PySkyWiFi: Free stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights
robertheaton.com
robertheaton.com
Notification of incoming texts was the only problem. I jailbroke the thing and started trying to schedule network requests, thinking I'd add some kind of new message counter on the home screen. This proved hard. But it occurred to me that the best place for the counter would be right next to the Kindle's device name, at the top of the screen. And the device name could be updated from her Amazon account.
So I automated a web browser on the home server to log into Amazon and update the device name to "My Kindle (x)" where x was the number of unread Google Voice texts. The Kindle would update the name on the home screen in less than a minute. This worked for years!
(Eventually that Kindle was stolen. I wanted to update its name to something foul but the device disappeared from her account too quickly.)
Later I found another kindle keyboard for $20 in a flea market but it only worked for 6 months before the battery died. I still have the body around - I wonder how much it would cost to get a replacement battery.
not too hard to pop open and swap in
I might just pay $30 for another battery and stick with this Kindle keyboard.
I recall Amazon announcing a few years back that it would stop working; not sure if they pushed a firmware update, stopped paying the bill, or if 3G just isn't available anymore.
https://www.thestreet.com/retail/amazon-quietly-discontinues...
I think the kindle keyboard (3rd generation) was great. physical buttons for page turning. internet. a keyboard! was way ahead of its time.
I have always felt that the default display of ads on Lock Screen cheapened the devices—-even the flagship oasis model required an additional purchase to remove the ads.
That seemed completely at odds with the premium pricing and marketing.
Also, it seemed like there was always some way to call Amazon support and make claims about location or some other detail that would make support disable the ads for free. Are you aware of those requests and manual handling?
The ads were profitable enough that customers buying devices without the ads for an extra $20 didn't quite make up for it. When they started selling the smart covers for the Paperwhite (IIRC the covers launched at $50) those made them more profit than they lost from reduced ad interactions on the lockscreen. I never knew the exact number though, and could be remembering wrong on some of that. Obviously I have no idea what the numbers would be today though.
There was a backend service with an endpoint which could un-enroll a device in ads, and I know that some customers were able to get ads disabled by just complaining. You can also, even today, just pay that same $20 for removal after you already have the device (I just checked on my own device here https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/alldevices, I go into the device and there's a button that says "Remove offers").
Also, I'm not sure I quite agree with the ads being at odds with the premium pricing. I could have easily turned off ads on my personal kindles (using the aforementioned backend services) and I never bothered because I really just don't find them all that intrusive. The lockscreens you get when ads are disabled are also really boring, so I kept the ads. Recently the tradeoff has shifted slightly, with some of the garbage AI covers I've seen, so I'm not positive what decision I'd make if it were still free (to me), but it's still definitely not worth $20 to me.
My next kindle had the ads, and I did indeed call customer service and have them remove it for no charge.
I’m very anti ad, and when my current kindle kicks the bucket, I’ll certainly be going with something else. They aren’t intrusive, but the principle is that I want to control when my time is commercialized.
Aside from all that, Amazon retail has gotten horrible logistics where I am in a medium sized Canadian town (50k people, 1.5 hours from the nearest international container port, 5 minutes from the nearest international airport). The delivery times have gotten so long over the past year that AliExpress is pretty consistently the fastest shipping.
Amazon has gone from being the first place I go shopping to the last.
Isn't it enough that I bought their device, and that I fill it with content from their store that "makes suggestions" (shows ads) when I visit it?
On a commercial prime account, I frequently find items that are listed as next day delivery only to get them in my cart, go through the checkout process and on the final page find that shipping will actually be 7 business days.
Every time it comes up, I am now attempting to get our company to close its Amazon account. It's not convenient or useful if I have to spend an hour navigating through constant lies in order to find the 1 product that actually ships when it says it will. I can go to a department store or office supply store and buy the things for the same cost in less time.
The problem is, the local stores don't have net 30 terms and we don't have corporate / business accounts with them, and it would be a huge hassle to add them.
