Happy holidays from TSAstatus.net

Last year at this time, I was getting ready for a trip to the airport. On a weeklong romp through the Midwest* this site "went viral" and TSA statuses came pouring in. Thanks to you, they haven't stopped. We're on pace for 150 this month, or so. Thanks for submitting. A year ago this site was built on some basic HTML, a home server that kept crashing and a moderately ugly, but usable, design. We've kept the design. The rest is updated. The structure is probably not optimal, but it works. And I can give thanks for that.

So, as we head to the new year, year 2 of TSA status, keep the statuses coming, keep the information up-to-date, keep the notes succinct and keep me laughing as I glance down the page. But, most of all, help your fellow passengers navigate the silliness that is the TSA.

Thanks!

Ari

* I spent successive nights leading up to the trip, and then beyond, in Twin Mountain, N.H., Newton, Mass., Hayward, Wis., Duluth, Minn, Saint Paul, Minneapolis and Chicago. Needless to say, by the Windy City I was spent.

How long does it take to get through airport security?

You can help us find out. We've recently added an optional feature where you can enter the time of day you pass through a checkpoint and how many minutes you wait in line. Why? Well, why not! We have a bunch of submissions, and as I was waiting in security the other day, I thought to myself, man, wouldn't it be nice to build a database of how long these lines are? It would. Let's do a quick pro/con analysis:

Cons:

• The site becomes a bit more cluttered with entry boxes for these data. 
• The site wavers from it's core mission.

Pros:

• The site can, perhaps, collect data showing that x-ray machines create longer lines (which might themselves be good targets for "evil doers") and more of a headache for all. 
• We've had people ask us to put in a "time" field so that they can see if security is or is not being used at certain times—this is an included feature (and may show that certain machines are turned on and off at certain times of day. 
• It will allow people who don't like wasting their time sitting waiting for planes to get a better idea of how early they have to arrive at the airport. 
• It may attract new site users who will update the checkpoint status (which is required of all posts)
• It might even be fun!

So, since I think the pros outweigh the cons, and had several hours to mess around with code on the plane (and, thanks to GoGo, test code live), it's in place. It's optional, but we hope you'll use it.

*NB: If you do report wait times, please report only the time from when you first got in line to when you got through the WTMD, but not time spent waiting for a secondary pat-down. If you want to note which line you went through (elite/regular) use the notes column for that.

Update: apparently the TSA used to provide this information, but no longer does (i.e. the links to that page are kaput).

A couple new site features

1. We've gotten a flood of submissions in recent days (everyone traveling and standing in lines) and have added a countdown to 2000 submissions ticker on the home page. As of this writing, there are 135 statuses to go!

2. We've added a few more (12, to be precise) major airports to the search page so you can just click and go; no need to type and search. Not a big deal, but better use of screen real estate.

Let us know how you like it!

Statistics!

Over on the site there's a new page which charts the "color" of each submission for each month since the site launched. Cool stuff!

On a different type of security entirely

I haven't been paying much attention to TSAstatus.net recently (first I went for an abortive hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, then I traveled around with just an iPhone for a month, and I can tell you that attempting to manage a database and writing code on an iPhone is not fun). While I was "away" the site started getting spam—posts like

I'm happy very good site Free Forbidden Lolita Pics :[ Lolita The Little Girl 256 Nudist Picture Lolita Girls =)) Nude Lolita Model Index xkjxun Lolita Bbs 10 Yo 3160 Preteen Lolitas Non Nude 8PP Nude Lolitas Modeling Toplist mdqoe Www Majic Lolita Com :-))) 3d Lolita Incest Toons tmdh Fotos Lolitas Dildos Machine :-D Young Girls Art Lolitas xpjzsk Small Lolita Sex Pics vozylh Lolita Preteen Pedo Pics %[[ Little Lolitas Russian Naked bhq Nn Preteen Lolita Models 185847 Lolitas Models Sample Videos qqalx Baby Dorki Little Lolitas >:P Hard Lolit Sex Young >:OO Loli Preten Pussy Pics roe Best Lolita Free Pics %-(((

with a lot of links (which I deleted here of course) became quite common. And if you follow the site regularly, you probably didn't notice. Why? Well, spammers (bots) aren't all that smart (although they do seem to read Nabokov), so while they we able to get the posts to post (I have no anti-spam protection whatsoever) they weren't able to get them to populate many (really, hardly any) of the airport specific pages. Why? Well, they didn't know that several of the fields needed rather specific information to show up in any of the queries, namely, they needed a valid 3-digit IATA airport code.

