Encrypted Flarmnet files and 3rd party software

On Monday, March 23, 2015 at 12:07:37 AM UTC-7, Ramy wrote:
Confirming that after upgrading the butterfly display to 3.4 and downloading the new encrypted flarmnet file, the contest number are no longer visible. Must be a bug.

Ramy

Ramy, I don't think a bug. This is the consequence of the encryption and tracking concerns. Butterfly tech support told me that's the way it is for now. Which sucks, frankly.

Ramy, I don't think a bug. This is the consequence of the encryption and tracking concerns. Butterfly tech support told me that's the way it is for now. Which sucks, frankly.

Kind of takes away any reason for signing up to FLARMnet I guess... Did you ask if the other info (eg., air-to-air frequency, aerodrome of origination, etc) is still available?

Dan
2D

This doesn't make any sense. The whole point of flarmnet, as well as the recent upgrade to the butterfly display was to support the new encrypted flarmnet so it doesn't make sense that this is by design.
For now best thing to do is downgrade the butterfly display to previous version and use an older unencrypted copy of flarmnet.
These silly privacy concerns are only causing a mess.

Ramy

At 17:22 23 March 2015, Ramy wrote:
This doesn't make any sense. The whole point of flarmnet, as well as the
recent upgrade to the butterfly display was to support the new encrypted
flarmnet so it doesn't make sense that this is by design.
For now best thing to do is downgrade the butterfly display to previous
version and use an older unencrypted copy of flarmnet.
These silly privacy concerns are only causing a mess.

Ramy


I have just downloaded the flarmnet.fln file, I used Flarmnet-lookup
(python script) to see the records and all the information is there apart
from the pilot's name. This seems fairly reasonable, one can find this
information if you want. Enjoy!

This would be fine, but the problem is that the call sign is not showing as well, unless they fixed it recently.
I still dont get the privacy thing, why removing the pilot name? If the pilot does not want to provide their name they wouldn't, if they do than why removing it?

Ramy

I don't get it either, since once you have the tail number or contest number (or IACO number) the owner at least is a very simple public database lookup. That isn't necessarily the pilot, but in gliders it is a very high correlation.

jfitch wrote:
I don't get it either, since once you have the tail number or contest
number (or IACO number) the owner at least is a very simple public
database lookup. That isn't necessarily the pilot, but in gliders it is a
very high correlation.

This is mostly a German privacy thing. Over there they don't have a
publicly available registration DB. German privacy law is way more strict
than anything here in the US

Pete

I got a confirmation from flarmnet folks that this was a bug they fixed as of last Tuesday. The only thing that they removed for now is the pilot name.. The Tail Number should be displayd as before once you download the latest file from flarmnet. I hope to be able to confirm it this weekend.

Ramy