[HN Gopher] PySkyWiFi: Free stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights
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PySkyWiFi: Free stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights
Author : oumua_don17
Score : 833 points
Date : 2024-07-09 12:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (robertheaton.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (robertheaton.com)
| phs318u wrote:
| Brilliant! I love stories like this. This is real hacking :)
|
| 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).
| exe34 wrote:
| "several bytes per second"
| lproven wrote:
| I think the first terminal-to-host connection I used at
| university was 300bps. That's about 30 bytes a second, and
| watching the characters of a large block of text appear on
| screen, it did feel like I could almost count them as they
| went past.
|
| So I can attest from personal experience that a double-digit
| number of bytes per second is enough to perform useful work,
| yes.
| ubergeek42 wrote:
| > 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).
|
| 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-...
| Retr0id wrote:
| "People's names are not transport protocols"
| jorgen123 wrote:
| Not to forget a stat about the number of "airline account name-
| change" e-mails sent to some (hopefully) junk e-mail account
| for each "name change". Ideally in relation to destination web-
| page design and amount of junk javascript embedded therein.
| DWakefield wrote:
| Sending stock quotes, scores, weather, etc. reminds me of a
| service that Google used to offer via text message. I used that a
| ton before I got my first smartphone: text W[ZIP code] to 46645
| (GOOGL) and it would text back the weather. Same for
| stock:[symbol] and many other things I've since forgotten. Of
| course Google killed it, but it was neat while it lasted!
| CSSer wrote:
| That is a blast from the past! This was around the time of
| slide-out keyboards, right? I remember using this now too.
| CalRobert wrote:
| I still miss those keyboards
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Same. Evo Shift. I miss the days when I wasn't frustrated
| _every_ time I type.
|
| Apparently this is what my gen will rocker rant about.
| CalRobert wrote:
| HTC Touch Pro 2 and I could type better on that than any
| phone since. Even managed to get it running Android (it
| was a Windows Mobile phone which is... old)
| CSSer wrote:
| Gladly! I'd go so far as to even say I was articulate.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Yet the currency conversion site I use which is run by one
| prof, probably on a Pentium III computer stashed under a
| stairwell at their university, has been up and running for
| decades and will probably last a lifetime.
| emchammer wrote:
| I had an alphanumeric pager like this in the 1990s. It had a
| few dozen text channels that were constantly updated with
| topics like news and sport.
| duffyjp wrote:
| I used that all the time from my flip phone. It took forever to
| type out a google search and results could take a minute or two
| to arrive but it was better than nothing.
|
| 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.
| justusthane wrote:
| In my days of messing around with PHP, I wrote a Twitter bot
| called "SongBuddy" for the purpose of looking up a song via SMS
| based on some lyrics.
|
| 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!
| dheera wrote:
| I made a backend with Twilio and an AWS instance to give me a
| SMS<->ChatGPT interface.
|
| 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.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| we will look back on whatsapp bots and ai chatbots in 10yr like
| we look back on those sms services now.
| scoot wrote:
| I'm curious when that was. I came up with this idea around 1995
| while working for a telecoms research company (a subsidiary of
| Ericsson). Flight status updates was my canonical example.
|
| 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?
| ubergeek42 wrote:
| Along the same lines, there are some programming contests that
| use a web based system for submitting solutions. They often
| restrict internet access to just the contest website, but a
| motivated user could use the same trick with the user profile
| fields to sneak information in/out.
|
| As a bonus one of those contest systems allows users to upload a
| profile photo, which would greatly increase the bandwidth!
| wkat4242 wrote:
| What's an airmiles account? I guess it's some kind of frequent
| flyer thing?
|
| 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.
| ttul wrote:
| Yes indeed. Us greybeards were tunneling ssh through DNS using
| a Perl-based hacking tool thrown together by Dan Kaminsky in
| 2004 called "OzymanDNS". DNS tunneling is now ubiquitously used
| for data exfiltration and consequently all major DNS platforms
| have methods to detect it.
|
| 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.
| rft wrote:
| So that was the name of it! I only had vague recollections of
| me setting up PuTTY with a proxycommand involving some kind
| of compiled to .exe Perl script. Worked out in the end with a
| free VPS and train station wifi. As usual, I spent far longer
| setting this up than actually using it, but it was one of the
| many small things that got me started on my career path.
|
| Thank you for the trip down memory lane!
| hxii wrote:
| This reminds me, and perhaps a perfect example of writing useless
| software[1] and the subsequent HN discussion[2].
|
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://ntietz.com/blog/write-more-useless-software/
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37911900
| poincaredisk wrote:
| This is awesome and I love hacks[1] like this. On the other hand,
| if I remember correctly, I've checked recently and global DNS in
| skywifi seemed to resolve fine without paying. So I think - at
| least in the plane I was in - just a regular iodine [2] tunnel
| would work
|
| [1] in the original meaning of the word. [2]
| https://github.com/yarrick/iodine
| ale42 wrote:
| iodine worked for me (on another airline/wifi) 6 years ago. Fun
| for the idea and principle, totally useless in practice given
| its speed, unless maybe you run an IM on top of UDP ;-)
| DaSHacka wrote:
| This was my experience too.
|
| 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.
| roygbiv2 wrote:
| Same experience here, I've never been able to use it for
| anything worthwhile. On one flight I was able to send an
| email by manually telnetting to an SMTP server and I
| eventually got an email out with a single line of text but
| that's been about it.
| ale42 wrote:
| I'm wondering if the problem has something to do with TCP
| retransmissions exploding the number of DNS requests. In
| the iodine client terminal there was a continuous flow of
| DNS requests and (most of the time) answers, so the
| communication at that level was kind-of working... but at
| the SSH level, it was practically unusable.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| Years ago I ran a "public" iodine service - anyone could
| connect, outbound traffic from the server went over Tor (to
| protect me from abuse requests).
|
| 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.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Why did end up stopping your service btw? Sounds like an
| awesome contribution to the free internet.
| michaelmior wrote:
| Without understanding the nuances of the issues, it sounds
| like the issue of case randomization could be fixed with
| changes to iodine while sacrificing some bandwidth.
| yegle wrote:
| https://developers.google.com/speed/public-
| dns/docs/security... as a security measure.
| slt2021 wrote:
| if dns is allowed on the firewall, shouldn't you just be able
| to just use wireguard via udp/53, without fiddling with dns
| protocol itself?
| Evidlo wrote:
| That's what Iodine's raw mode does (minus wireguard). It
| tries that first.
| TheDong wrote:
| The reason iodine works is not because any traffic to any IP
| on port 53 works, but because they allow traffic to a
| specific IP, and forward DNS queries.
|
| 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.
