Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

jamesbvaughan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 675 posts

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#51

Post by hot_gril »

matsemann wrote: post #20
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…

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.

Is net neutrality even law anymore? T-Mobile has had Binge on for a long time, which zero-rates certain video streaming services. And part of that was even under the old net neutrality laws.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#52

Post by falcor84 »

teeray wrote: post #41
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…

Time to implement IP over FB Messenger

Absolutely. And I'll just put this here for anyone who's looking for inspiration:

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2549

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#53

Post by RandallBrown »

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…

Probably 10-15 years ago when wifi on airlines was still pretty brand new I remember a fun hack for free Internet that involved Google Translate.

Because the wifi landing pages used Google Analytics, they allowed traffic through from many of the Google domains. You could then go to Google translate and translate the website from English to English and use it as sort of a proxy server to get free Internet.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#54

Post by everly »

benced wrote: post #38

Another thing to notice: they use the highly nonstandard time zone abbreviation “PDT”. This works because they’re a US-only airline but if an international airline did this, they’d be in for a world of hurt.

Is it really "highly nonstandard"? I thought it referred to Pacific Time during daylight savings. The rest of the time being PST (Pacific Standard Time).

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#56

Post by jackconsidine »

SirMaster wrote: post #24

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 someo…

I see you found that TCP relay- I've been dying to try it but I've heard of people successfully using it

https://github.com/aleixrodriala/wa-tunnel

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#57

Post by schoen »

fer wrote: post #42

I belive this is OPs flight if anyone wants to compare plane data with ADS-B one. https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/SWA2340/history/2023...

Conceivably, the ADS-B data source might be the same as the data source for this API, at least in that they might be calculated from the same instruments and flight systems.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#58

Post by mdasen »

matsemann wrote: post #20
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…

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.

In the US (I believe) Net Neutrality basically died. Even before that, it was allowed to zero-rate categories of apps (like messaging). That might be coming back now that the FCC has 5 commissioners again and can reinstate Net Neutrality.

However, even with reasonably strict neutrality, this is still possible. Many mobile carriers zero-rated streaming services here, but unlike your operators they'd do it for any streaming service. It was pretty easy for any streaming provider to sign up. They'd basically give the operator the IP ranges they'd be streaming from and the operator would just zero-rate data to those IP ranges (and they'd usually apply bandwidth throttling to around 1.5Mbps so that you'd only get 480-720p video). The key is simply not discriminating between providers within a category.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#59

Post by scatters »

hocuspocus wrote: post #39
jamesbvaughan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good catch! I'm not very familiar with knots - what specifically makes the speeds here look like knots to you? edit: Updated the article. Thanks!

Your ground speed plot hovering around 500 mph would be ~800 km/h which is oddly slow for an airliner, unless you were facing strong headwinds the entire way. The nautical mile is historically the common unit for marine and air navigation.

Clarification: a knot is one nautical mile per hour.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#60

Post by technothrasher »

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…

Many years ago, when hotels first started having and charging for WiFi connections, I wrote a simple little tunnel using the DNS port back to my server. Since the hotels didn't block that port or even bother to check what traffic was going over it, it worked like a charm.

I tried it on a trip to Tokyo and immediately got completely blocked. It took me a few minutes to figure out they'd blacklisted my MAC address. I changed the MAC of that interface and then behaved.

Post reply on HN