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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

#151

Post by catiopatio »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #130
catiopatio wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Why is that toxic?

A cognitive filter that misrepresents reality is toxic.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#152

Post by mcast »

fouc wrote: post #140
1B05H1N wrote: post #106

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

There's no "probing the network" involved here. The in-flight webpage was continuously fetching a specific end-point from the in-flight web server. This end-point is basically public data. All he did was duplicate what the webpage was already doing, and then do some basic analysis on the data the end-point was returning.

Cybersecurity and internet crime laws are notoriously outdated (created in the 80s). I could see a bad lawyer arguing that cURLing an API repeatedly is “hacking”.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#153

Post by catiopatio »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #141
catiopatio wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Tons of apps do that. It’s a built-in, supported use-case!

It’s also the trivial, obvious approach to anyone who asks the question “how can I push data to the application when it’s not running.”

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#154

Post by toast0 »

hot_gril wrote: post #129
toast0 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Binge On doesn't fall under strict net neutrality, but they are at least publicly open to all lawful and licensed content audio/video providers, and the technical requirements are not very high. I don't know what the actual onboarding process is like, but they've got a lot of providers signed up...

https://www.t-mobile.com/tv-streaming/binge-on/apps-list.htm... doesn't list all that many providers if we're talking about all video streaming services worldwide. I notice a large one under the gaming category missing, Twitch.

I think they've got to be licensed for US customers, or T-Mobile USA isn't going to include them. Twitch does seem to be a notable missing provider; Amazon video is on the program though, so maybe there's some technical or product thing on Twitch's side.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#156

Post by xeromal »

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 a web browser years ago that would use MMS to transfer web pages to the user without using internet service. This was in the early days. I think it was a Java app for the Motorola razor IIRC

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#157

Post by hackernewds »

jmharvey wrote: post #137
CamperBob2 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a good way to meet some upset people with expensive sunglasses shortly after you land.

It's not like that at all. The sunglasses aren't that expensive.

after you land also open to interpretation

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#158

Post by jamesbvaughan »

not2b wrote: post #148

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.

Yep, that's exactly right! They have a nice status page that you can visit free of charge that visualizes this data.

I chose to scrape it for a couple reasons:

1. I wanted see all of the data for the entire flight - that status page only visualizes the current values.

2. It was fun!

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#159

Post by remram »

hackmiester wrote: post #87

Here is how to get the equivalent data on a Delta flight. $ curl https://wifi.delta.com/api/flight-data | jq % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 448 100 448 0 0 5600 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 5743 { "timestamp": "2023-07-11T14:54:41Z", "eta": "17:48", "flightDuration": 278, "flightNumber": "DAL786", "latitude": 39.723472595214844, "longitude": -97…

You can use jq's string interpolation feature to simplify this:

    $ curl -s https://wifi.delta.com/api/flight-data | jq -r '"https://maps.google.com/?q=\(.latitude),\(.longitude)"'

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#160

Post by bombcar »

hot_gril wrote: post #51
matsemann wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some states implemented their own versions of net neutrality.
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