10 ms·
Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170
- nopelynopington 1y ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 1y agoThat doesn't make it non-interesting.
- _gtuv 1y agoJust want to clarify that my intent was not to say that internet is essential. However, I do need internet access for my job and in general, it's nice to be able to keep in touch with friends.
- nopelynopington 1y agoIf you need to still be accessible to your job while on a cruise there's something wrong somewhere. I mean I guess said job must pay well, but still
- _gtuv 1y agoMy job is mostly just working on open source software, which I enjoy and would be doing anyway. I actually haven't worked on it yet on the cruise, but thought it would be nice to sit by a window and code. Even my development database requires internet access, so offline coding really isn't an option.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> This is .1% problems Cruises are a stereotypically mass-market vacation. In most cases they’re cheaper than a hotel.
- Scarblac 1y agoBut still, Google says there's about 30 million cruise passengers per year, or less than 0.4% of the world. Close.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Google says there's about 30 million cruise passengers per year, or less than 0.4% of the world. Close. By the same math owning a pet tortoise is something of a 0.1% game.
- vntok 1y agoWell yes, having both the time and budget to properly care for a pet tortoise is a very exclusive hobby. Tortoises can live 50+ years, require space, a daily ose of fresh natural-grown veggies, and are prone to respiratory infections often requiring costly antibiotic injections.
- nopelynopington 1y agoExactly. And then add to that people that just happen to bring an openWRT router on a cruise with them
- BeetleB 1y ago> In most cases they’re cheaper than a hotel. Eh, depends on the package. I went on a 7 day cruise. Definitely not cheaper than a hotel, given that you are paying per person. So if you have 2 kids, you'd pay roughly $850/day.
- wlll 1y agoIf I earned ~50 million dollars per year then I think I'd just pay for Internet. Maybe .1% was a bad choice, should we only post articles that are relevant to people on a global average yearly wage of ~$12,000? How are we defining relevant? People earning $2000/year might be /interested/ in a thing, but not able to afford it (eg. a Mac computer or a large hadron collider), where do we draw the line?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jeffbee 1y agoI would never take a cruise but in other places with paid wifi that I did not want to pay for, IP-over-DNS tunneling worked well.
- OutOfHere 1y agoWhich services or apps do you advise for it?
- EvanAnderson 1y agoIodine is the go-to for IP-over-DNS tunneling: https://github.com/yarrick/iodine https://github.com/yarrick/iodine Back in the Before Times when my wireless telephone didn't support tethering / hotspot iodine was very handy, albeit excruciatingly slow. Very rarely did I find a network I couldn't tunnel out of. Virtually nobody thinks about DNS exfil. (Did a gig one time where we did live-off-the-land exfil of base64 encoded data using CERTUTIL, CMD, PING, and tcpdump running on an off-site DNS server.)
- bowmessage 1y agoOP, great work, bypassing internet restrictions is always fun. Though, I hope your family isn't cruising much in the future-- sharing stuff like this, with so many specifics about which cruise line and exact retry methodologies used, is a surefire way to get it shut down. (Or worse, a nasty internet bill from the cruise line.)
- _gtuv 1y agoThanks! My thought process was that realistically, a negligible amount of people will even attempt this. Also, there will always be a way to bypass internet restrictions. I will say, it would be kind of cool if this post gets big enough that someone from the cruise line sees it and actually feels that they need to put in the time to patch it.
- amendegree 1y agoYou’re on the front page of hn… while they may not see it right away it’s possible some bored tech blogger picks up the story
- axus 1y agoCruise ship passenger saves $170, thousands of hours and even more money are spent ensuring it can't ever happen again. Did the article always say REDACTEDCRUISELINE ?
- amendegree 1y agoNo, it named the cruiseline
- matt_heimer 1y agoNext time you might want to wait until your are off of the cruise ship before posting about it on a blog with your name. They'd probably be within their stated passage contract ([link-redacted]) to disembark you at the next port.
- vanschelven 1y agoFor those complaining about "first world problems"... for me this would be both about the sense of injustice and the joy finding a technical solution. We're on Hacker News, after all.
- pcthrowaway 1y agoI'm not sure what you mean by this, but anyone on a cruise is almost certainly wealthy by global standards; it's not like there are poor people there to feel bad about for not having faster internet
- mkesper 1y agoWorkers maybe?