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| It's been a long time since I audibly laughed out loud at a
| network diagram. Possibly never. There is a first time for
| everything.
| jesprenj wrote:
| I was on a ~20 hour ferry ship from Italy to Greece once. They
| had paid wifi using sattelite internet, which I did not want to
| pay. But for payments to work, they allowed access to stripe.
| Turns out, everything on stripe.com was accessible, even dev docs
| etc. So I started to waste their bandwidth by downloading
| gigabytes of images from the stripe website over and over again.
|
| 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.
| bauruine wrote:
| That's called domain fronting [0] and is disabled by all big
| CDNs now.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting
| throw_a_grenade wrote:
| No, proper fronting is when you mismatch Host: header and
| SNI. It takes a bit more than just editing /etc/hosts, which
| results in TLS error (as grandparent mentioned), but editing
| /etc/hosts cannot be disabled by CDN.
| EE84M3i wrote:
| I agree that's not proper domain fronting, but one point is
| that CDNs can and absolutely do restrict certain
| SNI/Host/sites to subsets of their IPs. It's not
| necessarily the case that if you can connect to one CDN
| node you can connect to all the sites that CDN serves.
| jesprenj wrote:
| OP here. It doesn't work anymore:
|
| Requested host does not match any Subject Alternative
| Names (SANs) on TLS certificate [d22c2cdf866a373f3648c0d7
| c30f9399e974d07c8c5417566ff11059a06f5b40] 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.
| cosmotic wrote:
| I presume the only people you're hurting by downloading
| gigabytes of docs are the people on the plain that paid for the
| service. Maybe the company providing the service because those
| people experiencing the slow connection might never buy again.
| You're probably a also costing stripe for their upload
| bandwidth.
|
| And here I am, avoiding downloading things on cell service
| because it might negatively impact other people around me.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Me and my wife merged our facebook accounts to not take up
| space in facebook
| Scoundreller wrote:
| idid2
| qingcharles wrote:
| I'm literally just posting this to add another row to a
| database.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| unethical!
| sgc wrote:
| Let me clean that up for you. '; DROP TABLE comments; --
| Cyphase wrote:
| Stop that, Bobby!
| Cyphase wrote:
| For anyone else who wants to add a row to a database, but
| can't be bothered to post a comment, you can upvote this
| comment; each (voter, comment, vote) tuple is likely a
| row, or at least some amount of data. You're welcome.
| Zak wrote:
| Good thing HN doesn't use one!
|
| Though I suppose once it's storage mechanism performs
| enough of the functions of a database, it's an ad-hoc
| database.
| justusthane wrote:
| Agreed. I applaud the initiative of figuring out they could
| access reddit via the CDN that Stripe uses - but downloading
| gigabytes of images for the sole purpose of "wasting their
| bandwidth"? Why??
| mmastrac wrote:
| > And here I am, avoiding downloading things on cell service
| because it might negatively impact other people around me.
|
| 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.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I think it's misguided. If the cell carrier can't deliver
| its service to normal people doing normal things without
| inconveniencing other customers, it's the carrier's fault,
| not the users'. No way am I going to treat the service I
| paid for with kid gloves to make Verizon's job easier.
|
| (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.)
| olyjohn wrote:
| Why is BitTorrent an edge case? I paid for the bandwidth,
| if I want to host a... Linux ISO, why shouldn't I? What
| if I pay for, and download 30 movies for offline use onto
| my phone because I know I'm going somewhere that there is
| no service? Why is that wrong? What if I backup my entire
| phone to two separate backup services in the cloud?
|
| 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.
| canes123456 wrote:
| I think you are overreacting. They didn't say either of
| those things are immoral. They said it was an edge case.
| It is an edge case. The vast majority of people don't
| know what a torrent is much and much less are downloading
| torrents on to their phones.
| kstrauser wrote:
| What canes123456 said. Also, I was talking in the context
| of cell connections. I have a vastly different
| expectation for wired connections: use that sucker up to
| whatever level you want and can afford. You paid for it,
| you use it. It's on the ISP to keep their network
| capacity upgraded to meet demand. (But even then, don't
| be a freaking sociopath. I have 10Gb fiber with no cap
| and I use it without a second thought, but don't like
| have a daemon that deliberately saturates it 24/7 or
| something. I run backups when it's convenient for me. I
| stream movies whenever. I download software updates as I
| please. I _don 't_ leave a copy of `iperf3` running just
| because I could, because that would be using up resources
| just for the hell of it, and that's never a good look.)
|
| 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_.
| xp84 wrote:
| Also from the "fuck them" department: I have gigabit at
| home, and about 1.25TB per month quota. The ISP recently
| was advertising me to upgrade to 2Gb. I was intrigued,
| checked it out... exact same quota. My math says that on
| 2Gbps I could use up the month's quota in 85 minutes
| (accounting for network overhead let's generously say 2
| hours).
| cosmotic wrote:
| Those bidirectional video streams where neither party is
| looking at the phone while talking about nothing use way
| more bandwidth than an audio stream or text message.
| There's no way for me to tell if it's causing slowness for
| me, but it certainly can't be helping.
|
| 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.
| arsome wrote:
| > And here I am, avoiding downloading things on cell service
| because it might negatively impact other people around me.
|
| 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.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| He DIDN'T pay.
| lencastre wrote:
| But did you give? You gotta give? See, it's completely
| user funded!
| londons_explore wrote:
| I think the same whenever I turn on my gardening watering
| system at 7am and the whole 250 person street group chat
| starts complaining about lower water pressure and the fact
| nobody can have a shower.
|
| But, I'm not selfish so I just water the garden at 4am now.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| As a firefighter...
|
| 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.
| londons_explore wrote:
| London (UK) has deliberately low water pressures because
| the pipe network has a lot of leaks, and the lower the
| pressure the less water leaks out.
|
| 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.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| A kinda rule of thumb is that municipal water systems
| lose 10% of their water through various small leaks.
| Water is generally cheap and your bill is more for
| maintaining the capital cost itself rather than
| gathering/processing the water.
|
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Now do that math for the US southwest, where water is
| ridiculously cheap and also severely limited ....
| rurp wrote:
| Yeah we should probably stop subsidizing the heaviest
| water users. Instead we get high profile efforts that get
| a lot of attention and only save a token amount of water.
| kortilla wrote:
| It's not severely limited, that's why it's cheap even
| ignoring people with huge water grants and purchasing on
| the open market.
|
| 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.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| So I guess London is just screwed if there's another big
| fire.
| londons_explore wrote:
| By law, houses must be built with fireproof (ie. Brick)
| walls between them, so a fire will not spread from one
| house to the next. This gives them a distinctive look
| [1].
|
| 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...
| shiroiushi wrote:
| Very interesting. Still, you'd think they'd put a little
| more effort into having a modern, high-pressure plumbing
| system in their main city.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Never lose the opportunity to fuck corporations, also it's
| not your duty to preserve others experience, it's not like
| that corporations don't give a phuck about having enough
| bandwidth or don't oversell and then we have to be scared of
| downloading something
| sickofparadox wrote:
| How communally-minded of you. That certainly is one way to
| solve the tragedy of the commons.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I am of the idea that the main issue are those at the
| top, but volounteers are also contributing to hide or
| make issues less pushy, what is the level of pain you're
| going to be able to support in order to let the community
| feel better, while execs pocket money?
| rexpop wrote:
| There is no such thing as "communally-minded" under
| private ownership. What we have is "rugged individualism"
| and free competition, ie "might makes right." I don't
| like it, but I can't escape it.
