Monthly Archives

Monthly Archives for March 2024.

Security Breach: Simple Hack Unlocks Millions of Hotel Room Doors Globally

by Gary Leff

Mar 22 2024

It’s possible to open over 3 million hotel doors worldwide with just two taps. One of the people that figured out how to do it is the founder of airline award search tool Seats.aero.

Two years ago a group was invited to hack a brand of hotel door lock in Las Vegas. What one team found was flaws in the RFID-based keycard locks by Dormakaba, a leading Swiss lock manufacturer. This vulnerability affects Saflok systems installed in doors across 131 countries. There’s a fix rolling out, but it’ll take months or even years to be in place worldwide.

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Conspiracy In Tennessee: State Senate Votes To Ban Weather Controlling Chemtrails From Planes

by Gary Leff

Mar 22 2024

Legislators in Tennessee are convinced that contrails are really government weather control experiments, or targeting of civilians with poison – and the state’s senate has passed legislation to ban “chemtrails” within the state’s borders.

Chemtrails is a conspiracy theory that the trails left by aircraft are chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for nefarious and secret purposes.

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Dark Side Of Rewards Miles And Government Surveillance: DOT Audits How Airlines Abuse Your Data

by Gary Leff

Mar 21 2024

The U.S. Department of Transportation is launching a comprehensive review of the top U.S. airlines’ privacy practices concerning passenger data, focusing on potential unethical monetization and data sharing with third parties, in an effort led by Secretary Buttigieg and influenced by Senator Wyden’s advocacy for stricter privacy protections.

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American Airlines To Passenger: You Can’t Fly If You Try To Avoid Overweight Bag Fees

by Gary Leff

Mar 21 2024

A passenger was told that if they wanted to remove an item from their checked bag to get under their 50 pound allowance, they would have to go to the back of the line and start over – and then they would miss their flight (or, presumably, the cut-off time for checking bags before their flight).

Of course paying the overweight bag fee would likely take at least as long as avoiding the overweight bag fee.

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JetBlue Will Cut Some Transatlantic Flights Next Month, May Lose Their Hawaiian Partnership

by Gary Leff

Mar 21 2024

A report from an executive meeting with JetBlue employees over all of the change that’s going on at the airline after the government blocked their partnership with American Airlines, stopped them from acquiring Spirit Airlines, and after corporate raider Carl Icahn took a stake in the carrier suggests that cuts may be coming to transatlantic flying and that there’s risk to their partnership with Hawaiian Airlines too.

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