- pcthrowaway 1y agoWell fair, but the above commenter seemed to be suggesting there may be people who couldn't afford better internet packages, and my assumption was that workers would get access to the internet as part of their employment, but perhaps I'm assuming wrong.
- landl0rd 1y agoGlobal standards aren't really relevant to how people think of things around them. Protesting this fact is tilting at a windmill. The hedonic treadmill does not stop and nobody in America living in section 8 housing thinks "well at least my apartment doesn't have a dirt floor!!"
- isawczuk 1y agoI was watching some cruise crew videos, and it turns out their biggest expense is internet. I'm curious why they don’t just install Starlink to cut costs and maybe sell to guests some "piracy" internet?
- jasoncartwright 1y agoPirate seaborne internet has been tried. "A Navy officer is demoted after sneaking a satellite dish onto a warship to get the internet" https://apnews.com/article/navy-illegal-wireless-internet-534007ea8b374bce3189c42449902b2c https://apnews.com/article/navy-illegal-wireless-internet-53... https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/ https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy...
- isawczuk 1y agoMaybe military is not best place to have "piracy internet", yet I think with current tech - internet access should not be an issue.
- emchammer 1y agoHow in the bloody hell do you install a Starlink on a submarine?
- jimmydddd 1y ago---The Starlink dish was secretly installed on the Independence Class vessel’s weather deck, where it was relatively out of view. The network was initially named “Stinky”, but it was later renamed to appear to be a wireless printer – despite there being no such devices aboard. ---The Starlink dish wasn’t discovered until a civilian technician, installing a Starshield satellite communications system, noted the device and reported it to a senior crew member.
- emchammer 1y agoArg, thanks. I literally read that, but there was too much advertising on that site. Maybe the Navy needs to provide Wi-Fi to sailors if it means that much for their morale. And maybe consumer endpoint security needs to be so rock-solid that a sailor can trust their phone/laptop on a voyage.
- jasonjayr 1y agoI imagine one of the ships officers will be tipped off by the IT team about the unusual number of free-internet activation attached to your booking id, and either give your room a visit to knock it off, or just bill some multiple of the $170 anyway. It sounds like it should only be used only a few times per booking, and this is going to hit at least 4/hour for multiple hours a day, so it will stick out like a sore thumb in the logs .... But, a cool hack, nonetheless :)
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> imagine one of the ships officers will be tipped off by the IT team If it’s any of the major cruise lines there almost certainly isn’t anyone in IT paying that much attention.
- ryandrake 1y agoYea, I'd think something like onboard Internet is something set up once for the ship, and then basically forgotten about as long as the overall revenue is above some "reasonable" threshold given the number of passengers. Ain't no security team sitting there monitoring user registration metrics in real-time looking for fraud. At best, they might pull logs every quarter to look for vulnerabilities like this to close.
- dylan604 1y agoWhy would someone in corporate IT responsible for this not ask Claude to write a script that does this on a much more frequent basis? That person might get a nice attaboi for it, but much less likely an actual bonus for it. Although, I can't imagine they are losing too much money on each cruise from this hack unless the next DefCon is on a cruise ship. Then realizing that 0 passengers signed up for WiFi might seem strange
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Why would someone in corporate IT responsible for this not ask Claude to write a script that does this on a much more frequent basis Because they have nine trillion bugs in their booking system that have been on backlog since 1910. According to this source [1] (of dubious quality, granted) Royal Caribbean's entire IT department is about 140 people headed by an electrical engineer. [1] https://rocketreach.co/royal-caribbean-cruises-ltd-it-department_b5c49e43f42e0dcb#:~:text=Royal%20Caribbean,IT%20Department&text=Top%20Royal,View.%202 https://rocketreach.co/royal-caribbean-cruises-ltd-it-depart...
- bearsyankees 1y agoNice tool for curl -> python requests without an LLM, all static: https://curlconverter.com/ https://curlconverter.com/
- dale_huevo 1y agoOne of the fringe benefits of going on a cruise is that you can disconnect from the Internet for a week. Hit up the bar, make love to your wife, gamble a bit. All without your phone constantly buzzing in your pocket. If you go on a cruise to immediately open your laptop it seems like a waste of time and money.