|
| 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.
| Gormo wrote:
| Everyone is a specific person, i.e. a "private" entity,
| and ownership represents the exclusivity of possession
| and use that is inherent in all economically rival goods.
| In order for anything to be owned and used by anyone, it
| must be owned and used by someone specific at the
| exclusion of others. In other words, "private ownership"
| is the only kind of ownership that actually exists.
|
| "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).
| rexpop wrote:
| > If you have a society full of greedy avaricious people,
| then commercial corporations will likely behave in ways
| that reflect greed and avarice.
|
| 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.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| There's no tragedy of the commons here. A paid service
| provided by a private corporation is not "the commons".
| The commons refers to something like a municipal park
| owned by the public and run by the local government, and
| a tragedy of the commons is jerks going to the public
| bathroom there and leaving it a mess, stealing the toilet
| paper, etc.
| Gormo wrote:
| "The public" is an abstraction, and the local government
| is just another specific organization. Everything is
| people, all the way down, and it is profoundly anti-
| social to rationalize away hostile, destructive behavior
| simply because you have an emotional prejudice against
| people who engage in commercial business.
|
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _which I did not want to pay_
|
| > _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?
| stronglikedan wrote:
| sign o' the times
| ndespres wrote:
| What, exactly, do you get out of doing something like that? As
| an intellectual exercise I understand probing to see what
| exactly is accessible on a "blocked" connection, but
| intentionally wasting bandwidth seems the virtual equivalent of
| leaving the taps running in a public restroom to waste water,
| or perhaps clogging the toilet and overflowing it.
| kalensh wrote:
| It reminds me of working on campus IT, and the sort of person
| who, at the end of the semester realize there are pages
| remaining in their "free print" allotment, print out every
| page completely covered in black ink to waste as much as
| possible.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| why would anyone do that?? the remaining "free print"
| sheets is perfectly good scratch paper if you leave it
| blank!
| Cyphase wrote:
| I have also printed a blank document before to get blank
| paper, instead of dealing with accessing the paper tray,
| which may not have been feasible given the circumstances.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I worked at a company that would provide "free pizza"
| during evenings to encourage people to stay a little later
| and get more work done. It wasn't long before people would
| simply grab armfuls of food, entire pizza boxes, and bring
| them to their cars, ending that little perk quickly.
| rcbdev wrote:
| That sounds dystopian.
| xeromal wrote:
| They're being a dick plain and simple. Some people are just
| wired that way.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Presumably because they perceive the operator as
| gouging/exploiting the captive audience.
| account42 wrote:
| Yes, I'd see it as a form of protest.
| Gormo wrote:
| No one else would, especially not the company or the
| customers who paid for the service expecting to receive
| it. They'd see it as vandalism, and they'd be correct.
| Gormo wrote:
| "The boat operator is charging too much for internet
| access, so let's ruin internet access for the customers who
| they've already received payment from! That'll show 'em!"
| stocknoob wrote:
| Next, I left the water running in the hotel to teach them a
| lesson for daring to offer me a paid service.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Why was your first instinct to abuse or degrade functionality
| for a service you didn't want to pay for?
| annexrichmond wrote:
| And then bragging about it. Wild.
| KTibow wrote:
| I think it may be more of an emotional than rational
| response, given he would be stuck on the ferry for 20 hours
| Gormo wrote:
| Is being stuck on the ferry for twenty hours something that
| was done intentionally to provoke him, or is that just how
| long the trip takes?
|
| 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.
| hot_gril wrote:
| He probably knew how long the ferry ride was before he
| booked it.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| everything needs dns. host a http proxy at home on port 53. the
| world of paid wifi will be your oyster.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Something similar used to work for Delta (and probably some
| other airline's wifi) because they hardcoded the ability to
| access some Google stuff (like analytics) which enabled more
| interesting stuff (like Gmail, Voice, or a proxy running on
| Google Cloud)
| api wrote:
| ZeroTier, Tailscale, and several other UDP based mesh protocols
| will sometimes work in "free" mode on planes, but it tends to be
| horrifically slow.
| ale42 wrote:
| Did they forget to block UDP? Or they left it totally open for
| DNS to work?!
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| Usually: it's left open to unfuck DNS.
|
| 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 :)
| slt2021 wrote:
| setup your wireguard server on udp/53 and voila.
| kccqzy wrote:
| If UDP is completely open, then QUIC would work too. Quite a
| bit of the public Internet works fine with QUIC.
|
| And there's already a protocol to proxy over QUIC, called
| MASQUE.
| _joel wrote:
| Reminded of using Iodine to break out of captive portals using
| DNS TXT/SRV etc records https://github.com/yarrick/iodine
| moritonal wrote:
| Interesting to see how close the author got to producing an
| abstract "TCP-over-shared-editable-fields", which in itself would
| make a really cool tool.
|
| 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.
| dheera wrote:
| I think TCP/IP-over-DNS has been done for getting free internet
| over paid Boingo hotspots in airports.
|
| 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.
| michaelmior wrote:
| Indeed it has with iodine[0] being a popular example.
|
| [0] https://github.com/yarrick/iodine
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| I have thought about this for years, ever since ISPs in my
| country started advertising "unlimited whatsapp" on otherwise
| data limited plans. It would only work for text and not images
| or video, but it would have been good enough for general web
| browsing.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Why could you not just proxy the images and videos as uploads
| to WhatsApp? They would be re-encoded possibly, but better
| than nothing...
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| I meant that the ISP would block wpp image and video
| traffic, but would allow text through. It has been several
| years since this happened, so I may be misremembering.
| moritonal wrote:
| I belive you're misunderstanding what TCP-over-X means.
| If you can exchange messages, it means you could exchange
| bytes, if you can do that you can send any form of data,
| including HTTPS which is an application over TCP. HTTPS
| could then include video and images, encrypted and
| therefore difficult to specifically block.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| GP was asking specifically about sending images and video
| as wpp images and video (which is why he mentioned them
| being re-encoded). I suspect that sending that amount of
| data as wpp text messages would run you into some sort of
| trouble, but maybe not! Somebody above posted an
| implementation of this idea, and they mention that using
| it could get you banned which is unsurprising imo
| bitdivision wrote:
| There is https://github.com/aleixrodriala/wa-tunnel to tunnel
| over whatsapp
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Thanks! I knew the idea was so obvious somebody else had
| already gone through with it
| xiwenc wrote:
| KLM, specially on long flights, has a free tier wifi where you
| can use major instant messaging without charge. If you want to
| surf the web, it's pretty cheap. If i recall around 30-40 euro
| for a 9-10hours flight. Or pay less for an hour.
|
| 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.
| duronald wrote:
| Southwest Airlines offers free IM through iMessage and WhatsApp
| too. Should be able to tunnel internet traffic through
| iMessage.
| frankus wrote:
| I'm trying to recall the name of the app that does this, but
| one of the travel-tracking apps uses Apple's push
| notification system (which the network treats as "messaging")
| to send e.g. gate changes to subscribing devices through this
| "messaging only" network.
|
| 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.
