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Comment by somethingnot | Hacker News Reader

His attack is active, privacy plugins are passive, even if they report back false fingerprints.

Offense versus defense.

Not sure if the attack is active. He’s not actively talking to the filtering equipment to try and mess up its configuration or disable it. He’s just sending out packets hoping to reach the internet (a perfectly valid thing to do considering the system is designed to let you access the internet). It just so happens that certain packets manage to slip through the poorly designed filter.

How is this different from trying a door handle to see if it's open.

In this case the “door handle” is marked with “pull to access the internet”, and he is pulling on it. The handle is supposed to have a mechanism to demand payment before opening but in this case it failed and opened right away.

Not saying this is ethical (although selling WiFi for 12$ per hour isn’t either) but I wouldn’t go as far as calling this an attack.

>although selling WiFi for 12$ per hour isn’t either

Care to elaborate on this? WiFi on a plane isn’t any kind of thing people are dependent on to survive and satellites are pretty expensive. Airplane WiFi is entirely a luxury good.

Do you feel that charging $12 to watch a movie in a theatre is unethical as well? How about $150k for a Porsche?

The problem is airplane WiFi has a captive audience with no competition so they can charge unfair rates and there is no free market to balance it.

So if you go to the top of a mountain and there is a single cabin selling water there, at outrageous prices, you would just help yourself to one bottle, because hey, no competition, captive audience.

The problem is that it’s $12 for an hour, regardless of whether you end up using it, or whether it works at all (do you get a guaranteed bandwidth along with that, and is there some BS filter that’s gonna interfere with certain sites or protocols despite you having paid?).

Finally it’s just way too expensive at that price.

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