I am guessing that since it is such a hassle to go back to the cart, pull the item with the false shipping dates, and then find another similar item with good shipping dates, add to cart, go through checkout, find out that shipping is actually 4+ days, rinse and repeat until you either get lucky or give up, they're probably not going to fix it because it makes them more money to keep you frustrated.
I like it, it's useful, I rely on it, and it's from Google. How does it still exist?
But that's quite unproductive. As it turned out, in order for stripe to work, it needs access to fastly CDN. And then I remembered that reddit also uses fastly. By connecting to stripe and changing the Host HTTP header to reddit.com, I could browse reddit! Images didn't work though (i.redd.it is not on fastly). I could edit my /etc/hosts and associate old.reddit.com with stripe's fastly IP address. After ignoring scary TLS errors, I could even log in.
Requested host does not match any Subject Alternative Names (SANs) on TLS certificate [d22c2cdf866a373f3648c0d7c30f9399e974d07c8c5417566ff11059a06f5b40] in use with this connection. Visit https://docs.fastly.com/en/guides/common-400-errors#error-42... for more information.
But I'm just doing this from memory, it's possible I did something else a years ago.
And here I am, avoiding downloading things on cell service because it might negatively impact other people around me.
Though I suppose once it's storage mechanism performs enough of the functions of a database, it's an ad-hoc database.
This is a noble activity and I salute you for it, but I'm pretty sure that towers have traffic shaping that manage QoS and fairness for you.
(Not talking about edge cases like BitTorrent or such. But if a carrier advertises watching streaming video on my phone, I don’t feel guilty downloading an app update. If their tower couldn’t handle that, it’s on them, not me.)
ISPs have done a great job shaming people who use their service for what it is supposed to be. It's 2024, and we should all have fiber to the home by now. But no, they're only working on deploying more shitty wireless connections to everybody and letting all the land-based services rot. Fuck them.
Wireless is a bit different in that there's inherently limited bandwidth. You and I share the same RF fields. If I'm monopolizing them, you can't, and vice versa. Now, if you have a home 5G hotspot, do what thou wilt. Those are advertised to support a household. If they can't, they shouldn't advertise it. However, if I were at a baseball game with 40,000 other people, and I couldn't text my wife because I saw you having 300 torrent connections open on a laptop just because you could, I'd still kinda wanna throw a beer at you. It's like listening to music out loud on the bus. You can; you shouldn't.
There's no chance the carrier can give every phone in a cell full bandwidth at the same time, they rely on only a handful of people using their connection at any given moment.
You paid for that service, they should be able to provide it to you. If it negatively impacts other users, that's the provider's fault.
But, I'm not selfish so I just water the garden at 4am now.
If your neighborhood's water pressure is affected by you running a garden watering system that most likely maxes out at 15 gallons/minute, then you have a serious problem, god help you if there's a structure fire in the neighborhood.
Seriously though, if you're not just exaggerating to make an example, contact your town/city/whatever Department of Works, something is seriously wrong.
It's low enough that some appliances like dishwashers and washing machines give 'water supply' errors unless you run them overnight. Some houses use pressure boosting pumps to get water to the top floor.
Apparently fixing the leaks is expensive and it's free to just lower the pressure and pass the problem onto householders.
I also use this analogy for smuggling and the resources spent trying to stop it: if 10% gets lost/intercepted/“leaked”, the smugglers just produce and send 11% more and demand is met. You can change the numbers but it doesn’t change the result.
Using the entire annual flow of the Colorado river doesn’t mean it’s severely limited. It just means society isn’t stupid and will use the excess to fill sunny deserts to grow crops.
As long as there are crops grown anywhere between Phoenix and LA, water isn’t severely limited.
This is false.
Most western states associate water rights with land ownership. The marginal cost of a unit of water for a user with their own well is close to zero (wells do require electricity and maintanance, but these costs are generally very small).
However, the existence of those water rights (e.g. "this 5 acre parcel comes with 3 acre-feet of water") has nothing to do with whether the water is actually available, and increasingly in many parts of the southwest, it is not.
"Severely limited" in my book means that water usage could not increase by 50%. Fairly sure this condition applies to more or less the entire US southwest.