| nwbort wrote:
| Believe you're referring to Flighty
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _...it's pretty cheap. If i recall around 30-40 euro for a
| 9-10hours flight._
|
| I would love to be in a position where I could consider this
| cheap. FWIW, I pay about EUR46 per _month_ for Internet
| service.
| bauruine wrote:
| If you pay 1000+ for the flight an additional 40 Euros isn't
| that bad.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| That's how they get you.
|
| The bias is known as "Anchoring Effect", where your
| perception of subsequent prices is skewed by the initial
| high price.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Except you're on a literal plane flying through the sky.
| This isn't the same as being on the ground with permanent
| cables attached to your internet connection. Not only is
| this incredible that you'd get internet at all, it's
| totally reasonable for it to cost a lot more!
| aeyes wrote:
| Times have changed, with Starlink the cost is going to be
| a rounding error. Free high speed Wifi will probably be
| available on long haul flights within the next 3-5 years.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| Assuming there are 300 people on a flight and half of
| them purchase this, that would be $4-6000 per trip for
| internet access. What do you think the actual margins on
| this access are, especially relative to the other eye
| watering and obscene surcharges airlines impose?
| xiwenc wrote:
| With "cheap" i meant it was still affordable. If it was 10x
| then it would not be affordable. Just like a bottle a water
| costs more at the airport, internet access costs more on a
| plane in the sky.
|
| 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
| miyuru wrote:
| singapore air has free unlimited wifi. only need a
| krisflyer account. speed is also decent.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| I certainly applaud the author's creativity, but aren't there
| potential very significant downsides to using abusing an account
| linked to your identity in order to fraudulently obtain services?
|
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| It's very interesting how afraid we've become, as a culture, of
| legal repercussions if you "mess with computer stuff in any
| way".
|
| Changing your first name field on a form too often? Welcome to
| prison!
| walterbell wrote:
| _> how afraid we 've become_
|
| Widespread proliferation of pseudonyms modeling/nudging self-
| censorship is not a proxy for fear in humans-who-hack.
| stavros wrote:
| Not in hackers, the population.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _It 's very interesting how afraid we've become_
|
| 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
| hunter2_ wrote:
| I think you're probably right, but the thing that always
| gets me is this: if nothing in their terms or UI prohibits
| you from encoding data into your name and changing it as
| often as possible, then is doing so actually unauthorized?
| I can't imagine that every conceivable activity you might
| perform with a computer system would need to be explicitly
| documented as ok before you can perform it. In other words,
| if the system owner lists things you can do and things you
| can't do, then are you in trouble for doing things not
| mentioned? They never authorized me to use the brightness
| control on the entertainment system, but I did anyway, uh
| oh!
|
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| The intent to bypass the paywall is extraordinarily clear
| here. The name field is obviously not being used for its
| intended purpose.
|
| 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.
| GrantMoyer wrote:
| I would hope the server literally _authorizing_ the user to
| modify the field after correctly _authenticating_ the user
| implies "authorized use" under the CFAA, but I'm not a
| lawyer and I'm not familiar with the law here.
| canadianwriter wrote:
| He notes in the blog post that he didn't actually use his
| airmiles account more than a couple proof of concepts (the IM
| stage) - he also says not to actually do this - it was just a
| creative bit of hacking.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| This is bonkers and I love it. A great hack in spirit but also a
| good primer on how a fundamental protocol like TCP kinda-if-you-
| squint-sorta powers everything else.
|
| I wish I thought of it on my last trans-atlantic!
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| Sorry if this isn't the thread for it, but is airplane wifi
| costly to provide?
|
| Is there any hope for a future where all airplane wifi is free?
|
| (Maybe if cellphone plans automatically include satellite wifi?)
| ale42 wrote:
| I guess the airlines want to monetize all they can... so
| probably not.
| klohto wrote:
| maybe when we have abundant Starlink capacity, otherwise any
| satellite-to-ground roundtrip at a reasonable speed is costly
| nhod wrote:
| In the US, it's free on Delta for SkyMiles members, which is in
| turn free to join. It's also free for everyone on JSX with no
| strings, and they actually are the first airline I know of to
| use StarLink.
|
| 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).
| master-lincoln wrote:
| The question was if it's costly to provide, not how much
| customers have to pay
| Someone1234 wrote:
| This isn't important; but Delta's "free with SkyMiles"
| offering is for domestic US travel. For international travel
| they're still charging $8/hour. Supposedly they may expand
| the free offering to some flights to Europe though but YMMV.
| ziml77 wrote:
| I have to imagine this comes down to how they provide the
| Internet connection. Over land they can use cell towers.
| Over sea they're forced to use satellites.
| joezydeco wrote:
| On AA, the "free one hour for TMO subscribers" through their
| app doesn't actually check to see if you're using a TMO SIM.
| It only checks the phone number against their customer list.
|
| After burning up the first free hour I switch to my wife's
| number, then my kids, etc. It never complains.
| denysvitali wrote:
| You can literally bump the last digit of any T-Mobile
| number (:
| joezydeco wrote:
| Yeah that should work...for a while. Eventually numbers
| get ported out and the space fragments. Area codes don't
| mean much anymore.
| ydant wrote:
| Re: T-Mobile - On United you can just set your laptop user
| agent to a mobile one and sign on with your phone number.
| Works fine for both the short period and full flight options.
| future10se wrote:
| Zipair, a budget airline subidiary of JAL, offers free Wifi [1]
| on all their international flights. They operate in the SEA
| area.
|
| [1] - https://www.zipair.net/en/onboard/service
| supportengineer wrote:
| On a recent Hawaiian flight there was free StarLink-powered
| WiFi. It was free and worked incredibly well.
| dboreham wrote:
| > but is airplane wifi costly to provide
|
| Depends on the location. Over populated land areas, no. Over
| oceans far from land, yes.
| jraph wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Eh. I would probably mind but depending on my mood and the level
| of conflict avoidance in me, you wouldn't notice.
| posterman wrote:
| its a joke.
| jraph wrote:
| On a plane, I would guess anyone trying to do this would be
| stopped by the stewards :-)
| jmkb wrote:
| Decades ago, my partner used Google Voice for texting -- really
| handy, texts just showed up in the gmail inbox, and could be
| replied to from there. She didn't like cellphones, but usually
| carried one of the old "Kindle Keyboard" models with unlimited 3G
| data. The Kindle had simple web browser that could load the low-
| spec gmail interface, so in essence she had a fully functional
| SMS device, with no monthly charges.
|
| 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.)
| LegitShady wrote:
| I loaned my kindle keyboard to a coworker for a trip and it was
| stolen from them in mexico. The joke was at the time it was
| probably the oldest working kindle possible, so I assume the
| thief just took whatever was in the bag.
|
| 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| It's probably a single cell so with some luck you can plonk
| whatever battery physically fits in there.
| LegitShady wrote:
| Batteries for it are pretty readily available across the
| Internet so you can get the exact right one. It's about 2
| minutes worth of work to change.
