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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

#141

Post by mynameisvlad »

catiopatio wrote: post #118
s3p wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not understanding the point of the comment. The Flighty team did some amazing engineering work for anyone who doesn't pay.

> amazing engineering Background updates are a built-in, supported, documented feature, widely employed by applications on the platform, and accessible to anyone that reads the two pages of documentation required to use them: “Pushing background updates to your App — Deliver notifications that wake your app and update it in the background.” https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/... edited for po…

They're using push notifications in a novel way to provide the app the necessary information to update itself without needing to be connected to the full internet. That's quite a bit beyond "They're using push notifications" and no other app does that AFAIK. Almost all will use the push notification as a notification and trigger an update on app open which would fail.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#143

Post by mcast »

snazz wrote: post #19
atourgates wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The scale of Apple’s notification service must be pretty large. Granted, most notifications don’t have strong SLA guarantees but I don’t remember it having any downtime either.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#144

Post by amalcon »

dag11 wrote: post #18
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…

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 th…

This reminds me of the old tools that tunnel more or less whatever over DNS. I.e. behind the scenes, the tool would look up "base64encodedpacket.domainyoucontrol.example.com", and it would respond with encoded data going the other way. This is because captive portal WiFi often permitted DNS to pass through unimpeded, for various reasons.

I always appreciated the hack, even though I could never bring myself to use it due to the obvious cache pollution problem on the various DNS servers.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#145

Post by cityofdelusion »

paul7986 wrote: post #75

If you travel lite with clothes in a book bag(wash clothes if extended stay)… I don't see why anyone would fly United, Southwest, American Airlines, etc VS.the budget Airlines like Spirit. Maybe if you have points with those airlines… Otherwise, save hundreds of dollars using budget airlines which the planes are newer in my experience, and never had a bad experience versus my recent bad experiences with Delta and the…

Just to clarify, Southwest is classified as a budget airline, especially compared to the "big 3". Spirit and airlines like them are in their own class called ULCC (ultra low cost carrier) to differentiate them from the existing budget airlines.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#147

Post by WendyTheWillow »

Etheryte wrote: post #120
1B05H1N wrote: post #106

Did you have permission to do that ? Sounds pretty risky to be probing the network of a flight imo.

Are you aware what the website you're currently on is called?

Hackers talk about ethics and legality all the time!

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#148

Post by not2b »

But SouthWest will give you a much prettier display of that same data (track your flight, see the current altitude and ETA, and a lot more, like the plane's position on the map) without paying for their WiFi. My guess is that they are using the same data that article writer wrote a program to process. Essentially there is one site you can visit for free and that's where it is.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#149

Post by lapetitejort »

renewiltord wrote: post #104
el_benhameen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But you’re on a site called “Hacker News”. I’m not sure that there’s a more perfect topic of discussion for a site with that name.

[flagged]

"Wait, why did my Amazon account get banned?"

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#150

Post by kayson »

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 can't seem to find it, but there was a blog post on HN a while back about how someone set up a proxy to browse Wikipedia by sending and receiving WhatsApp messages. I'm sure you could extend that to be a web proxy.
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