Year: 2018

American Airlines Considers Ending Ticket Changes If Congress Limits Fees

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From Bloomberg:

American Airlines Group Inc. would consider barring passengers from changing nonrefundable tickets if Congress limits what carriers can charge for the adjustments, Chief Executive Officer Doug Parker said Tuesday.

This is coming from some legislation making its way through Congress:

Doing away with changes to nonrefundable fares would make airline flights more like baseball games or concerts, where customers aren’t typically reimbursed if they buy tickets and can’t use them. Carriers currently consider the ability to change a nonrefundable ticket as a service that carries a cost. Such fees, which run up to $200, anger many passengers.

The language limiting what carriers can charge for ticket changes is being supported by consumer groups as a bipartisan provision. It is in a version of an aviation-policy bill sponsored by Republican Senator John Thune of South Dakota, who is chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. Parker called the proposal “really bad for consumers” last week.

I can’t say I blame American Airlines. Change fees have been around since the days of regulated aviation in the U.S. and the only reason I can think of to change the rules now is to appease some percentage of the voting public.

Is a limitation on the cost of change fees good for the consumer? On the surface, it’s easy to say yes, but when you dig into how airlines oversell flights and offer last minute seats or adapt to weather situations, I think the answer becomes a more complex “no”. Maybe Congress should simply focus on the transparency of the fares and underlying fare rules. If it becomes clear what consumers can and cannot do on a fare, rather than having to dig through pages and pages of fare rules, it becomes easier to make decisions.

Text Messaging is Broken

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When my wife made the jump from an iPhone to the Google Pixel 2 we thought everything would be easy. For the most part, everything was. All of her photos, contacts, and other random phone data ported over without issue. But even after following the steps to disable iMessage and move to regular SMS on Google Fi we still have a number of issues. And this is months after the initial move. With Google now pushing forward with Chat, I think this problem is about to get worse before it ever gets better.

The texting landscape before smartphones was pretty straightforward, 140 characters, sent via the SMS protocol to another phone number. Then MMS came along and we could send grainy photos to one another. Then iMessage showed up and things started to fall apart. If you have an iPhone and send a text to another iPhone user (both with iMessage turned on, which it is, by default), that text is sent as an iMessage via Apple’s servers. If one of the users doesn’t have iMessage, then theoretically, there is a check done and the message will be sent as a regular text message (via SMS or MMS, depending on if any media is in the message). If a person used to have iMessage enabled then the waters become even more murky as the iMessage system may swallow the message and never deliver it to the recipient. It sometimes takes sending 2-3 messages to that person before their regular texting kicks in, even if you follow all of the steps to disable iMessage.

Then you enter the Android device texting fiasco and things get even more confusing. Now with Google coming out with Chat and saying that it will fix all of the issues I think the landscape becomes even more rocky. Google’s product will not be end-to-end encrypted, which is surprising and a huge disappointment. One of the things that iMessage has going for it is the fact that Apple never sees the text of your messages, it is always encrypted. Most people don’t care about the government necessarily having access to their texts, but what about people who don’t want their phone used as a weapon against them (an abused child/wife/etc texting for help). The encryption of this data is important and Google dropping the ball is a shortsighted mistake.

This brings up the question of the chat apps that are out there (Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram/etc). I have all three installed on my primary phone but really only have experience with WhatsApp and Telegram. Signal is limited to a single device at a time and that’s a flaw to me. I like to be able to send message from my iPad, computer, or phone and not having that capability immediately makes me less likely to use the app.

I prefer Telegram’s interface over WhatsApp but Telegram uses a homegrown encryption method that I don’t think is completely proven and that makes me a little uncomfortable. WhatsApp’s Facebook ties aren’t my favorite, but they do use an encryption standard that is widely recognized.

The key with all of these independent apps is uptake and having friends who use the same application to communicate. If a few of your friends go with Telegram while others use Facebook Messenger and others are on Signal, then everyone just reverts to SMS/MMS and messages get missed and we are back to square one. Ideally, the SMS/MMS protocols would be updated with some “smart” functionality (if a device is an old school flip phone, revert to 140 character maximums). Or, Google would implement end-to-end encryption and large numbers of people would move over to that. I have strong doubts either of those things will happen though and the landscape will just stay fragmented and hard to navigate.

Don’t Give Away Historic Details About Yourself

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With all of the recent security issues with Facebook, I think this advice from Krebs on Security is probably some of the most relevant information on the internet today.

From “Don’t Give Away Historic Details About Yourself“:

I’m willing to bet that a good percentage of regular readers here would never respond — honestly or otherwise — to such questionnaires (except perhaps to chide others for responding). But I thought it was worth mentioning because certain social networks — particularly Facebook — seem positively overrun with these data-harvesting schemes. What’s more, I’m constantly asking friends and family members to stop participating in these quizzes and to stop urging their contacts to do the same.

On the surface, these simple questions may be little more than an attempt at online engagement by otherwise well-meaning companies and individuals. Nevertheless, your answers to these questions may live in perpetuity online, giving identity thieves and scammers ample ammunition to start gaining backdoor access to your various online accounts.

These quizzes seem innocuous, but the data that can be harvested from them is enough identifiers to get into your phone account, your banking, your credit cards, and more. It seems harmless to fill in a answer but you are putting yourself at risk by exposing that history to data mining.

US Navy remotely lands F/A-18 Super Hornet on aircraft carrier

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From FlightGlobal –

Using the ATARI system, or aircraft terminal approach remote inceptor, landing signal officers demonstrated remote piloting of the F/A-18E Super Hornet while conducting carrier qualifications and flight testing aboard the Abraham Lincoln in March. The officers also demonstrated touch-and-go manoeuvres with the system.

It is kind of fitting that the system’s acronym is “ATARI”. What’s even more interesting, and somewhat terrifying, is that there was a pilot in the cockpit during the tests. Landing on a carrier deck is a mental test for a pilot when they are in control, it has to be even more of a mental test when someone else is control of the plane remotely.