It’s all being used because there is enough farmland and sun to absorb it. Cut out the farming and the remaining usage could easily grow several hundred percent.
People grow absolutely ridiculous shit in southwest Arizona because water is so cheap and is not “severely limited” by any notional definition of the term.
The only context in which it looks that way is to people coming from locations that are inundated with water but are land/weather limited.
If you want to see what “severely limited” water looks like. Take a look at Israel.
As long as people can pay $100 for 10,000 gallons of water to fill a pool, there is no severe limit.
In the village where I live in rural New Mexico, at least 30% of the population here have private wells and pay nothing for water at all (other than pump energy costs and well maintanance costs). Ranchers to the south of the village pump their own water and use it to irrigate alfalfa fields without paying anyone anything at all.
The reason water is cheap here is because of the historical and legal situation. If water was managed here as it is east of the Mississippi, where it is considered exclusively a public resource, then water supply systems would be able to charge prices more like those found in the east. But because "water rights" are bound up with "land rights", there is no way currently to do politically-controlled water pricing outside of city water systems.
And yes, agriculture in this part of the world uses 75% or more of all the water that falls or flows through the land, and if that wasn't here, water would not be much of an issue. I advocate locally for changes in how agriculture is done here, and write articles for hyperlocal media here to raise awareness of this issue.
But for now agriculture is here, using water wastefully and substantially, and that means that in effect the water supply is severely limited to the point that local jurisdictions will pay farmers to not use water that they have rights to.
I've lived in Israel (Rehovot). The Negev is a broadly similar climate (though much lower in elevation) as southern New Mexico and northern Israel is very similar to northern New Mexico. The Israelis are world leaders in the use of desalination, an option that makes no real sense for most of the US southwest (southern CA would be the obvious exception). This makes a significant difference to water availability both for agriculture and residential use in Israel.
There are no timber frame buildings, not any with flammable roofs like thatch or shingles.
They aren't going to make the mistakes of the great fire again!
It seems to work - I have never seen any fire burn more than one building.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/149wg3o/why_do_lond...
It's ironic that you mention "tragedy of the commons." Literally, what we don't have is a commons. What we have is enclosure. So it's truly not a "tragedy of the commons" but a tragedy of private ownership or, specifically, a tragedy of the commons' absence.
Again, there is no use in being "communally-minded" within the confines of an entity that has no community spirit, eg a ruthless, cynical, bottom-lining private corporation. In this context, "communally-minded" action cannot and will not be rewarded. It will only be exploited.
"The public" is an abstraction that resolves to lots of separate "private" people in aggregate -- it's not a specific entity capable of acting as an owner of anything. When people talk about "publkic ownership", what they're really describing is one specific organization acting as the de facto owner, but nominally acting on behalf of "the public" by being bound up in fiduciary responsibilities to others. That sounds nice in theory, but the incentive structures applicable to those institutons are often not aligned with the interests of "the public" (presuming that any singular interest can even be attributed to it), and the mechanisms of fiduciary accountability often do not work properly. What "public ownership" usually amounts to is private ownership by political institutions, which have their own interests and agendas.
> Again, there is no use in being "communally-minded" within the confines of an entity that has no community spirit, eg a ruthless, cynical, bottom-lining private corporation. In this context, "communally-minded" action cannot and will not be rewarded. It will only be exploited.
The corporation is an organizational model employed by people. It has no consciousness or will of its own, so attributing any of the above qualities, positive or negative, to it, is meaningless. Corporations cannot be ruthless or cynical, or be communally-minded or have any sort of "spirit". They are just processes.
The people who are using the corporation as an organizational structure, on the other hand, can be any of those things. If you have a society full of greedy avaricious people, then commercial corporations will likely behave in ways that reflect greed and avarice. But then so again will every other expression of that society -- including political institutions and interpersonal interactions -- because it's not the abstract organizational model that possesses those qualities, it's the people.
The reality here is that doing destructive things out of some antipathy toward the abstract "corporation" has concrete negative consequences for its employees, its customers, and its investors (who aren't cartoon characters wearing top hats and monocles, but include ordinary people trying to fund their retirements).
