20 ms·

PySkyWiFi: Free stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights

• ocodo 2y ago
  I know that Robert Heaton will appreciate this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpQ_W_lQ9Jo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpQ_W_lQ9Jo
  • Aachen 2y ago
    Care to add an alt text?
    • ocodo 2y ago
      ... to a youtube link... are you afraid. it's a spoof 80s song that Robert aludes to in his blog tagline.
• phs318u 2y ago
  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).
  • ubergeek42 2y ago
    > 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-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
    • Retr0id 2y ago
      "People’s names are not transport protocols"
  • exe34 2y ago
    "several bytes per second"
    • lproven 2y ago
      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.
  • jorgen123 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    That is a blast from the past! This was around the time of slide-out keyboards, right? I remember using this now too.
    • CalRobert 2y ago
      I still miss those keyboards
      • WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
        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 2y ago
          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 2y ago
          Gladly! I’d go so far as to even say I was articulate.
  • rkagerer 2y ago
    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.
• throwaway984393 2y ago
  [dead]
• ubergeek42 2y ago
  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!
• hxii 2y ago
  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/ https://ntietz.com/blog/write-more-useless-software/ [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37911900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37911900
• poincaredisk 2y ago
  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 https://github.com/yarrick/iodine
  • ale42 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
        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.
• wkat4242 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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!
• stuartjohnson12 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    That's called domain fronting [0] and is disabled by all big CDNs now. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting
    • throw_a_grenade 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
          OP here. It doesn't work anymore: Requested host does not match any Subject Alternative Names (SANs) on TLS certificate [d22c2cdf866a373f3648c0d7c30f9399e974d07c8c5417566ff11059a06f5b40] in use with this connection. Visit https://docs.fastly.com/en/guides/common-400-errors#error-421-misdirected-request 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.
• api 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Did they forget to block UDP? Or they left it totally open for DNS to work?!
    • fullspectrumdev 2y ago
      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 2y ago
    setup your wireguard server on udp/53 and voila.
  • kccqzy 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  Reminded of using Iodine to break out of captive portals using DNS TXT/SRV etc records https://github.com/yarrick/iodine https://github.com/yarrick/iodine
• moritonal 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      Indeed it has with iodine[0] being a popular example. [0] https://github.com/yarrick/iodine https://github.com/yarrick/iodine
  • TremendousJudge 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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.
• xiwenc 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Southwest Airlines offers free IM through iMessage and WhatsApp too. Should be able to tunnel internet traffic through iMessage.
    • frankus 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        Believe you're referring to Flighty
  • dfxm12 2y ago
    ...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 €46 per month for Internet service.
    • bauruine 2y ago
      If you pay 1000+ for the flight an additional 40 Euros isn't that bad.
• BobbyTables2 2y ago
  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.
  • canadianwriter 2y ago
    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.
  • stavros 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      > how afraid we've become Widespread proliferation of pseudonyms modeling/nudging self-censorship is not a proxy for fear in humans-who-hack.
      • stavros 2y ago
        Not in hackers, the population.
    • crazygringo 2y ago
      > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
• theideaofcoffee 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    I guess the airlines want to monetize all they can... so probably not.
  • klohto 2y ago
    maybe when we have abundant Starlink capacity, otherwise any satellite-to-ground roundtrip at a reasonable speed is costly
  • nhod 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      The question was if it's costly to provide, not how much customers have to pay
    • Someone1234 2y ago
      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.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • ziml77 2y ago
• jraph 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    its a joke.
    • jraph 2y ago
      On a plane, I would guess anyone trying to do this would be stopped by the stewards :-)
• jmkb 2y ago
  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.)
  • toastercat 2y ago
    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_ 2y ago
      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
  • oldang 2y ago
    [dead]
  • LegitShady 2y ago
    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.
• rozenmd 2y ago
  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.
• HumblyTossed 2y ago
  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.
• Gys 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    Nah it was definitely worth picking Python for the quadruple rhyme.
    • Gys 2y ago
      JumboGoSlowTelco?
  • denysvitali 2y ago
    Considering that some of those paid Wi-Fi services are provided by Boingo, maybe BoinGo is a nice name
• floam 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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.
• sghiassy 2y ago
  Did he say that played Limp Bizkit on his speakers and made everyone the plane listen to it?!?
• wtcactus 2y ago
  "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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    Given the tone of this and other articles on the site I'd be inclined to suggest that _this was a joke_.
  • Milner08 2y ago
    Did you really not read this as a joke? It seemed obvious that it was one to me.
