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A few years ago I was on a Southwest flight and had OpenVPN running because I forgot to turn it off. I was able to access the Internet through my tunnel withou
by kxrm 3y ago
A few years ago I was on a Southwest flight and had OpenVPN running because I forgot to turn it off. I was able to access the Internet through my tunnel without paying for access. I guess at the time they were only port blocking common ports (80, 443, 53 etc) if you didn't pay. They have since closed that hole.
- Kikawala 3y agoIt also worked on Alaska Airlines and American Airlines.
- chankstein38 3y agoFor this same reason you used to be able to send messages via platforms like whatsapp without internet as well! I don't remember the airline I just remember I hadn't paid for internet but I could message and do a few other things but I couldn't browse the internet.
- thedanbob 3y agoThat was probably deliberate. I flew United recently and they advertised free wifi for certain messaging apps, or you could pay to access more apps or the general internet.
- MostlyStable 3y agoI also flew united recently and, in addition to the free messaging access, they also provided free access to the inflight entertainment, in case you wanted to watch it on your device instead of on the screen. I would have loved to take advantage of this since my wireless earbuds were significantly better than the wired pair I had. Unfortunately, a little pop-up warned me that this was not available on Android 13 devices. I was more than a little annoyed, but also curious as to why this might have been the case.
- xattt 3y agoThere was a report in the early to mid-2000s where someone got iChat AV to work, partly because it was fairly obscure and likely the network engineers didn’t consider blocking it.
- alwayslikethis 3y agoI flew United recently, and I was able to use the free messaging service for basically everything without any intervention from my part. It's just a tad slow. Not sure if it was intended or not.
- kshacker 3y agoHere's my hack for United's free messaging. Works on iOS, and makes the flight more useful than before, but not as good as paid internet. Messaging and Notifications basically follow the same protocol. Even though I usually have notifications disabled, I go and activate it for anything I care about - News, Weather, Slack, Whatsapp (yes I have that silenced). Every single message pops up as a notification. Could be bank alert, Ring alert, homekit alert, whatever ... it just shows. So you can keep tab on things you care about, and if you are really needed, well you can pay and get on the full Wifi. And anyways you can iMessage to communicate if needed.
- HouseOfStairs 3y agoI had a mosh connection open before I got on my last United flight and was able to use it the whole time. Seemed to me the free messaging/inflight entertainment tier doesn't block arbitrary UDP packets at all.
- bayindirh 3y agoIf it's Turksih Airlines, they also provide unlimited messaging on board, free of charge.
- nerdbert 3y agoKLM and United for sure have free in-flight messaging (at least as of a few days ago, the last time I used them). It's interesting what does and doesn't go through. e.g. Facebook notifications update, but not the content. I guess that's because they use the same channel as FB Messenger.
- xcrunner529 3y agoAt least for iOS iMessage uses the same push notification endpoint so really you get iMessage plus any push notifications.
- astura 3y agoThat's an advertised feature on some airlines.