I think it's possible to have corporations whose emergent values don't reflect their constituent values. In fact, I think it's inevitable; an LLC is not a cortical homunculus.
The reality is that the behavior you are trying to justify doesn't impact the equally abstract "corporation", it impacts the actual people whose activities that concept represents -- employees, customers, investors, etc.
> So I started to waste their bandwidth
...why? Trying to hack it for your own use I can understand, but why would you actively try to worsen the performance for everyone else paying, or try to run up the company's bill if it's metered?
A couple of decades ago, the idea of even having internet connectivity on a ship at sea was fanciful. The trip would have taken the same twenty hours, and there would have just been no internet access. Now, it's something that is available, but naturally has costs associated -- and the reaction here is that because you don't want to pay for it, it's justifiable to screw over everyone who is paying for it? That's almost sociopathic.
I checked the default gateway and it took me to a cisco modem. It had all sort of diagnostic tooling including the list of devices connected to the modem. However, it showed no Internet connection. I googled the model on my phone, and the admin is supposed to be the serial number with blank password and there was an example of the pattern. Surprisingly, one of the devices connected to the modem had a name that looked like said pattern.
And just like that, I was in. I toggled the Internet button, 15 seconds later it turned green. I set a new password on the device.
[1] in the original meaning of the word. [2] https://github.com/yarrick/iodine
Had a Delta flight that used gogoinflight internet. On my initial outbound flight I noticed DNS still worked without paying, so when I was flying back home, I had set up a simple iodine tunnel on my homelab in advance.
I was surprised by how completely unusable it was. Of the few sites I even attempted to load, I only just barely managed stallman.org after modifying my browsers maximum timeout via a flag (and it look ~5 minutes).
SSH was also not usable, even a simple "whoami" took ~1 minute to finally execute.
So yeah fun as a cool gimmick, but other than _maaaaybe_ connecting to a single IRC channel, its not practical for anything.
I kept a log of all train/hotel/airport/etc networks that it worked on, and also offered some other tunneling protocols.
Was a fun project for a while. Wish I’d kept the thing running.
These days DNS tunnelling is a bit harder to do due to some DNS servers (notably Google) randomising the case in DNS requests which breaks certain encodings horribly.
Let's say the plane's DNS server is 192.168.1.53 and your DNS server is 1.1.1.53
You can't talk to 1.1.1.53 because that's blocked, so running wireguard on 1.1.1.53:53 doesn't help you. Instead, you run iodine there and configure "*.mydomain.com" to have 1.1.1.53 as its dns server.
Now, you can talk to 192.168.1.53 to make DNS queries, and then the dns server there, which isn't firewalled, will forward to 1.1.1.53:53, and proxy back the response.
Obviously, the plane's DNS server won't speak wireguard, nor forward wireguard for you.
That's the usecase for iodine, when you have access to some local DNS server which will forward requests for you, but you don't have access to the public internet, so you can access your own DNS server indirectly and thus do IP-over-DNS that way.
People like this lack basic civility. I'm sure a lot of the people around Robert did mind, they were just too polite to ask him to stop imposing his gratuitous noise on them.
In a way it made me think "wow, it had to be an American who doesn't care about others than him and is rude and self centered"
Which is stupid a stupid generalization I know. And also goes to show the ambiguity of written language. And how strong our preconceptions can impact our judgement (as it did mine initially).
I'm overthinking this haha.
Giveaways:
>I logged in to my JetStreamers Diamond Altitude account and started clicking.
Satire! It's not called that, but it's a similar marketing wankery version.
>This clickable rascal would allow me to access the entire internet through my airmiles account. This would be slow. It would be unbelievably stupid. But it would work.
"It would be unbelievably stupid but I'm going to do it anyway!"
>Several co-workers were asking me to review their PRs because my feedback was “two weeks late” and “blocking a critical deployment.” But my ideas are important too so I put on my headphones and smashed on some focus tunes.
Even this was a sarcastic/satirical leadup.
