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.