| Palomides wrote:
| I just replaced two, a new battery inc. shipping runs around
| $15
|
| not too hard to pop open and swap in
| CrazyStat wrote:
| Years ago before I got a smart phone I used my kindle keyboard
| to navigate on a long road trip. It could just barely run the
| Google Maps website.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| The AT&T bill (IIRC it was all under a single account) for the
| 3G Kindles was eye-watering. I recall a few byte-shavings
| yielding something like a million dollars of savings.
| zorked wrote:
| Free Internet was a very bold proposition. I used it a lot,
| via roaming, from a country that was in the very-expensive-
| roaming lists.
| jmkb wrote:
| Worth it, I reckon. You can't buy this kind of advertising:
|
| https://xkcd.com/548/
| throwup238 wrote:
| Amazon really missed the chance to call their network Sub-
| Etha. Or the Sub-Wave network.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I still have my Kindle 3g. I love it. The battery on mine is
| toast right now so it's not operable. I was going to buy a
| new Kindle but the prime day preview in Canada doesn't show
| any Kindles on sale and I was hoping Amazon was going to
| release an oasis v2 with USB-c before I replaced this.
|
| I might just pay $30 for another battery and stick with this
| Kindle keyboard.
| wwweston wrote:
| Does the connectivity still work? Thinking about pulling
| out my DX and giving it a spin.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I dont think any of the providers around me still have 3g
| networks for it to connect to, and I know in the US
| amazon said they would lose connectivity in the US 2021
| vasusen wrote:
| Yes, the connectivity should still work, but it might be
| limited depending on the model and the network you're
| trying to connect to. Some older Kindle models may have
| issues with newer Wi-Fi standards. It's worth giving it a
| try, though! You might also want to check if there are
| any firmware updates available for your device.
| daemonologist wrote:
| I have a keyboard 3G on v3.4.3 and the cell connectivity
| does not work anymore. It does still mention in the
| device info that it has 3G capability but if you try to
| do anything requiring a network connection it prompts you
| to connect to wifi. (Interestingly it also has the cell-
| style right triangle with five bars to indicate signal
| strength.)
|
| 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.
| TylerE wrote:
| As of a few months ago there are no operating 3g towers
| in the US.
| nfriedly wrote:
| Did that finally happen!? I feel like they've been
| telling me it was going to happen "this year" for at
| least 5 years.
| TylerE wrote:
| Yes. The last operational towers were a few up in the
| Appalachians operated by US Cellular and were shut down
| in January of this year.
| realityloop wrote:
| None in Australia anymore either
| timo555 wrote:
| Was wondering if anyone was going to chime in about still
| having this old Kindle. I still have mine and use it daily.
| Battery lasts 3 weeks as long as the wifi is off and the
| free 3G still works too. Purchased it in July 2011. I also
| want a new e-reader but I also want to see how long I can
| keep this thing going.
| criddell wrote:
| The Oasis has been discontinued which is a big bummer for
| me. I've had 3 or 4 kindles and the Oasis is the only one I
| thought was truly great.
| borispavlovic wrote:
| Hm... I've just checked on amazon.de and it's still
| available in several versions.
| criddell wrote:
| I suspect once the stock is depleted, it will be delisted
| there as well.
|
| https://www.thestreet.com/retail/amazon-quietly-
| discontinues...
| LegitShady wrote:
| it being discontinued was exactly why I was hoping that
| meant a v2 coming out, with a more modern usb port. I
| looked at picking up an oasis but everything else I own
| is usb-c more or less, and I don't want to deal with a
| microusb port.
|
| I think the kindle keyboard (3rd generation) was great.
| physical buttons for page turning. internet. a keyboard!
| was way ahead of its time.
| delecti wrote:
| I was at Amazon in a Kindle adjacent team (the lockscreen
| ads) starting in 2012, and I can second this sentiment. For
| the first couple years, there were multiple tweaks made to
| minimize enormous roaming bills for customers taking their US
| region "global unlimited free 3g" kindles to really remote
| parts of the world. Things like not enqueuing push downloads
| of books/ads if they were roaming.
| bredren wrote:
| How profitable was this behavior and its paid removal?
|
| 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?
| delecti wrote:
| It's been several years since I left Amazon, and nearly a
| decade since I worked on anything relevant to those
| questions, but I'll answer what I remember.
|
| 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.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I had a kindle with the unlimited roaming and it was
| great. I bought it at a time when I was overseas for 9
| months a year, they must have eaten so many roaming fees
| on my behalf.
|
| 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.
| gigatexal wrote:
| I've actually found interesting book suggestions from the
| kindle ads so shrug.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Sure. But my point is that I only want to be shown those
| suggestions when _I choose_ to go to the built in,
| unremovable book store app on my kindle. Not when I set
| my device down for 10 minutes to go make a coffee, and it
| decides that I have been away long enough to needlessly
| replace the content _I_ paid Amazon for with content that
| someone else is paying Amazon to show me.
|
| 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?
| heywire wrote:
| I called in and complained about an awkward romance novel
| cover ad a few years ago and they disabled ads for me for
| free.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I used to have a few 3g Kindles. I believe they have dialed
| it back to 50mb a month, but they still get that free
| internet - and internationally too!
| thot_experiment wrote:
| Oh my god! I did this too!!! I didn't have the clever Kindle
| name change integration but I did use a keyboard Kindle with
| infinite 3G to text for a while.
| venusenvy47 wrote:
| I still use Google Voice for texting, but only from their
| dedicated web page. I never heard about being able to text from
| Gmail. I assume this feature is gone?
| dark wrote:
| no, it still exists.
| vasusen wrote:
| Google Voice still supports texting from their web page, but
| the feature to text directly from Gmail was discontinued a
| few years ago. It was a convenient feature, but now you have
| to use the Google Voice app or web page for texting.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I use it as my primary interface. I can't believe they
| haven't killed it.
|
| I like it, it's useful, I rely on it, and it's from Google.
| How does it still exist?
| e808 wrote:
| Oh that 'free' 3g was amazing! I was able to hobble through
| gmail through the browser, and even wrote a kindle-friendly
| Zork website so one could play text games on it allowing you to
| choose from a bunch of zmachine roms. Had some traction getting
| mentioned on a few news websites.
| keb_ wrote:
| Google Voice has only existed since 2009, so it couldn't have
| been "decades" ago. That's how i know your story is fake.
| fyrn_ wrote:
| Or just maybe, 1.5 decades and "decades" are compatible when
| parsed by a human. Calling a story fake for that is a bit
| much, people just get details wrong, and that's okay
| rozenmd wrote:
| Recently I found Cloudflare's WARP app let me bypass the chat-
| only restriction on some long-haul airlines. You'd get like 5kbps
| bandwidth, but it was enough to read HN.
| Gys wrote:
| > At first I thought that I'd write them using Go, but then I
| realised that if I used Python then I could call the final tool
| PySkyWiFi.
|
| Hmm, GoFlyWiFi? GoHighWifi?
| ziml77 wrote:
| Nah it was definitely worth picking Python for the quadruple
| rhyme.
| Gys wrote:
| JumboGoSlowTelco?