>I’d forgotten to charge my headphones so Limp Bizkit started playing out of my laptop speakers. Fortunately no one else on the plane seemed to mind so we all rocked out together.
Limp Bizkit is a very famous (or infamous) band that gets notoroiusly mocked. The odds of even a single person rocking out with that playing out of laptop speakers is tiny. Two people? Everyone on the plane? 0.0% chance.
I don't know why I put so much effort into explaining this.
They aren't always American as some other commenters have pointed out. Was on a tour bus from Paris to Giverny and some Italian guy thought it was okay to watch his sport events out loud the entire way. Had a similar experience on a long distance train in Germany and another in a train in Japan (western person, not American). It's crazy to me people don't get how annoying it is. I'm sure they'd be annoying if I pulled out something louder but it apparently never occurs to them.
I would also contend that HN, like my workplace (university math department) skews towards folks with ASD.
Usual caveats of “when you met one person with autism, you met one person with autism…” etc etc.
It’s obviously a joke.
Maybe take a stand-up comedy class or something
The idea of pulling out my laptop or even a book is just… tiring. There’s a lot of noise as well (airbus anyone?) and I don’t have noise cancel headphones, so concentration is difficult. Without taking into account that I have spent at least 2h away from home among trains, trams and security controllers. The bad (unhealthy) food available in airports doesn’t help either. Half the year the weather doesn’t help either(it’s either too hot or too cold). Plus the 10 kilos backpack I have on my back is making me sweat no matter what.
So, basically, I’m never in the mood of doing anything in a plane.
Also, for some odd reasons, aircraft meals gives me bloating issues every single time and need medication immediately after I have landed.
Interestingly, I have flown in business class twice and was able to do some reading partially before my brain checkedout.
On long distance train rides, it is. easier for me to actually get some work done given that am sitting facing the direction on which the train is going. However, if the train gets fairly crowded, then my brain again decides to checkout.
The shaking, not enough space to type properly etc.
Edit: some googling shows that commercial flights can reach 1500 to sometimes 3000 ppm co2. Pressure is around 0.75 atm at cruising altitude. My understanding is that would be noticeable
So these days I usually just pull out my iPad and noise cancelling headphones and catch up on my movies or TV shows.
I feel the rare permission to live as if I'm in cryo stasis and time doesn't matter and no one expects anything from me.
The plane noise is like white noise which helps me focus, chilly temps keeps me alert and I'm cozy in a sweater. I bring snacks I enjoy.
And I get to coding. Or working on presentations. Or journalling.
Also I cannot sleep in a chair/on a plane no matter what (even if utterly exhausted, I'm swaying an and out of consciousness every few seconds). That is so dreadful that I always avoid red-eye. In fact I just avoid being tired on a plane in general, typically booking a morning/daytime flight, have a little caffeine (I usually avoid it, so it's a jolt), no big meals, ...
But apparently there are people who are not affected by this at all and can do useful work on airplanes.
I can deal with all the airport crap, but sitting on the plane for two 12 hour stretches is horrible.
What's wrong with it? Perhaps I'm weird, I love flying and always look forward to my next flight, bonus points if its a long one.
It forces me to unplug from the internet, so I always bring along my kindle to take a decent chunk out of my book backlog.
Of course I have my laptop too, though its not useful for much besides cataloging my knowledge base and getting a head start on essays for school.
I'm curious why many people seem to dislike flying. I wonder if its more of an introvert/extrovert split or a young/old one. I want nothing more than to be able to do my own thing undisturbed, and flights are the perfect avenue for that.
For me, it's almost always that I'm exhausted and basically unable to be physically comfortable. When I have 10+ hour flights with layovers it feels like enhanced interrogation: I'm prevented from getting any significant amount of good sleep, and I'm forced to be in a kind of sitting stress position where I can't get comfortable and I can't sleep. Forget about reading, I'm just not capable of doing it.
