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WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

jamesbvaughan.com

441–450 of 675 posts

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you then fighting the switch's port learning? Or RSTing each other's TCP connections?

Usually doesn't matter... The other person will get frustrated and disconnect and reconnect a few times, and finally give up and read a book...

> The other person will get frustrated and disconnect and reconnect a few times, and finally give up and read a book...

That makes me really reconsider my past struggles with this form of Internet access.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#442

When my son was younger - maybe 9 or 10 or so, we were on a plane and he was using his phone and I looked over his shoulder and realized he was on the internet... but I hadn't paid for an internet plan. I said, "son, how are you using the internet?" He said, "oh, a kid at school showed me - if you go here" (he opened up the wifi settings where the DHCP assigned IP address is) "and start changing the numbers, eventual…

The LAN here seems relatively small and fixed, i.e., the number of passengers on a flight is known and does not change during flight. The airline could easily assign a unique IP address to each seat (ticket) without using DHCP. This is generally in contrast to other instances of public Wifi.

What if someone has multiple devices they want to connect? Most people would travel with at least two devices.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#443

On redeye international flights with exorbitant WiFi fees I'll admit to scanning for MAC addresses, get the top talkers, then come back later when ones been idle for like 15 minutes, presuming the person is asleep and change my mac to take the address and get online. I just did it for fun, ok fine.

How do you determine who the top talkers are?

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#444
post #434

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 happened to have had a flight a day or two after the first beta of Apple’s Private Relay a year or two ago. I was able to use free WiFi the entire flight. Presumably because whatever they whitelisted for iMessage and/or push notifications covered that as well. They had blocked it before my return flight days later. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Huh. Maybe this explains why my "messaging only" wifi on Virgin Atlantic a few weeks ago gave me full, slow, internet access?

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#446
post #18

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…

It works not because Alaska wants to give you notifications for your messages, but because iMessage literally is transported over APNS.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#447
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, true. I deliberately left out altitude because this is HN but you caught me anyway. Presumably a train's groundSpeed and airSpeed are the same. If they diverge you have bigger problems than a JSON schema. Is there a variant of this for ships? surfaceSpeed vs seaFloorSpeed?

A train can easily run in a head- or tailwind in the same order of magnitude as its groundspeed.

I've been tempted to mount a small anemometer to my car - by subtracting the groundspeed from the measured airspeed, one can get the wind speed and direction and figure out whether there is a headwind or tailwind and if so how strong. Theoretically this could be used to drive more efficiently, though the extra drag from the anemometer would probably cancel out any gains.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#448

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…

It'd be interested to make a little HTML page that can query the api for each airline that exposes something like this and give you an in-flight display on your laptop.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#449
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an amazing anecdote! The state of "open Wi-Fi" security is actually really sad. I'm not aware of an easy way for the airline to actually do better than this! I suppose they could use Opportunistic Wireless Encryption [1] and bind session authentication to that (i.e. authenticate a given OWE session, not a given MAC address) if the device supports it, as at least modern Apple devices do? But I have no idea how…

You can always use an open network to generate passwords for the proper internet connected WPA-EAP network (along with some in-flight multimedia like some carriers do). Extra step for sure but it solves the problem. PS: I'm a couch expert so I have no idea if there's a problem with this idea.

The first problem that comes to my mind--clients will remember both wifi networks and may continue to choose the open network when e.g. waking from sleep.

The user can go in and forget the open network of course, but most won't know to do that.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#450
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably can. I suspect airliner software is appallingly insecure.

Relies very strongly on simple airgapping. Can't do anything to it if there's no wires in the direction you want. Can't remotely hack if there's nothing antenna connected that can talk to flight control. It has the luxury of not needing to do the "limited RCE" that is a modern web request

In the article above, in-flight wifi has an API reporting position, altitude, and velocity. That is a feed from avionics, which renders the claim of airgapped systems essentially null.
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