Now, if I knew how to code, and wanted to exclude international airports, I could enter those codes (there are only 382 airports in the country with more than 10,000 passengers annually—or 30 per day) and exclude others. But I don't—especially traveling around with an iPhone and little else. But, instead, the spam was filtered out, because using only the 26 A-Z letters, there are 17,576 possible three-letter codes, and using numbers, too, there are 46,656. So assuming the codes generated were random, one in every 46 to 182 would have been for a valid airport, and many of those would have been a tiny airports which only have a few flights per day. In other words, the spammers weren't flooding the pages for ATL, ORD and SFO.

The all statuses page did have a bunch of junk, but the spammers also didn't understand how to enter a current date, so many of the entries were for January 1, 2010, meaning they wound up at the bottom of the page. So unless you were (like me) obsessively scanning through that page, you didn't notice it.

Of course, once I got around to it, I spent more time logging in to the admin page for the database than it took to look up the MySQL to search for text within a field and delete the offending entries (how did I do it? I searched for any "notes" with the text "<a href"—there's no point in spamming without links) and exorcise them. I'm planning to find some code to disallow any post with html tags embedded (or, at least, anything with a "<" in it), but for now this works as well.

And thanks to everyone who is submitting real entries. Keep 'em coming!

New UI, new TSA nonsense

First of all, new UI! I learned just enough php and mysql to copy and paste (read: steal from the Internets) enough code to make a page which automatically updates and can be searched by airport and such. So much more better than the old one. And easier for the webmaster, too, who doesn't have to rejigger Google Docs in to excel and then in to code each time an update is in order. Huzzah!

Also, my daily read of TSA nonsense: soon we can pay a nice fee to the government (I'm a big government liberal and I think this is ludicrous) to maybe get through security faster. Here's an idea: how about make security work better so that no one pays any fees and we actually know who is who.

Ugh.

Adverts

Yeah, there's ads on the page now. When I had spent $0 on the website, I figured I shouldn't try to make money off of it. Now that I have to cover my costs (so far, $10.16 for a domain—if some miserable cretin hadn't taken the .com, I'd still be free and clear. I'm not bitter at all. Don't click that link. Just mouse over it.

200!

Over 200 status posts in three days. Keep 'em coming, we'll work on making it as close to real-time as possible.

Form!

Thanks to the Googles (what would we do without you, Larry, Sergey et al?) there's a nifty form on the home page which should make it super easy to submit statuses. And which should make it slightly more automated for me to update things. Which is great, because it has to be better than doing it all manually. (Yes, email and twitter will still be acceptable!)

I bet the form would even work from smart phones; I might make a standalone version for them. Later.

Squatting

Someone (well, thanks to InstaTrace we know it's Homer Simpson of 732 Evergreen Terrace … our pledge enforcement van will be on its way—oh, wait, I mean, thanks to whois we know it's studio3k.com of Ocala, Florida). That's okay, because I jumped on tsastatus.net and it forwards now. Maybe Studio3k is trying to protect the URL for me since I wasn't jumping on it because I had, oh, 200 statuses to post. Or maybe studio3k is a ninny.

Site down?

I hope it's not. But it is (for now) on a home web server, and while it's pretty fast, it does have limitations. Like being hosted on a 8-year-old iBook with an iffy power supply. So, patience.

Notes from 12/27

12/27: I went skiing all day and have 67 emails to post. And, oh god, the Twitters. Will work on it. Thanks! And, yes, I am hoping to make this more user friendly soon (i.e. search/sort by airport or date &c.). Lots of interesting information coming in though. I love the internet. Thanks to the person who pointed out the typo of "incidates" which has been fixed, too :)

Also, please remember to include the date you flew in updates.

Okay, I've alphabetized the list.

And I might need a fifth status: scanners installed and in use, but it's possible to avoid them. If I do that, I'd add blue, so that we'd have the good old Homeland Security Threat Level color scheme. I must do this. I have.

I also added quotes from contributors.