However, you can make it suck less. Stow your backpack overhead so you have at least some leg room. Have comfortable clothes, possibly adjustable ones (zip-off pants, t-shirt plus a separate warmer layer you can take off). Wear earplugs - possibly from the point on where you leave your home - to reduce the added stress from noise. If you have noise cancelling over-the-ear headphones, those go over the earplugs, then you crank the volume up (given the surrounding noise, this should not leak enough noise to be annoying for your seat mates). If you don't, consider noise-insulating in-ear headphones + earmuffs.
I tend to fall asleep on planes easily (usually aided by sleep deprivation because I procrastinated packing for way too long), but when I wake up, I tend to be perfectly in the mood for some dumb entertainment.
Buy yourself some noise cancelling headphones, either over-ear or in-ear like Airpods Pro. At a minimum these provide a lot of comfort on planes to keep the noise down from potential passengers and the aircraft itself. I often wear them without any music at all.
I like to whip a book out and read or look out the window.
I suffer from adult ADHD. It is harder for me to focus when at work. But, on a plane or other busy places, I can achieve laser focus. Counterintuitive, but I am told that many ADHD brains work like this.
My time on the plane is the most productive.
But give me a quiet room, what I need, and time and I do absolutely nothing. It's ridiculous.
Apparently this is what my gen will rocker rant about.
Primarily I used it to google the address of a place I wanted to go so I could enter that in my TomTom. Times have changed.
You would send it a DM via SMS (which Twitter supported at the time) containing a few lyrics, and it would do a Google search of "<your input> lyrics", parse the search results, and in theory return the artist and title to you via SMS.
It never worked very well, but I was proud of it!
That allows me to ask ChatGPT questions from anywhere on Earth via a handheld satellite communicator (inReach Mini 2). It's kind of nice to be able to ask ChatGPT things from the middle of death valley.
Nobody imagined that P2P messaging (requiring multiple presses of a numeric keypad to type one character) would become as popular as it did, so an information service was the best use I could imagine, especially given the growing availability of data through the nascent Web. (Teletext was also still a thing, and we had a separate project for scraping that...)
But guess what those of us with access to SMS (and the general public) ended up using it for?
Imagine a proxy where all you did was design at a high-level a way to write/read to a shared resource from two sides, and then it handled all the rest for you as a SOCKS proxy.
Eventually free Wi-Fi became the standard and this is not a thing anymore.
We have just progressed to fighting the in-flight free Wi-Fi battle now. Eventually in-flight Wi-Fi will be free everywhere. It already is on several airlines.
Anyway, the way they implemented this is by blocking all traffic from/to ip addresses but not blocking tcp and completely forgot about ipv6 as it was not pretty new. So, I created a simple p2p chat Application which will work with ipv6. Only problem is that we had to share our ipv6 addresses with our friends which they have to maintain in contacts. It worked great until we figured tunneling to computer which is outside the network was much easier.
Is it a life changer? Probably not. Was it fun to write and explore? Most likely!
We definitely need to make more stuff like this.
After the course ended, one student going home did manage to use his assignment to get Internet access from the airport, as we had forgotten to turn off the DNS server nodes.
Over the years we had a lot of fun with creative final projects in the course besides IP-over-DNS, including web-based phone tethering, DNS spoofing, openflow-based SDN routing, LT (Erasure) Coding, a BitTorrent client, and a DNS-redirection-based CDN with leaderboard.
[1] https://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs168/s11/handouts/dtun.pdf
Website makers: There's a hole here, but we make it super slow so nobody in their right mind would use it and even if they do then there's no problem whatsoever. It would only waste their time.
He's not serious, right? Right?
The problem was I had packed my wallet into my check-in like a dumbass. I couldn't figure out a way to sign up for in flight wifi. Plenty of apps and services have my credit card number on my phone but none of them would show the entire number without me signing on.
The flight however had Alipay as one of the apps to pay, which would have been great except it wasn't working. It still allowed connections to alipay. I figured out I could cancel the payment through a button hiding in a transaction details page and be dumped out to the alipay home screen.
The alipay chat feature wasn't working though, they'd must have thought about that. But some of the mini-apps did work, including the mini-app for my home automation.
