161–170 of 675 posts
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Time_Zone# https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zones/
I 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.
If you have location permissions enabled in your camera app, the image's exif data will have the coordinates in it. (US Civilian GPS units are prohibited from working above 60,000 ft above sea level and 1,000 knots due to ITAR munitions export restrictions.)
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've noticed that airline wifi doesn't block DNS traffic. You can likely accomplish the same thing with a DNS tunnel like Iodine ( https://github.com/yarrick/iodine ).
What did you use to create your graphics?
You can see the code that's generating these charts here: https://github.com/jamesbvaughan/jamesbvaughan.com/blob/main...
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!
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 c…
I think I had to use Shadowsocks or something at the end to completely bypass it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.