- tossandthrow 1y agoUnless you are on a cruise to work remotely and flee soaring rental prices.
- LtWorf 1y agoThere is no way that a cruise is cheaper.
- tossandthrow 1y agoSorry, I genuinely thought that this idea was a well adopted meme. I reckon it is not. https://www.unilad.com/news/money/living-on-cruise-ship-cost-vs-house-644136-20231024 https://www.unilad.com/news/money/living-on-cruise-ship-cost...
- asadm 1y agoUnless you LOVE your work and just want a change of scene while doing what you love.
- bredren 1y agoI used a travel router on my recent trip to Argentina and found it quite useful. It will be a permanent part of my travel kit. Some cooler uses: - streaming HDR video from closed MacBook running Amphetamine to Vision Pro via Moonlink - Having a working HomePod mini in the hotel room. The hotel internet did not like multiple devices off the router. It didn’t reject it outright but it throttled or nerfed it. Individual connections were free, though and fwiw high speed data over cellular was more reliable.
- bentcorner 1y ago> The hotel internet did not like multiple devices off the router. It didn’t reject it outright but it throttled or nerfed it. Curious - what tools would they use to detect this, and what could someone do to work around this?
- bpye 1y agoI hit this once - it was using the TTL. I setup an iptables rule on the router to rewrite TTL and then it worked fine.
- kennethrc 1y agoI have Wireguard (and OpenVPN off TCP/UDP 443 as backup) on a router connected to residential symmetric 1G fiber. Among the many uses for that means I can watch the NFL (et al.) when abroad just as if I were home; there's WG/OPVN clients for the FireSticks I carry when travelling.
- okdood64 1y ago> travel router What's the difference between that and tethering off your phone?
- vntok 1y agoPhone-based tethering is not nearly as configurable as a router.
- blacksmith_tb 1y ago
- chillers 1y agoOn Royal Caribbean, it's much simpler. You can open a hotspot and allow other devices to connect. We paid for one device, and friends and family could connect whenever they were nearby. At one point, we had up to 8 connected devices with no issues.
- whizzzkid 1y agoThis doesn't really work with iOS devices. You need to have an android or better a travel router.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoHow do you get through a portal on a travel router?
- bitpush 1y agoThe steps are as follows 1. Turn on travel router 2. Connect to its network 3. Go to travel router's admin page (192.168.8.1 or similar) 4. Click buttons and join the Hotel/Cruise/Flight WiFi 5. Go to neverssl.com (or google.com or whatever) 6. See the captive portal of Hotel/Cruise/Flight and follow instructions. In other words, for the portal, it is no different than using your phone. The extra step is logging into the admin portal and having the router join the public wifi first.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoOk, so once connected any client can authenticate at the portal page.
- whizzzkid 1y agoI was able to do something similar on the Celebrity Cruises, however, theirs is more vulnerable as you can overtake a logged-in user's session by changing to their IP addresses. This allows you to take over room-controls, casting and internet in Celebrity's connected rooms. I didn't try this on Princes, because I had an all-inclusive pricing, but yeah, this is possible.
- Doohickey-d 1y agoThis is actually quite common: I've been on ferries, at airports, even hotels, which give you some amount of time for free, often anonymously. So just a mac address change gives extra internet. New Android versions make it especially convenient, with a "Wi-Fi non-persistent MAC randomization" option in the developer options, meaning you can just "forget" the wifi network and connect again with a fresh mac address. In some cases I've seen networks that allow any traffic on port 53 - it doesn't have to be DNS traffic. The most surprising one was a mobile network with a pay as you go payment model: load money first, buy a data package, when the data package runs out, you get a captive portal that says "you've run out of data" - but port 53 wasn't blocked, so a commercial VPN resulted in unlimited internet at unlimited speed, with roaming anywhere in the world (and that was back in the day before SIM card registration was required too, so anonymous, too).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- McAlpine5892 1y ago> but port 53 wasn't blocked, so a commercial VPN resulted in unlimited internet The VPN would have to accept a connection over 53 though, right? This also seems like a great way to possibly bypass VPN blocking via DPI, which I've been hit with before on airlines when going over 443.
- toast0 1y agoYeah, but it doesn't cost much to accept connections on all ports (AIM did it in the 90s). DPI should be able to easily detect and block non-DNS traffic on port 53, as well as IP over DNS. Just a matter of configuration effort; but lots of networks lack configuration effort, so it's worth a try.