It let me send a message to the terminal thingy at the door of my place where you buzz people in (there was a feature to send mail to other rooms, I just sent it to myself).
This took up about 40 minutes of the 11 hour flight.
There were no security checks whatsoever: everyone who know the magic word that triggered the start of the commands could do whatever they wanted on the Alcatel servers.
As a bonus one of those contest systems allows users to upload a profile photo, which would greatly increase the bandwidth!
I wish I thought of it on my last trans-atlantic!
Was considering to “hack” my way out of the free tier. But paying was just too easy and it’s affordable.
Sorry for boring addition/story.
The APNS payload is a JSON blob that's limited to 4KB, with a few required pieces of information but mostly free-form, so it's definitely in the scope of e.g. a (text-only) blog post split over a few messages.
I would love to be in a position where I could consider this cheap. FWIW, I pay about €46 per month for Internet service.
The bias is known as “Anchoring Effect”, where your perception of subsequent prices is skewed by the initial high price.
Perhaps i am a bit biased i would expense the bill to the company. A few hours of work definitely pays back the prepaid internet.
As mentioned, a decade or two ago, this was not possible or very limited to the elites. I certainly dont feel or behave like an elite. So it is “affordable” to me
By the way, many many paid WiFi networks leak DNS requests like a sieve when not logged in or paid and you can tunnel through it easily. There's a piece of software for that, iodine I think it was called. Never really needed it but it's there and it works.
Mind you, this was before the age of WiFi on airplanes. But within other gated networks, it used to work quite well. I recall getting tens of Kbps.
Thank you for the trip down memory lane!
It was a simple matter of joining the network, and then dumping the traffic in monitor mode. I could log MAC addresses of other devices on the network.
I made a list of addresses and then spoofed someone else’s address that must have paid, and blamo, I’m online.
I would rotate to another address when Internet access deteriorated: this meant the other guy was trying to use the Internet at the same time.
Yeah, I know I’m awful.
The trouble is that IP conflict detection may have to be disabled.
Back then, TCP session hijacking coordinated with IP and ARP spoofing was fun. That was the era of airpwn and goatse injection into unsecured wifi. TLS and such made most of it moot.
Modern network security measures tends to shut most of it down now.
Also, I wouldn't do anything approaching hacking on a flight to the PRC. That would just be stupid.
In all liklihood if I had been caught they’d have just destroyed them or worse case sent me back to the US rather than doing the jail or international incident thing, I believe.
My ex’s dad had an important enough job as director of water resources for much of a province and was a party member and likely could have gotten me out of trouble besides him suffering some major embarrassment.
Am disappointed though to have reached the end of the article only to find no mention of stats regarding max speed, efficiency etc vs the paid-for wifi.
Also, not sure why you wouldn’t just use Base64 encoding for which optimised versions already exist instead of rolling your own conversion to/from base 26 (or 52).
So I can attest from personal experience that a double-digit number of bytes per second is enough to perform useful work, yes.
It's mentioned in the article, but base64 includes weird characters that might not be allowed in a name field, like `+=/`. I also wouldn't be surprised if the airline name field didn't allow numbers.
Reminds me a bit of this post: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
Anyway, on my last flight I tried WiFi Hotspot and I was able to give WiFi to my girlfriend and dad, just paying for one account on my device. It isn't free but at least it allows everyone on my party to be connected.
Even the venerable (and ancient) WRT54G could do this with appropriate firmware.
IIRC, I've even used this functionality with Windows ICS on my laptop many moons ago
It's not necessarily an efficient function, but efficiency isn't always the most important thing.
(These days, I often travel with a Mikrotik device that I've set up to be a hotspot abuser, so as to provide myself and whoever is with me a slice of Internet while having the immediate appearance of being a solitary device. It does this trick very well indeed.)
Some of them will try force you to use their local resolver, but often UDP will be left open (or left open on port 53) because it is easier.
When they force a local resolver you can often tunnel over DNS requests, though this only works sometimes :)
And there's already a protocol to proxy over QUIC, called MASQUE.
I assume it was to entice you to buy the wifi for some important notification. Or just so you would GET that important notification in the first place. Either way, probably eminently abusable on android at least.
