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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

#221

Post by dfc »

smcl wrote: post #198
Firmwarrior wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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

Ah come on "multiple workout outfits" is a little bit of a stretch of what I said. Everything I described except for the skiing stuff is normal in anything but the very poorest countries - in addition to what you listed, you didn't have a jumper for when it's cold or some old trainers for when it's muddy? I just wore my normal shorts for football whenever we went swimming (fyi my school didn't have a pool, but some d…

I do not think having multiple pairs of gym shoes is normal outside of the very poorest countries. I grew up in the US and I never had multiple pairs of gym shoes. Neither did many of my friends. We had "shoes" and "dress shoes" if we were fortunate.

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

#222

Post by dreamcompiler »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #103

"One flight attendant said of the current situation affecting Sequence Decoder that they had “never seen a company go out of their way to make life harder for their workers.”" Every large company I've worked for had an IT department (or similar) that intentionally made developers'/sysadmins' lives harder. They don't care. So the good people leave, morale drops, productivity drops, management starts implementing crap…

Same here. IT people would prefer to shut down the company rather than help it achieve its mission because they are heavily incentivized to prevent security incidents and not incentivized at all to help with the mission.

Couple that with a CIO who wants to build an empire and second- or third-rate MCSE "Certified" personnel and IT inevitably becomes a huge impedance against the corporate mission.

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

#223

Post by bronco21016 »

Scoundreller wrote: post #190
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

You’d be amazed the creative places flight crew find to write down names/notes of people that are just truly wonderful to work with. Each fleet generally has a known place to look and see some notes.

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

#224

Post by messe »

OJFord wrote: post #141
pc86 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can always tell their employees they're not allowed to do something, and punish the ones that do. I think it's an important distinction though that whatever they tell their employees, the app isn't doing anything wrong in a legal sense. So still legal, possible, and difficult.

And I don't think there's anything illegal about the employer making it more difficult; that may well be the cheapest/easiest way of stopping employees using it.

There's nothing illegal about it, but that doesn't mean that making life harder for your employees trying to make sure the hours they're working are legal is moral.

EDIT: I welcome anyone who wants to justify this ethically.

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

#225

Post by andrepd »

thayne wrote: post #91
gpvos wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading the descriptions under the sibling comment, it seems to be something that every airline absolutely should offer their employees. You don't want them to work illegally as that could mean huge fines for you.

It's quite possible they consider the benefit of overworking their employees to be worth the risk of having to pay those fines.

Which clearly indicates that the fines need to me much higher, + probably specific accountability for individuals who made the calls, rather than just the corporation itself.

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

#226

Post by OJFord »

messe wrote: post #224
OJFord wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I don't think there's anything illegal about the employer making it more difficult; that may well be the cheapest/easiest way of stopping employees using it.

There's nothing illegal about it, but that doesn't mean that making life harder for your employees trying to make sure the hours they're working are legal is moral. EDIT: I welcome anyone who wants to justify this ethically.

Agreed. I haven't commented on morals, ethics, or even witb judgement on what ought to be legal or not.

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

#227

Post by a1369209993 »

a1369209993 wrote: post #199
jay-anderson wrote: post #108

We have bots scraping some of our pages at work. We've attempted to reach out but haven't received a response. We don't mind the bots so much themselves, but we want them to be well behaved. Currently they are making calls over and over again that return a 4xx response and are a significant portion of our traffic. We want to request that they stop making bad requests and slow down (we do have throttling in place, but…

> but this just gave them more errors to ignore and retry. So null-route the offending IPs on a [0]24-hour timeout? The problem you're describing isn't "scraping", it's "low-grade denial-of-service attack (that you suspect might be a result of attempted scraping)", and should be addressed accordingly. (The parenthesised part doesn't really matter.) 0: exponentially increasing up to -, for automated versions, but you'…

[Too late to edit:]

Also, double check that your first-stage throttling actually increases the latency of the requests, such that a user-agent that doesn't issue multiple requests concurrently (but starts a new request immediately on recieving a response) will automatically self-rate-limit. This should be standard for any 'serious' HTTP server, but I've seen a few that incorrectly go straight from "serve 200 OK instantly" to "serve 429 Too Many Requests, also instantly" rather than "serve 200 OK after ~1 second", and sending 429 only when there are actually too many requests (in particular, more than one at any given time).

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

#228

Post by closeparen »

kleiba wrote: post #156
jmslbam wrote: post #24

Reminds me of those Stockholm parents that built an app by obtaining data, in a legal way, that worked better the the manufactorer build themselfs.... https://www.wired.com/story/sweden-stockholm-school-app-open... :)

Landgren would dig through endless convoluted menus to find out what his children were doing at school. If working out what his children needed in their gym kit was a hassle, then working out how to report them as sick was a nightmare. This seems very removed from my own school days: - find out what the children were doing at school : you couldn't, really, the curricula were not public. You could ask your kids after…

>working out how to report them as sick

Welcome to the new world. Teacher submits attendance on the computer at the beginning of every class period; if the student is absent and there's no excuse recorded then the system immediately starts robocalling all the family contacts.

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

#229

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#230

Post by Arainach »

crznp wrote: post #182
Syzygies wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 u…

It's really not. From what I've seen of crashes and boot up screens, most airlines seem to use some rebranded Android experience. I'm fairly confident that's what American used the most recent time I flew them based on some navigation buttons that appeared on the bottom at one point. There's a lot of Android devs out there in the world, but AA does seem to hire or subcontract to some particularly bad ones.
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