is true for my employer. We are allowed to work outside of the country for at most 60 days.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#186

Post by bronco21016 »

fn-mote wrote: post #155
bronco21016 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At most airlines there are two sets of scheduling rules. The regulatory rules, and the union contract negotiated rules. You can guess which one the company doesn’t want audited.

Perhaps surprisingly, I can't. Violating "regulatory rules" should result in fines and the government coming down on you. I would think this is the worse outcome, but less likely than... Violating "union contract negotiated rules" should result in grievances ending in legal action if the employer doesn't agree they broke the rules. This should be a lighter penalty but the union seems more likely to pursue the remedy…

Violating union contract rules requires the company to be called out on it. When the scheduling tools they provide to employees are archaic, strings of text spaghetti, and the contract is extremely complex, the likely hood of being called out on a violation by an employee is relatively low. Grievance settlements are often just a small amount of pay hours paid out for days off that are lost. Like maybe 4 hours of flight pay per day that there was an error.

I’m not suggesting they willfully violate the contract either. Many of the schedulers are simply ignorant of the nuances in the rules because they’re complex. They are just trying to get trips covered. When employees are armed with knowledge greater than the scheduler(tools such as this, or often just experience) you end up with phone arguments/discussions that cause delays and cancellations. The company would far rather that they keep moving the jets and settle grievances for the handful of people that catch issues after the fact.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#187

Post by tomohawk »

Typical adversarial relationship that develops between companies and unionized employees. It becomes more about winning the power struggle than getting work done or having a good life. And also more about the rules in the current contract than anything else.

If the current contract doesn't have any rules about it, then employees are just stuck with it until the next contract negotiation between the union and the company.

Thems the breaks.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#188

Post by dzhiurgis »

gnopgnip wrote: post #149
OJFord wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the reality is that scraping is legal, always possible, but difficult. > This particular case is a bit harder since it's not purely using public data, but may still qualify since it's likely scraping with legally-obtained credentials. No, it's easy: they're employees, they can be told they're not allowed to do that. Doesn't matter if the app's legally allowed to exist or not.

AA Flight attendants are in a union working under a collective bargaining agreement. The employer can’t just change this unilaterally.

Mere threat to strike for a day would make AA to buy out developer for millions of $.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#189

Post by simsla »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #178
smcl wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What else could it be? Swimming trunks/swimsuit. Clean indoor trainers for basketball/volleyball/circuit training/etc, or scruffy outdoor ones for cross-country running, orienteering or anything muddy outside. In winter they may need to take something warmer if there's outdoor activities planned, some locations in the north or near mountains may even do skiing or cross-country skiing. In our school in winter time w…

> (casually implies kids have multiple workout outfits/shoes and regularly engage in expensive outdoor activities) Man, sometimes I'll run into a reminder that I grew up poor as dirt, haha

If it's any consolation, I grew up in a well off family, and had a single pair of somewhat smelly gym shorts.

The swimming trunks argument still holds though.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#190

Post by Scoundreller »

shagie wrote: post #7

The app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sequence-decoder/id1439988599 For the public: -Past and future departure information for all airports -Past and future arrival information for all airports -Individual flight info lookup For flight attendants: -Flight specific info inflight -ETB alerts -Open time alerts -Flight alerts -Open time display -Sequence details -Calendar -Reserve call out list -Standby list -Crew chat…

> Save notes about crew members

This one must be full of gold

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