| denysvitali wrote:
| Considering that some of those paid Wi-Fi services are provided
| by Boingo, maybe BoinGo is a nice name
| floam wrote:
| I "hacked" free WiFi on a very long flight to Beijing about 10
| years ago when I was in my 20s. I was visiting my girlfriend's
| family and didn't actually have more than $20 to my name at the
| time.
|
| 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.
| avidiax wrote:
| I have heard that you can often do this at the IP address layer
| instead of the MAC layer.
|
| The trouble is that IP conflict detection may have to be
| disabled.
| banish-m4 wrote:
| It won't work. IPv4 spoofing with multiple MAC addresses
| typically blocks one or the other. ARP spoofing also tends
| block one or the other device, but sometimes it sorta works.
| banish-m4 wrote:
| ARP spoofing was a thing most prevalent in the late '90's and
| early '00's.
|
| 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.
| floam wrote:
| I also accidentally brought my Adderall, having packed in a
| hurry. It's just an illegal drug there. I didn't realize
| until I was going through my bags in a hotel. I've never
| claimed I'm particularly smart.
|
| 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.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| At a company I used to work for long ago locked the network down
| pretty good, so a coworker used ping requests and a server at
| home to get around it.
| sghiassy wrote:
| Did he say that played Limp Bizkit on his speakers and made
| everyone the plane listen to it?!?
| wtcactus wrote:
| "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."
|
| 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.
| dynm wrote:
| I read this as a joke. (Which I thought was funny precisely
| because so many people do lack this kind of basic civility--but
| I'm pretty sure not the author?)
| ides_dev wrote:
| Given the tone of this and other articles on the site I'd be
| inclined to suggest that _this was a joke_.
| Milner08 wrote:
| Did you really not read this as a joke? It seemed obvious that
| it was one to me.
| sghiassy wrote:
| I didn't read it as a joke
| brokensegue wrote:
| It's clearly a joke
| djmips wrote:
| Jokes are funny.
| cmcaleer wrote:
| The mental image of a plane rocking out to rap rock from
| tinny laptop speakers is funny.
| xtracto wrote:
| I did not read it as a joke. Granted,I'm not American and
| English is not my first language.
|
| 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.
| djmips wrote:
| Well it's not funny so it's hard to read as a joke.
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| The dry sarcastic humor of the author made it very obvious
| to me that this was satire. I have a very similar sense of
| humor, at least partly. And I'm a native American English
| speaker.
|
| 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.
| xtracto wrote:
| I appreciate it . Thanks.
| nox101 wrote:
| For me it was 50/50. 50% it was a joke. 50% the guy was "one
| of those a-holes". They exist so it's hard to tell.
|
| 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.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| I believe this is what the humans refer to as "humour".
| sghiassy wrote:
| Hopefully it was a joke like others have said - if not, then
| he's incredibly rude and callous
| kraftman wrote:
| It's very, very obviously a joke.
| c03 wrote:
| The author sounds so incredibly obnoxious.
| beardedwizard wrote:
| This response lacks a basic sense of humor.
| xapata wrote:
| If the author wrote, "This is satire," it'd ruin the satire.
| sghiassy wrote:
| If you have to explain that it's a joke, then it wasn't funny
| sfilmeyer wrote:
| What's the bar, though? If out of a million people reading
| a joke, 80% find it funny, 20% find it meh, and one
| solitary person needs the joke explained to them, I think
| it's still fair to call it a funny joke. There are multiple
| comments in this thread missing the satire so it's obvious
| the percentage is a bit higher than that, but I'd wager the
| majority of people didn't need the joke explained to them.
| cmcaleer wrote:
| To you.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| This doesn't apply to satire. Your lack of media literacy
| is not evidence of bad satire.
| sghiassy wrote:
| There's enough people in this thread saying the same, to
| prove I'm not an outlier in my interpretation
| mrguyorama wrote:
| HN is not a representative sample of normal people and
| has a long understood inability to recognize satire, or
| even just particularly strong sarcasm. HN not getting a
| joke is not evidence of it being a bad joke.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I've never seen an online community fail to grasp sarcasm
| as badly as HN. I deliberately make one out of 50 posts
| ultra-sarcastic (to the point where no normal person
| could possibly believe I'd hold whatever view I wrote),
| and they always, _always_ go straight to -4.
| jmhammond wrote:
| Coming from a family with several people "on the
| spectrum," I want to point out that _some_ people with
| ASD have trouble with sarcasm.
|
| 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.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Autism is a spectrum disorder and I'd say that spectrum
| is quite biased around here.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Hell, even jokes that have been properly marked get
| downvoted and flagged here.
| j0hnyl wrote:
| It was obviously a joke, and not a bad one.
| banish-m4 wrote:
| Poe's law. This doesn't seem completely absurd because there
| are plenty of jerks on planes who don't dim excessively-
| bright screens much less reduce the volume of crap music.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| I've flown close to a million miles and can't recall a
| single time someone played music out of their speakers.
| banish-m4 wrote:
| Anecdotal evidence. We'll just have to agree to disagree.
| lproven wrote:
| At least once or twice so far this year, for me.
| zaat wrote:
| While I didn't find the joke funny, it does thematically match
| the piece - the hacker who supposedly see the possibility to
| get free internet as a viable opportunity. Later in the piece
| the author does distance himself from that image, revealing the
| tone in the opening was merely a stylistic choice, a writer's
| device, as clearly he is not the kind of a person who will in
| practice exploit the airline systems.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| In my mind the whole plane was rockin to ,,... keep on rollin
| baby, you know what time it it is ..."
|
| It's obviously a joke.
| strunz wrote:
| Whoosh
|
| Maybe take a stand-up comedy class or something
| adyavanapalli wrote:
| Most flight WiFi networks don't block DNS traffic, so if you set
| up a custom DNS server, you can tunnel everything through DNS.
| It's slow, but it's free internet!
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I'm afraid to get on some kind of terrorist watch list that
| way.
| apantel wrote:
| Then don't visit any terrorist sites till you're back on the
| ground :)
| prmoustache wrote:
| I once found out on a plane ssh wasn't blocked even if I wasn't
| paying so I just used a remote vps that I had already setup as
| a socks proxy to browse the web.
| slt2021 wrote:
| how about spinning up a wireguard server on udp/53 and connect
| to it with wireguard client. I haven't tried it myself but it
| could work. Gonna try it next time I am going to fly
| cheema33 wrote:
| This doesn't work. I have tried it. The trick iodine tool
| uses works very differently.
| amelius wrote:
| Hacker: Those stupid website makers, they didn't think of this
| hole.
|
| 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.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-10-30
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Thank you to share! I never knew about SMBC ( _not_ Sumitomo
| Mitsui Banking Corporation) before your post...
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| don't forget to click the red button on every comic!
