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WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

jamesbvaughan.com

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Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#21

Post by SirMaster »

organsnyder wrote: post #10
atourgates wrote: post #4

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…

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.

On iOS all notifications have to use Apple's Push service.

And the WiFi essentially has to allow the Apple push notification system entirely in order for iMessage to work fully the way people expect.

So it's really a side effect. But yeah for example with the free iMessage connection on Southwest, I can see all the notifications come in on Discord, but of course I cannot connect within the discord app to actually load all those messages. I can only read them as they come in as push notifications.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#24

Post by SirMaster »

I want to see someone build a proxy that uses the free iMessage or WhatsApp allowed connection to send arbitrary data.

Like have a WhatsApp relay set up at home that you are sending messages to and from, from the plane.

Like at a most basic level, send a message of a URL to your home WhatsApp which loads the web page there, and sends the HTML back as a WhatApp message reply so you can render it etc.

Wonder what someone could all do and make work.

edit Guess someone made a TCP relay using WhatApp already, neat.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#26

Post by jamesbvaughan »

cirrus3 wrote: post #9

Fun story =) Anyone else freaked out by that "time" format though? Seems like a strange choice, would have expected something more standard like ISO 8601 with timezone offset. "time": "Sun Sep 24 22:02:19 2023"

I felt similar!

My best guess is that whoever designed this system preferred to transform the time into a localized (based on the flight's location, I guess?) representation on the server so that they could drop it directly into the web UI without much client-side logic.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#27

Post by tuetuopay »

atourgates wrote: post #4

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…

some options:

- attachments are likely stored in a different part of the infra than raw messages (like on some s3 bucket somewhere), so it's pretty easy to allow the WA/iMessage/Signal/Messenger API while blocking their CDN through dns blocking, ip range blocking, sni inspection, etc.

- they cut the tcp connection once more than e.g. 1MB has been transferred. it would result in slightly degraded user experience (the message tcp stream needs to be periodically reopened), and may not be foolproof is apps are smart and resume the download where it failed instead of from the start

I lean for the first option as it's both the simplest and most foolproof option.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#29

Post by danielfoster »

atourgates wrote: post #4

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…

I've also wondered why Grindr but not Tinder works on the "messaging only" plan. Someone at Alaska must have had fun with that one.

Flightaware.com also works, presumably because Alaska uses Flightaware for its tracking map.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#30

Post by miki123211 »

atourgates wrote: post #4

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…

Do they allow Telegram?

If so, that would be the easiest, Telegram has a really good bot API.

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