- sandworm101 1y ago5190 continued well into the 2000s.
- haunter 1y agoI've never been to a cruise but want to go one day
- LtWorf 1y agoIt's quite boring to be honest. I think it can be good if you have small kids.
- pcthrowaway 1y agoI'd be interested in a hacker cruise. A boat with 100 hackers on board is in the middle of the ocean when the nav system gains self-awareness and decides not to return to land. The boat is equipped with satellite communication devices, but passenger internet access is off. Only 40 days of rations. Will they be able to hack their way back to shore before they run out of red bull? Or will they turn to a life of piracy instead?
- ellisv 1y agoThey typically have much less than 40 days of rations…
- Jonovono 1y agoHmm, seeing someone fall/jump overboard and then subsequently getting interrogated by the fbi upon docking was anything but boring,
- b0a04gl 1y agoon a recent trip, i stayed at a hotel that had a 1-hour free wifi trial per device. after it expired, i toggled mac randomisation and reconnected. worked again. did it four times, no issues. never paid. later checked the captive portal domain. it was hosted by a third-party vendor. not the hotel. same pattern as cruises. backend didn’t care who i was, just tracked mac and time. this blog just confirmed what i suspected: enforcement is surface-level. they want friction low enough to upsell, but not tight enough to annoy casual users. the systems are optimised for conversion, not for plugging leaks. most abuse is silent and tolerated. these aren't security flaws. they're tradeoffs
- WhyNotHugo 1y agoWhen dealing with security issues, organisation typically lost likelihood of occurrence and impact. The impact for these is negligible, so they don’t invent in fixing them. There’s absolutely nothing to be lost if this gets explotes by the ocasional tinkerer.
- mr_mitm 1y agoI did something similar at the Zürich airport and gained access to a second four hour window of free wifi. You had to bind your MAC to your identity either via SMS or via boarding pass, two independent channels. Only problem was that I only had an android phone without root. So I disabled MAC randomization for that wifi, deleted the cookie, and signed up via boarding pass. Never felt more like a hacker (and I hacked dozens of active directory domains to domain admin on my job).
- TrackerFF 1y agoInternet on any ship is expensive as soon as you're out in maritime area - where data transfer is done via satellite services. So it is not necessarily because a captive market, where the cruise liners can fleece you. They pay crazy prices to the telecom/ISPs. So if you're getting free internet out at seas, it is really at the cost of the ones actually paying the bills - or in this case, the cruise liner.
- benbristow 1y agoI'm assuming these large cruise corps can get a decent bulk/business discount though.
- zinekeller 1y agoPre-Starlink, no, not really. Some discount due to the bulk payment, yes, but the bandwidth is simply not there to allow for such discounts, especially in high-demand areas like Africa and the Pacific where satellites have a double-duty to serve land-based customers.
- testing22321 1y agoPre starlink I looked at getting sat internet for 3 years around Africa. For even a few GB per month the cost was more per month than all other costs of the expedition combined. I just got local sims, worked great
- skerit 1y agoCould be, but getting a Gigsky e-sim is a lot cheaper than the internet on-board. And I was under the impression that in the end, that system is using the same internet uplink as the wifi (since I believe it's the ships themselves that send out the "Cellular at sea" network?)
- zamadatix 1y agoIn the "Cruise Only" section of https://www.gigsky.com/data-cruises https://www.gigsky.com/data-cruises it's $112 for 10 GB over 30 days. Per day that's certainly cheaper than $170 for 7 days but it's hard to say it's actually any cheaper per GB without knowing the other option's limit. Of course if 10 GB is enough for what you wanted to do in a week then it doesn't really matter but it might explain some of the pricing difference (ignoring bulk provider to provider pricing or other factors before we finally get to the "what do we think we can charge" pricing).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- larrykluger 1y agoBy the way, this is called theft of services.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kylehotchkiss 1y agoMaybe next time the author will get thrown in the brig!
- billfor 1y agoDoes the SNI tunnel trick (changing the SNI to match the AP) not work on cruise ships?
- jiveturkey 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- happyopossum 1y ago[flagged]
- baq 1y agoThis horse is pulp and has been for a long while now but theft of services is not a thing, it’s a breach of contract.