That said, who the hell buys overpriced internet connectivity on a 7 day cruise? I have an addictive personality and spend pretty much all my free time on Youtube or Reddit, and it was refreshing to be without. I especially felt sad about all the young teens who were obviously scrolling tiktok or instagram. What parent buys their child a $3000 cruise ticket and then also pays an additional $300 per child for them to completely not do it? Cheaper than a week of babysitting maybe.
Thank you for this. Very well done.
Hmm, GoFlyWiFi? GoHighWifi?
>> I’d forgotten to charge my headphones so Limp Bizkit started playing out of my laptop speakers. Fortunately no one else on the plane seemed to mind
Talent or not, managers commonly say that 10% of people cause 90% of the headaches. I guarantee the others on the plane minded very much, but were just to polite to say anything.
> Limp Bizkit started playing out of my laptop speakers. Fortunately no one else on the plane seemed to mind so we all rocked out together.
No they were just being too polite to speak up and say this is inconsiderate AF.
It’s bad enough when people do this on public transport, but on a fuckin plane?!?
And then to write about it under one’s own name?
Isn’t this kind of thing that goes against the CFAA?
PRs can wait — not worth criminal charges.
Changing your first name field on a form too often? Welcome to prison!
Widespread proliferation of pseudonyms modeling/nudging self-censorship is not a proxy for fear in humans-who-hack.
You make it sound as if this is some kind of irrational response to nothing.
When in reality it's an entirely reasonable response to the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act [1].
The interesting observation here wouldn't be about us "as a culture", it would be about the government.
Because obviously it's not about "changing your first name field on a form too often", it's about using that field for an unintended use, in order to bypass controls to give yourself access to communications the company didn't authorize you for.
I don't know why you think a kind of cultural fear is the thing to focus on here, rather than the very real law that sends people to very real prison.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
They're charging money for normal easy communication with the ground, and they're not charging for slow convoluted communication with the ground. I see the problem with getting the former without paying, but it's harder to find a problem with getting the latter without paying. They configured their system to allow it, and then failed to list rapid changes and encoding as either authorized or unauthorized.
I don't know how a court would actually decide, and that would depend on the precise jury as well.
But the point is that it's entirely reasonable to be scared that this could land you in jail. Cases are decided by people who have common sense.
There was a Windows built-in input method (智能ABC) that will show a small floating bar wherever there's an input. So you can trigger that bar, right click and select "Help" to open the default CHM viewer, then you can open any URLs from there.
Or alternatively the input method has a secret sequence that will crash any apps: v UP DEL ENTER and boom.
This is the way
it's a spoof 80s song that Robert aludes to in his blog tagline.
Is there any hope for a future where all airplane wifi is free?
(Maybe if cellphone plans automatically include satellite wifi?)
Additionally it’s free on most US airlines for T-Mobile customers, but only on devices that actually have T-Mobile SIMs (so not most laptops).
After burning up the first free hour I switch to my wife's number, then my kids, etc. It never complains.
Depends on the location. Over populated land areas, no. Over oceans far from land, yes.
> NB: at this point I didn’t want to send any more automated data through my airmiles account in case that got me in trouble somehow. [...] I therefore proved to myself that PySkyWiFi would work on my airmiles accounts too by updating my name ten or so times in quick succession. They all succeeded [...] I then wrote the rest of my code by sending my data through friendly services like GitHub Gists and local files on my computer
> I’m going to keep talking about sending data through an airmiles account, because that’s the point I’m trying to make.
Disappointing! I would not be surprised if things break when updating name millions of times (and you do need millions of updates for basic website) - maybe there is a history table, or a queue, or a easily overloaded service...
Never have I thought of an idea as hilarious as this.
Well done.
After reading this, I’m not interested in anything else the author has to say. People won’t always tell you when you are being a jerk.
use this knowledge to get free internet access :-)
Eh. I would probably mind but depending on my mood and the level of conflict avoidance in me, you wouldn't notice.
Here's where I parachuted out of this article.