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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, th
by 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 agoThat'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 agoNo, 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 agoI 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 agoOP 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.
- cosmotic 2y agoI 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- yard2010 2y agoMe and my wife merged our facebook accounts to not take up space in facebook
- Scoundreller 2y agoidid2
- qingcharles 2y agoI'm literally just posting this to add another row to a database.
- Scoundreller 2y agounethical!
- sgc 2y agoLet me clean that up for you. '; DROP TABLE comments; --
- Cyphase 2y agoStop that, Bobby!
- 2y ago
- zoeysmithe 2y ago[flagged]
- dheera 2y agoClearly the solution is to just make Wi-Fi free by default. Once this is done, it becomes uninteresting to download gigabytes of crap to "hurt" people. Win-win for everyone. Just saying.
- zoeysmithe 2y agoExcept there's 2,500 people on that ship and the satellite bandwidth is 15mbps. Now making it free doesnt work because the resources aren't there. If you want free wifi, that's great but the private sector isn't going to do it for you. How many of these public nuisance hackers are advocating for large socialized programs to make wifi a human right on all manner of transport? Usually the hacker demographic is right-wing libertarian and would never advocate for socialism. So you dont want socialism but you want socialized services? Curious. If this person's story ended with "Then I started a website to advocate for regulations and pricing for better transport wifi," then that would be great! Instead he just drowned out the internet connection of paying customers who are now making angry calls at some poor tech support person making minimum wage in a poor country. He did nothing but hurt people out of his own immaturity and cheapness.
- Retric 2y agoThese are paying customers, discouraging them from coming back is a net loss. Suppose your cabin includes a shower but you need to pay every day to actually use it. Nobody would think that’s reasonable, but because internet used to be difficult companies are still tacking on insane fees even though the actual costs are minimal. With Starlink you’re looking at a lot more than 15mbps. We’re at the point where some cruise lines offer free Wi-Fi and people still see multi megabit connections anyway.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
- crazygringo 2y ago> 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 2y agosign o' the times
- ndespres 2y agoWhat, 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 2y agoIt 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 2y agowhy would anyone do that?? the remaining "free print" sheets is perfectly good scratch paper if you leave it blank!
- Cyphase 2y agoI 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 2y agoI 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 2y agoThat sounds dystopian.
- xeromal 2y ago
- stocknoob 2y agoNext, I left the water running in the hotel to teach them a lesson for daring to offer me a paid service.
- vsuperpower2021 2y ago[flagged]
- DiggyJohnson 2y agoWhy was your first instinct to abuse or degrade functionality for a service you didn't want to pay for?
- annexrichmond 2y agoAnd then bragging about it. Wild.
- KTibow 2y agoI think it may be more of an emotional than rational response, given he would be stuck on the ferry for 20 hours
- Gormo 2y agoIs 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 2y agoHe probably knew how long the ferry ride was before he booked it.
- 1oooqooq 2y agoeverything needs dns. host a http proxy at home on port 53. the world of paid wifi will be your oyster.
- Rebelgecko 2y agoSomething 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)