- archagon 1y agoSome of the earliest hackers were phone phreakers, and this is essentially a victimless "crime." (Cost of maritime internet for a cruise line is probably a rounding error in their budget.)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jl6 1y agoI’m not going to cry hard about stealing from one of the scummiest industries on the planet, and a good hack is a good hack, but man, what a wasted opportunity to disconnect! I guess OP is a kid and gets the FOMO itch from being offline. I feel we as a society are not good at helping people grow out of that.
- mattgreenrocks 1y agoFinally, a reasonable comment on this thread. Hacking around things is fun, yes. Another thing that is also enjoyable is resting your brain from the Internet for a bit.
- unreda 1y ago[flagged]
- yegle 1y agoFWIW: to "repeat a command until it succeeds" the right way is to do `until $command; do $some_back_off; done`.
- nunez 1y agoThe picture you (or OP) provided has an on-board restaurant in the background that reveals the cruise line they tried to redact.
- uudecoded 1y agoFor what it's worth, based on somewhat frequent posts to r/cruise and Cruise Critic, travel routers are very often confiscated by ship personnel and held for pickup until departure day. They appear on major cruise lines prohibited items list (but curiously are banned on Carnival but not their subsidiary [name-redacted]).
- robocat 1y ago> confiscated Detection? APs are scanning for SSIDs and then staff are notified? Or multiple devices are detected on one connection?
- sergiotapia 1y agoWith the picture + your name, [name-redacted] will find your booking and probably bill and ban you from their cruiseline?
- esafak 1y agoI've never heard of that router brand: https://www.gl-inet.com/ https://www.gl-inet.com/
- evadne 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gwbas1c 1y agoJust need to point out: A cruise is a ^%$^#$ expensive vacation. For me, part of vacation is focusing on the moment, place, and people that I'm with. Cruises have plenty of entertainment onboard, so if you feel the need to do something like this to save a buck, maybe take a deep breath and try to take advantage of what's already there for your entertainment. If I ever take advantage of this hack... It'll be to download an extra book or two to my Kindle. My wife and I took a honeymoon in a remote area and mostly used our devices to take pictures and read books while at a beach.
- Fergusonb 1y agoThe author implies they're a highschool aged programmer. They're likely along for the ride with their parents and very online. I'd probably do the same thing at their age.
- archagon 1y agoI've taken transatlantic repositioning cruises for a few hundred bucks back when I was in my twenties and funemployed. Feels appropriate for that scenario.
- ellisv 1y agoI disagree that cruises are expensive. Cruises can be expensive but many cost roughly the same per night in a hotel but includes your food and entertainment. No, they're not as cheap as camping at your local campground or a staycation. Yes, they're more expensive if you have to fly to/from the port. Our most recent cruise was less than $1,200 for 6 nights, $556 for airfare, and $127 for a hotel the night before. This was more expensive than usual because it was during a popular time of year to fly. However I completely agree that vacation is meant to be focusing on the present. One of the main appeals of cruises to me is being disconnected from the Internet.
- greenchair 1y ago[flagged]
- bodhi_mind 1y agoSide note, I’m pretty sure you can send iMessage on a cruise ship when connected to their WiFi with no internet package because apple has a mesh network between unrelated devices and finds one with an internet endpoint to funnel messages in and out. I’m just basing this on usage experience and my hypothesis.
- codazoda 1y agoI did not find Apple iMessage to work on my recent cruise without the room Wifi. I didn't really need internet with a tiny bit of planning though. The cruise line had its own app and THAT had a chat feature. We didn't find it very reliable, however. You would eventually get messages, but it wasn't instant. I downloaded my ebooks in advance and installed a small LLM on my laptop. I could read and code but I didn't get much of the latter done.
- frenchtoast8 1y agoI've tried this on a RCL ship and it didn't work, so YMMV
- euroderf 1y ago> I’m pretty sure you can send iMessage on a cruise ship when connected to their WiFi with no internet package because apple has a mesh network between unrelated devices and finds one with an internet endpoint to funnel messages in and out. I for one would love to hear more about this sub rosa mesh network.
- kylehotchkiss 1y agoPerhaps the real solution here is to vacation where the wifi or 5g are abundant!
- unknown2342 1y agouber cringe