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WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

jamesbvaughan.com

241–250 of 675 posts

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#241

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…

You must have buns of steel. I flew Spirit exactly once (well, twice, it was round-trip), and it was such a miserable experience I swore to never do it again. Their seats are made of concrete as far as I can tell. For domestic flights I pretty much always sit in the window and never get up during the flight. On spirit I had to get up and walk around after about 3 hours 'cause my ass was sore. Never again.

Did you have a negative view of Spirit before flying with them?

Not sure about my backside.. don't do squats lol ... 5'10 170

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#242

> I didn’t know what I’d do with the data at this point, but I started collecting it right away so that I’d have as much as possible to play with later. And people complain that everything everywhere collects data on everyone.

The complaint is collecting data on others. Specifically the complaint is on others collecting data on me.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#243
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A plane going up and down 20-30 feet seems like it would be very unpleasant. Considering that there's longitude and latitude, isn't it more likely that the altitude is coming from GPS, which is notoriously inaccurate with regards to elevation?

Maybe the plane is staying level but the ground is variable terrain.

it's the Earth vibrating ...

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#244
post #140

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.

Tell it to the judge.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#245
Fun fact: I used to work for a company that provided equipment and services for satcom. The price tier and license for airborne communication was higher and we had software calculating the speed and if the speed went over 300 m/hr or alike it will check your license features and expiration date. If you forgot to pay your bill, no wifi for ya! We did not use altitude for obvious reasons.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#246
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to do the same thing at hotels. Still often works. nmap -sn 192.168.0.1-255 To find everyone on the network, then start spoofing each of their MACs until you find one that works

I should probably know the answer, but what happens when two devices have the same MAC address?

No way to tell for sure, but I can only assume that he had actually hijacked somebody else's connection and the other person's device stopped working for them. I sure wasn't going to stand up and ask the plane if anybody had had their internet plan hacked...

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#247
post #210
post #136

“According to this data, the plane’s altitude was only fluctuating by about 20-30 feet. This is more stable than I expected!” Autopilots are very good and they are servoing to the pressure altitude. Many pressure altitude encoders used in modern aircraft (for example to drive altitudes that transponders report to SSR radar or via ADS-B) have 25 ft encoding resolution. That 25ft resolution is likely what is being seen…

I guess they got a lot more precise with implementation of Reduced Vertical Separation Minimum (RVSM) - planes had to be separated by 2000 ft and this was reduced in early 2000s to 1000ft

It was probably fairly precise already. To get their license, a private pilot must demonstrate via a checkride the ability to stay within 100 feet of an assigned altitude, even in a steep turn.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#248

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

No permission - just curiosity :) I'm not too concerned about the risk associated with fetching a JSON file that their flight status page is already fetching on a loop. That said, I'm curious what risks you have in mind.

> That said, I'm curious what risks you have in mind.

Overzealous prosecutors.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#250
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have pictures from my camera (with location permissions enabled) that don't have any GPS data in it, or at least the data is extremely wrong.

I can't help diagnose that for you. There are other ways to get your current location, etc from your phone though.

I have GPS Test[1] on my Android - it's pretty neat to launch it while on a flight - seeing the speed in realtime is pretty fun.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chartcross...

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