I'm an Alaska (relatively) frequent flyer. That airline offers a free "messaging" plan, that lets you send and receive messages on apps like iMessage, Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. Though, it somehow prevents images/attachments from coming through on those platforms. I've always wondered how this is implemented technically, and if it might be possible to setup some kind of protocol/wrapper to send data that looks…
WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
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Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#12I'm an Alaska (relatively) frequent flyer. That airline offers a free "messaging" plan, that lets you send and receive messages on apps like iMessage, Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. Though, it somehow prevents images/attachments from coming through on those platforms. I've always wondered how this is implemented technically, and if it might be possible to setup some kind of protocol/wrapper to send data that looks…
I've been wondering the same.
I wonder if they just do some rudimentary packet inspection and drop packets above a certain size. My thinking being that short text messages result in very small packets, while large images will result in many large packets. Dropping large packets is most likely OK. I'd need to test this hypothesis by sending a very large text message (resulting in many large packets)
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#13I'm an Alaska (relatively) frequent flyer. That airline offers a free "messaging" plan, that lets you send and receive messages on apps like iMessage, Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. Though, it somehow prevents images/attachments from coming through on those platforms. I've always wondered how this is implemented technically, and if it might be possible to setup some kind of protocol/wrapper to send data that looks…
I've come across wifi zones which allow normal web browsing, WhatsApp messaging (including pictures), but not WhatsApp calls. I saw it first in Hollyhead Port while waiting for a ferry. WhatsApp threw up an error message saying that calls were disallowed by the wifi network.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#14I was just thinking that you could take a picture from the window and then tie the GPS coordinates to the image with the output from that JSON. Kind of handy.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#15Reminds me of the time I dumped CANbus data off a Yamaha R1 bike, made sense of the data, and displayed it on a bunch of charts. Interesting data like Accelerator Handle position, you can figure out how much a rider is really cranking it, and how aggressive they are riding.
... Which is precisely the data those data loggers you plug in from insurance companies track to adjust/refine your rates .....
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#16The speed unit looks more like knots than mph.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#17I'm an Alaska (relatively) frequent flyer. That airline offers a free "messaging" plan, that lets you send and receive messages on apps like iMessage, Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. Though, it somehow prevents images/attachments from coming through on those platforms. I've always wondered how this is implemented technically, and if it might be possible to setup some kind of protocol/wrapper to send data that looks…
United wifi is similar. I've found that notifications work for most things, including my Home Assistant instance—they must all use the same Apple push service.
I noticed the same on Alaska flying last weekend.
As soon as I activated the "Free Messaging" service, I got a bunch of notifications from my Apple Home and Google Nest devices.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#18I'm an Alaska (relatively) frequent flyer. That airline offers a free "messaging" plan, that lets you send and receive messages on apps like iMessage, Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. Though, it somehow prevents images/attachments from coming through on those platforms. I've always wondered how this is implemented technically, and if it might be possible to setup some kind of protocol/wrapper to send data that looks…
Hi fellow Alaska frequent flier.
So about that! There's this iOS app called Flightly that does a brilliant little hack where the app updates itself in (almost) real time on the "free messaging" plan. The way it works (according to a friend) is that their servers send your phone a push notification every couple of minutes from take-off until landing, containing some serialized info such as lat,long,alt,eta,etc. And then the app immediately swallows the notification and deserializes its content without you ever seeing it. The notification works because in order for Alaska to give you notifications at all for your messaging apps, it needs to give you access to _all_ push notifications as they all get sent over an encrypted connected through Apple's server and it can't pick and choose which apps' notifications it lets through.
I've often wondered if it'd be possible to pipe any sort of internet over notifications but I'm not sure if e.g. inline responses are viable, and also that'd probably be heavy enough usage of push notifications I'm sure it's violate someone's TOS.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
United wifi is similar. I've found that notifications work for most things, including my Home Assistant instance—they must all use the same Apple push service.
I noticed the same on Alaska flying last weekend. As soon as I activated the "Free Messaging" service, I got a bunch of notifications from my Apple Home and Google Nest devices.
Yes, APNs (Apple Push Notification service) has to be allowed for notifications to come through from messaging apps and the network operator can’t tell whether it’s an allowed messaging app or any other kind of notification.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#20I'm an Alaska (relatively) frequent flyer. That airline offers a free "messaging" plan, that lets you send and receive messages on apps like iMessage, Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. Though, it somehow prevents images/attachments from coming through on those platforms. I've always wondered how this is implemented technically, and if it might be possible to setup some kind of protocol/wrapper to send data that looks…
How does that fly (pun intended) with regards to net neutrality?
Where I live, some mobile operators gave you "unlimited streaming" in their data plan, but only for certain popular services (spotify, youtube, netflix basically). Since this would make it harder for others to disrupt the big ones, it was quickly forbidden.