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| >Author and programmer Sam Hughes, by the way, pushed this to
| the limit and invented Base 65,536, which includes basically
| every character from every language. It is ridiculous and
| unnecessary, but when has that ever stopped programmers?
|
| https://youtu.be/gocwRvLhDf8?t=103
| starkrights wrote:
| This is the third time I've been nerd sniped with something
| qntm related in a weeks time. I've never been more pleased
| haha.
| banish-m4 wrote:
| Website makers underestimated the dedication of unreasonable
| individuals.
| nunez wrote:
| > 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. 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.
|
| He's not serious, right? Right?
| fwip wrote:
| Correct, it's a joke.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Queue the joke about "coding on a boat" from StackOverflow.
| 101008 wrote:
| I pay for WiFi on long-haul flights because I am bit scared of
| flying and it keeps me distracted and connected to the world and
| friends and relatives (maybe I am scared because I feel
| isolated?).
|
| 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.
| phcreery wrote:
| WiFi-to-WiFi hotspot is a good idea, I don't think all phones
| can do that though. I once used my rooted Android to spoof my
| Wifes MAC address to use her in-flight WiFi she paid for after
| she was not using it anymore.
| netsharc wrote:
| If I understand correctly, if your WiFi chip comes with 2.4
| and 5 GHz bands, it's "trivial" to connect to the network
| using the one band and provide the hotspot on the other one -
| it already has 2 antennas - at least the issue wouldn't be
| the hardware.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Lots of hardware supports being operated in access point
| mode and station mode at the same time -- on the same
| radio/antenna(s).
|
| 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.)
| rangestransform wrote:
| AFAIK this only works if your hotspot device functions as a NAT
| and not a bridge
| nunez wrote:
| The lengths that people will go to to avoid paying $10-20 for
| onboard WiFi is nuts.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Not that I condone stealing, but it really surprises you that
| people do not want to pay for service that has a $0 marginal
| cost to the company?
| demondemidi wrote:
| Clever exploit of a website security hole! Except you need to
| give your credentials to a trusted party.
| theamk wrote:
| A very important quote:
|
| > 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...
| remram wrote:
| I was wondering about this. How well would the protocol cope if
| the name field suddenly changed back to the previous value,
| because the database is not that consistent? In addition to
| counters, you'd probably need signaling to indicate a missing
| packet, at least.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| A lot of cruise ships will let you pay for a messaging tier which
| unblocks messaging apps, but blocks everything else. I found this
| repo that uses whatsapp messages as a form of proxy. [1] It's
| pretty cool as a PoC, but in reality is much too slow to use for
| more than maybe checking the news.
|
| [1]https://github.com/aleixrodriala/wa-tunnel
| firefoxd wrote:
| Couple weeks ago, I took my kids to a class at the mall, then
| decided to use their free wifi. I logged in successfully with my
| laptop, but it said no Internet.
|
| 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.
| VagabundoP wrote:
| Award for good IT citizen goes to you, sir or madam or <insert
| honorary>.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Except for setting a new password on the device. Now nobody
| else can perform the same public service next time the
| Internet goes down on that modem.
| qup wrote:
| Probably some kid working at the `All-Star Burger & Shake`
| stand wrote a script to reset the internet every 27 minutes
| and it "just worked" for 9 years until this guy came in...
| banish-m4 wrote:
| IANAL, but it's probably also illegal (ie CFAA) by
| accessing other people's systems and denying their owners
| access to them by changing the password.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| I was visiting family and logged on to a neighbors insecure
| wifi one time to get in my work vpn. I couldn't connect to the
| vpn and I noticed I could easily get into their router, so I
| did and changed an MTU setting on it and voila back in
| business. :)
| archon810 wrote:
| The Steam Deck is what I pull out on flights nowadays. It's
| quite amazing how fast it helps the time fly (pun intended).
| HanClinto wrote:
| This is exactly the sort of post that gives me a ray of hope that
| the Internet still has some of its old magic in it.
|
| Thank you for this. Very well done.
| metabagel wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| cmcaleer wrote:
| This reads like an obvious joke.
| metabagel wrote:
| I hope so.
| gnarlouse wrote:
| This is amazing but honestly I'd rather just pay for wifi.
| jacobrussell wrote:
| cloud computing
| dakiol wrote:
| Am I the only one who is always tired in the plane no matter what
| and cannot anything but close my eyes and wait til the flight is
| over?
|
| 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.
| architango wrote:
| Definitely not just you. My wishful thinking compels me to
| bring a book on a plane, but I usually end up either trying to
| sleep, or playing yet another stupid game of iPhone
| Civilization.
| n_ary wrote:
| You are not the only one. I feel super hazy during flights and
| shut my eyes for the flight to land. I tried reading books and
| getting some work done too but my brain just checks out after
| 5-10 minutes.
|
| 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.
| prewett wrote:
| Sounds like a pair of noise cancelling headphones would be a
| good investment in your quality of life, then! Or you can get
| those noise-reduction things that look like headphones but just
| attenuate noise for construction sites. My brother tipped me
| off to that, it's great! (You can also listen to music / movies
| without having the volume on too high, too)
| arjvik wrote:
| Funnily enough, a pair of AirPods Pros were the first thing
| that let me sleep on a flight!
| jcul wrote:
| I can burn hours reading on a plane, if I'm not really tired.
| But I feel the same as you about working on a laptop.
|
| The shaking, not enough space to type properly etc.
| pythonguython wrote:
| Totally agree. I've always assumed that high CO2 levels and low
| air pressure must have some effect on drowsiness and cognition
|
| 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
| lgats wrote:
| Strange, from my own measurements, I remember the co2 levels
| to be sub-600.
| pythonguython wrote:
| The study i saw this on was a review of data from 200ish US
| domestic flights. Maybe you were close to a vent, or some
| other variable im not thinking of, or just an outlier
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Possibly increased ventilation post-COVID?
| jonpurdy wrote:
| Confirmed, flown SF-Toronto round trip multiple times,
| Toronto-SF-South Korea, Toronto-London, and on both narrow
| body and wide body aircraft I'm lucky to get less than
| 1800ppm, with peaks at 3100ppm (on the London flight)
| according to my aranet4 placed either at the top of the
| magazine pouch or in an open exposed pocket in my bag on the
| floor.
| RebeccaTheDev wrote:
| I used to get my laptop out and try to do things. But ever
| since the seat pitch started shrinking, I find it really hard
| to get anything larger than a tablet out without it needing to
| rest on me or risk having the screen broken if the person in
| front of me leans back. The last one happened to a coworker a
| few years ago.
|
| So these days I usually just pull out my iPad and noise
| cancelling headphones and catch up on my movies or TV shows.
| lausbub wrote:
| Sounds like a case for lazy glasses.
| wnolens wrote:
| Interesting, I'm the total opposite.
|
| 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, ...
| jwr wrote:
| No, you are not the only one. My body does the same thing, and
| I think this is related to lower amounts of oxygen in the air.
| It's not about the noise (noise canceling headphones do
| wonders), it's definitely about the air.
|
| But apparently there are people who are not affected by this at
| all and can do useful work on airplanes.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The noise isn't the _only_ issue but it certainly contributes
| - I 've noticed fixing the noise issue with
| headphones/earplugs does wonders. I would expect the air
| pressure (=oxygen availability) to contribute too, and
| another factor are the movements and vibrations.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| I'm intensely jealous. I used to go to the doctor and get
| medication specifically to _make_ me sleepy on the plane. I
| 've decided not to take that kind of thing anymore and dread
| the next time I have a long flight.