    • sghiassy 2y ago
      I didn’t read it as a joke
      • brokensegue 2y ago
        It's clearly a joke
        • djmips 2y ago
          Jokes are funny.
          • cmcaleer 2y ago
            The mental image of a plane rocking out to rap rock from tinny laptop speakers is funny.
• adyavanapalli 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    I'm afraid to get on some kind of terrorist watch list that way.
    • apantel 2y ago
      Then don’t visit any terrorist sites till you’re back on the ground :)
  • prmoustache 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      This doesn't work. I have tried it. The trick iodine tool uses works very differently.
• amelius 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-10-30 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-10-30
    • throwaway2037 2y ago
      Thank you to share! I never knew about SMBC (not Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation) before your post...
      • 1oooqooq 2y ago
        don't forget to click the red button on every comic!
        • einsteinx2 2y ago
          Thanks for the tip! I knew about the “secret” text on XKCD comics but all these years never knew about the red button on SMBC!
  • Vicinity9635 2y ago
    >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 https://youtu.be/gocwRvLhDf8?t=103
    • starkrights 2y ago
      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.
• nunez 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    Correct, it's a joke.
    • throwaway2037 2y ago
      Queue the joke about "coding on a boat" from StackOverflow.
• 101008 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
    AFAIK this only works if your hotspot device functions as a NAT and not a bridge
• nunez 2y ago
  The lengths that people will go to to avoid paying $10-20 for onboard WiFi is nuts.
  • 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    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?
    • nunez 2y ago
      On a site where many of us (in the US) make crazy money slinging code and the author of this article works for literally one of the hottest tech companies out there right now as a SWE, absolutely yes.
• demondemidi 2y ago
  Clever exploit of a website security hole! Except you need to give your credentials to a trusted party.
• theamk 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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 https://github.com/aleixrodriala/wa-tunnel
• firefoxd 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Award for good IT citizen goes to you, sir or madam or <insert honorary>.
    • ryandrake 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
    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. :)
• HanClinto 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    This reads like an obvious joke.
    • metabagel 2y ago
      I hope so.
• gnarlouse 2y ago
  This is amazing but honestly I'd rather just pay for wifi.
• jacobrussell 2y ago
  cloud computing
• dakiol 2y ago
  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.
  • arrobbiato 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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)
• tverbeure 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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?!?
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • SlimyHog 2y ago
    You realize that this part was a joke and didn't actually happen right?
    • banish-m4 2y ago
      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 2y ago
    I believe it was satire, meant to be humorous..
• _yb2s 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  not nearly as impressive, but i got past the software lock at a gaming internet café 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 2y ago
    Oh memories! There was a Windows built-in input method (智能ABC) that will show a small floating bar wherever there's an input. So you can trigger that bar, right click and select "Help" to open the default CHM viewer, then you can open any URLs from there. Or alternatively the input method has a secret sequence that will crash any apps: v UP DEL ENTER and boom.
• amenhotep 2y ago
  220 comments and no "Bob Wehadababyitsaboy"? Surprising!
• sandworm101 2y ago
  >> 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 2y ago
  Reminds me of the "Bob Wehadababyitsaboy" GEICO commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JxhTnWrKYs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JxhTnWrKYs
  • knodi123 2y ago
    amazing how many people have that commercial burned into their memory.
• yellow_postit 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 voilà! Free ISP :)
• slt2021 2y ago
  boingo wifi lets you connect to AppStore and Android store to download Boingo mobile app. use this knowledge to get free internet access :-)
  • avidiax 2y ago
    Is the trick that these app stores are on a CDN?
    • slt2021 2y ago
      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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Somebody’s getting fired at air miles
• dventimi 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  Tldr: $1,000 worth of engineering time to save $10 on inflight WiFi
• sv0t 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  Once upon a time when mobile data wasn't as common and cheap, I found that starbucks wifi allowed ping to any where :)
• imdsm 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
  TCP-UP , TCP over User Profile
• rfonseca 2y ago
  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 https://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs168/s11/handouts/dtun.pdf
• imdsm 2y ago
  It was a shame to see the author stop proving this over the actual hole. That's where I switched off sadly.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• newshackr 2y ago
  I had a similar idea to do internet over free-on-the-plane SMS payloads but ended up abandoning it after Twilio asked me to verify I was a legit business.
• Kab1r 2y ago
  I have used iodine, which though isn't the easiest to setup works on every airline I have tried, to bypass airline Internet firewalls. DNS packets are one of the few things they don't seem to even try to filter. I wouldn't be surprised if you could just run wireguard over UDP/22.