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Threats Made Over FlightPrep Coverage
Late Tuesday, December 21st, and followed a few hours later in the wee hours of the morning of December 22nd, we received threatening emails from a person calling himself Dave Merril. The email was pretty nasty... pretty much threatening to ruin our Christmas/business/lives via all kinds of threats and mis-deeds because of our FlightPrep coverage. The combined emails were long-winded, closely parroted the claims and positions of FlightPrep's public statements and blog entries, and were… (www.aero-news.net) और अधिक...Sort type: [Top] [Newest]
if there was any doubt that FlightPrep is evil, then this should convince everyone.
Can somebody go to police and shut down that FlightPrep forever?
If you can obtain known samples of writing by the person/persons suspected of penning the emails in question, running those samples and the emails through a program that evaluates writing for repetitive words, misspellings and grammatical errors, may give you an indication of whose writing style resembles that of the offending emails. Programs of that type are used in evaluation of essays etc.
This is crime to call like that. And it's easy to track the calls.
I've been following this discussion is various places in the aviation community and it's clear that it has everyone riled up. That makes total sense since the data and technology that Flightprep provides seems to be a cornerstone of the amazing technological progression we've made in aviation over the last 10 years.
We're clearly being faced with a choice of regressing our aviation data tools or paying for it. In my personal opinion, this is as much about questioning the basic assumptions of the internet i.e. free data vs. paid data. It's certainly complicated and merits healthy discourse to get to some position that works for most people.
When I try to look at this objectively (note: I'm not objective, I use Flightprep and Foreflight), I'm conscious that most arguments of this complexity probably have merits on both sides. Certainly Flightprep has a product that has some value and now they want to get paid for it. I'm a businessman, so I can understand that. The users of that data and data interface see that they'll either have to pay for it or quit using it. I don't have any ability to discern all the facts on this.
It is clear that Flightprep is playing with sharp sticks here and I'm guessing that's what most of us are reacting. I doubt that people are reacting to the capitalistic behavior. After all, it is Flightprep's data and if you don't want to pay for it, don't use it. We have markets to help us enforce our preferences. I would ask everyone to consider how they would handle it if they owned this product; would you give it away? Isn't a clever approach to get everyone reliant on your free product and then start charging for it?
All that being said, I find that the article above undermines the argument of "our side" by it's strident tone. It doesn't seem to have the cool (pseudo) objective tone of journalism and I think that it lessens the strength of it.
Granted, if someone aggressively took away my livelihood and threatened me, I'd be yelling at the top of my lungs while I kicked their ass.
The point of my words here today are that this is a critical debate in our community and we all have a stake in it. Our responsibilities as stakeholders in the outcome include being respectful of all points of view and most importantly doing our best to discern what is a fact and what is an opinion.
We're clearly being faced with a choice of regressing our aviation data tools or paying for it. In my personal opinion, this is as much about questioning the basic assumptions of the internet i.e. free data vs. paid data. It's certainly complicated and merits healthy discourse to get to some position that works for most people.
When I try to look at this objectively (note: I'm not objective, I use Flightprep and Foreflight), I'm conscious that most arguments of this complexity probably have merits on both sides. Certainly Flightprep has a product that has some value and now they want to get paid for it. I'm a businessman, so I can understand that. The users of that data and data interface see that they'll either have to pay for it or quit using it. I don't have any ability to discern all the facts on this.
It is clear that Flightprep is playing with sharp sticks here and I'm guessing that's what most of us are reacting. I doubt that people are reacting to the capitalistic behavior. After all, it is Flightprep's data and if you don't want to pay for it, don't use it. We have markets to help us enforce our preferences. I would ask everyone to consider how they would handle it if they owned this product; would you give it away? Isn't a clever approach to get everyone reliant on your free product and then start charging for it?
All that being said, I find that the article above undermines the argument of "our side" by it's strident tone. It doesn't seem to have the cool (pseudo) objective tone of journalism and I think that it lessens the strength of it.
Granted, if someone aggressively took away my livelihood and threatened me, I'd be yelling at the top of my lungs while I kicked their ass.
The point of my words here today are that this is a critical debate in our community and we all have a stake in it. Our responsibilities as stakeholders in the outcome include being respectful of all points of view and most importantly doing our best to discern what is a fact and what is an opinion.
@Nikolay It might be "easy" to track the calls, but anytime I've ever needed help from ATT and/or Sprint, they've claimed there is absolutely nothing they can do - they don't have the callerID information they say. Certainly this is BS, because the computers keep records of where calls originated, etc -- but getting the telco off their lazy ass is another matter. Law enforcement is generally also not helpful to private citizens until the threats reach some threshold for frequency or evidence of intent/opportunity to carry out any such threats.