|
| I can deal with all the airport crap, but sitting on the
| plane for two 12 hour stretches is horrible.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| > 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.
| hatefulmoron wrote:
| I prefer to spend most of my time sitting down by myself
| and thinking, so it's definitely not a matter of
| unplugging, nor is it a lack of stimulation.
|
| 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.
| sn9 wrote:
| You could test if this was the case by traveling to a high-
| altitude city and staying there long enough to acclimate
| before flying out.
| junon wrote:
| I'm the opposite. I can't sleep or even get tired regardless of
| how tired or sleep deprived I am. Makes trans-Atlantics worse,
| and traveling with others almost feels like getting mocked when
| they fall asleep for eight hours at a time.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Yes, travel is tiring/stressful, air travel doubly so (first
| the airport gauntlet, then a box full of noise, vibrations and
| with about 70% of normal oxygen levels available to your body
| due to the lower pressure).
|
| 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.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| drugs
| NoPicklez wrote:
| For me I find planes a good way to disconnect from the outside
| world.
|
| 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.
| cheema33 wrote:
| > Am I the only one who is always tired in the plane no matter
| what and cannot anything but close my eyes and wait till the
| flight is over?
|
| 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.
| lproven wrote:
| Interesting. Sounds like John von Neumann, who was famous for
| this.
| rootsudo wrote:
| I'm glad I'm not the only one. This is me too. I don't get
| it. It's like doctors waiting rooms, traffic, etc I do some
| of my best thinking.
|
| But give me a quiet room, what I need, and time and I do
| absolutely nothing. It's ridiculous.
| tverbeure wrote:
| In the early nineties, before logging into work from home was a
| thing, my friend created an email based terminal tunnel: he'd
| send emails with Unix commands to this account, executed the
| command, and returned an email with the result.
|
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I was recently on a cruise ship in the Caribbean, and they sold
| "Starlink powered" internet service for $40 a day. Interestingly,
| they seemed to let notification service traffic through. Any data
| delivered through a platform based notification made it through
| just fine, including large images in a youtube notification.
|
| 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.
| Havoc wrote:
| Cool hack aside this part really grates me
|
| > 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?!?
| SlimyHog wrote:
| You realize that this part was a joke and didn't actually
| happen right?
| banish-m4 wrote:
| Haven't you ever been on a night flight where you had to ask
| someone to turn down their Samsung phablet from the
| brightness of indoor landing light? That's roughly the level
| of inconsideration that is routine on flights, so this
| passage isn't so extreme as to fall under Poe's law and falls
| in a gray zone of ambiguity. If they had said _Bodysnatcher
| at full volume for 20 minutes and no one complained_ , then
| it would've been absolutely certain to be satire without a
| doubt. I kind of like the idea of it remaining ambiguous,
| almost as much as I enjoy appearing to lie while telling
| people the truth.
| fransje26 wrote:
| I believe it was satire, meant to be humorous..
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I love the part where he paid for the wifi so he could develop a
| workaround that he would never need. True hacker spirit.
| neontomo wrote:
| not nearly as impressive, but i got past the software lock at a
| gaming internet cafe as a 16 year old by hitting (i think it was)
| Win + I to open a windows accessibility screen, which had a link
| to a Microsoft page. when clicked it opened a web browser and
| bam.
| yegle wrote:
| Oh memories!
|
| There was a Windows built-in input method (Zhi Neng 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.
| amenhotep wrote:
| 220 comments and no "Bob Wehadababyitsaboy"? Surprising!
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> my feedback was "two weeks late" and "blocking a critical
| deployment."
|
| >> 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.
| hoytech wrote:
| Reminds me of the "Bob Wehadababyitsaboy" GEICO commercial:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JxhTnWrKYs
| knodi123 wrote:
| amazing how many people have that commercial burned into their
| memory.
| yellow_postit wrote:
| I still use the browser dev tools trick with T Mobile's free 1
| hour for mobile clients. change laptop user agent to mobile --
| log in for planes's wifi -- turn off user agent change. I assume
| the plane is provisioning internet access by mac address.
| breck wrote:
| Many times have I hacked to get free in flight and hotel wifi,
| often using brute force algos.
|
| Never have I thought of an idea as hilarious as this.
|
| Well done.
| vzaliva wrote:
| I vaguely recall a story from a long time ago when companies like
| AOL and CompuServe sent you CDs in the mail with demo versions of
| their products. You could dial up using them and access a subset
| of their services before purchasing full access. Someone figured
| out that although the rest of the internet was firewalled, they
| still relayed DNS requests to the original DNS servers (maybe
| needing a low TTL) and used this to tunnel via a custom DNS
| server. Et voila! Free ISP :)
| slt2021 wrote:
| boingo wifi lets you connect to AppStore and Android store to
| download Boingo mobile app.
|
| use this knowledge to get free internet access :-)
| avidiax wrote:
| Is the trick that these app stores are on a CDN?
| slt2021 wrote:
| I didnt have a laptop, so only was able to test it with my
| iPhone. but basically after going to their captive portal and
| clicking AppStore button your client will open AppStore and
| even can start Download app (and cancel immediately) and then
| you switch window to regular browser and start browsing
| praveen9920 wrote:
| Few years ago, dean of our college decided to block lan network
| after 10PM because of "gaming impact attendance" blah blah.
|
| 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.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| It's all fun and games until they shut down your frequent flyer
| program account. That seems to be the way airlines prefer to dish
| out punishment.
| umrashrf wrote:
| Somebody's getting fired at air miles
| dventimi wrote:
| _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._
|
| Here's where I parachuted out of this article.
| yyyfb wrote:
| Tldr: $1,000 worth of engineering time to save $10 on inflight
| WiFi
| sv0t wrote:
| I needed to get a message to my misses while on a long flight
| home. It wasn't an emergency but it would have been a total
| bummer to let her know after I had landed.
|
| 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.
| retrochameleon wrote:
| Set up a password manager like Bitwarden or 1Password (which
| you should absolutely do anyways), and you can put all your
| card information in the manager. They typically will auto fill
| them as well
| utbabya wrote:
| Once upon a time when mobile data wasn't as common and cheap, I
| found that starbucks wifi allowed ping to any where :)
| imdsm wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is the way
| hacker_88 wrote:
| TCP-UP , TCP over User Profile
| rfonseca wrote:
| A long time ago (2011) when I was teaching the networking course
| at Brown, the final assignment in the course was to create the
| equivalent of iodine, IP-over-DNS tunneling [1]. Being a course
| assignment, the handout only outlines the solution. We provided a
| set of domain names and DNS servers on VMs for students to use.
|
| 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
| imdsm wrote:
| It was a shame to see the author stop proving this over the
| actual hole. That's where I switched off sadly.
| ocodo wrote:
| I know that Robert Heaton will appreciate this
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpQ_W_lQ9Jo
| Aachen wrote:
| Care to add an alt text?
| ocodo wrote:
| ... to a youtube link... are you afraid.
|
| it's a spoof 80s song that Robert aludes to in his blog
| tagline.
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