News and notes from around the interweb:
- Delta has been gathering data from its pilots’ personal phones.
It turned out that an app designed for Delta employees to install on their personal devices was able to collect data, such as all the apps that employees have installed on their own phones, as well as the potential ability to track their location.
The app is known as the Delta Hub app, and it allows employees to install internal apps from Delta’s own app store onto their devices. As a default, when the app is installed, it creates a ‘personal managed’ account that sends information to Delta, including data like the device IP address, which can often be traced to an approximate geographic location.
- I’ll be making a donation of United miles to Give-a-Mile’s holiday campaign, and I hope you will join me. This is a great cause that redeems miles to help people travel to be with their dying loved ones, so that they can have last moments together and so that no one has to die alone.
- Florida law requires airports “to report sightings of so-called aircraft with weather modification or geoengineering equipment aboard.”
In reality, those streaks that appear in the wakes of jet planes are called contrails, not chemtrails. They form when hot, humid air from jet engines condense into ice crystals in the cold air thousands of feet off the ground. Condensation is how regular clouds form, too.
The idea of chemtrails first surfaced in a 1996 Air Force report looking at weather scenarios. Its authors stressed that their work contained “fictional representations of future situations/scenarios,” but it fed rumors about the powers of scientists and government agencies.
- Watch.
The wildest video you’ll see today:
The abandoned Sheraton Hotel in New Jersey collapses in just 30 seconds.
Former NASA engineer and YouTuber Mark Rober led the project. His team constructed a giant “Angry Birds”-inspired slingshot that activated explosives, carefully… pic.twitter.com/j6RlrddyLv— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) November 6, 2025
- British Airways will start rolling out Starlink wifi next year which is awesome.
- Top O’Hare official indicted on fraud charges “funneling money through subcontracted companies owned by his father and girlfriend’s son to line his own pockets” (and theirs, presumably). Although if I were General Manager of Operations at a Chicago airport, I’d just assume that was what I was supposed to do?
Contrails show up on pictures of World War 2 propeller driven bombers flying at high altitudes. But try telling that to people who “know” better. After all, this is the country where the astronomer who led the demotion of Pluto told me that he gets death threats for his action.
I suspect AAL has the same thing, and that is why there are no airline apps on my personal device.
the company phone is on a charger out in the garage.. in case they try to listen in…..
for the other story: watching a building implode is already cool. adding an Angry Birds Detonator is just icing on the top. Well Done!
Hey! Marriott just sent me an email to check in online for my upcoming stay at this Sheraton! WTF?
Does my Marriott ‘Ultimate Reservation Guarantee’ cover properties that have been blown up, or am I going to get Bonvoyed yet again?!? 😀
I’m genuinely surprised the people in that demolition video weren’t Marriott executives.
An apt metaphor for what they did to Starwood and the Sheraton brand.
Delta only uses Premium Spyware.
I wonder who contracted made the Delta Hub app for Delta. From problems with their computer systems in the past, I doubt that they have the homegrown talent capable of making such an app.
“Spying” on employees is not unique to DL. At my last company we had to sign an agreement that allowed IT to monitor our personal devices with we put ANY work apps on our personal devices, including email.
I told them they could pound sand and refused. Made it so much easier to separate from work after hours.
My employer used Microsoft Intune, which is capable of significant surveillance. As a company with European employees, employee data privacy rules prevented the software from using all the capabilities it had the permission to do. It was only used to be a device administrator, enable the company email, and to install the company’s DNS certificate. The Device Administrator was used to allow the company to wipe the phone if it was lost or stolen. If Delta has any European employees or subcontractors who have to use this app, I doubt Delta is using that data either.
@Parker – Never make anything an “app” that can just as easily be a webpage.
Know someone who was a FA at Pan Am in NYC when it was absorbed into Delta in 1991, but not before the HR interviewers from Atlanta inquired about their “birth control practices and…marital histories.” Delta eventually settled the lawsuit for $5M and 20K tickets.