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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

#451

Post by Wowfunhappy »

babypuncher wrote: post #427
commandlinefan wrote: post #205

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…

A slightly more ethical solution, for those wondering, is SSH tunneling. A lot of gated wifi networks allow SSH traffic through without payment. I used to spend a lot of time at JFK back when they still charged for WiFi. I watched a lot of Netflix for free by just logging into my router and opening a tunnel to my VPN server.

Do you know why they let SSH through?

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#452

Post by inopinatus »

eddieroger wrote: post #169
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…

Interesting how they chose to make more general `vehicleId` instead of `planeId` or `tailNumber` or something. I wonder if Delta's fleet includes other things that have matching APIs to this one. I also wonder how much of their internal system structure one could learn from the `flightId` if they knew about other systems. It doesn't look like much beyond a composite key of otherwise knowable data, but still interesti…

Not all aircraft are planes.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#453

Post by lxgr »

dangus wrote: post #408
lxgr wrote: 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…

Isn’t this data meant to be exposed? You can get all this flight status on the Southwest intranet when you’re connected to WiFi as part of the flight status page. This hack just goes a step further to plot the data over time.

The concern isn’t access to the flight status data (or even your data, which is most likely encrypted these days), but theft of service you paid for, by another passenger on the flight (you would probably at least get kicked out/experience issues with your own connectivity, and might worst-case be blamed if something bad happens using the connection you bought).

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#454

Post by lxgr »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #449
vezuchyy wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You could just prevent access to the wider internet on the open version!

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#455

Post by Wowfunhappy »

lxgr wrote: post #454
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You could just prevent access to the wider internet on the open version!

Yes but the client will still connect and the user will wonder why their internet isn't working.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#456

Post by lxgr »

labcomputer wrote: post #347
Nextgrid wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In cases where the Wi-Fi is provided as a value-add or is bought via another channel than the Wi-Fi network itself, I think you can just generate one-time WPA Enterprise credentials, with a QR code to facilitate data entry? In case of in-flight Wi-Fi, the credentials/QR code can be printed on the boarding pass, or available in the app (the app caches it in advance while it's still on the ground, so when in the air yo…

I think you could even take this one step further: Have a captive portal on an unencrypted channel (using TLS obviously) to do the vending, so that the credentials don’t need to be purchased before the flight.

Oh, these are neat ideas, I hadn’t thought of that!

One concern might be expiring access credentials (not sure if most OSes will re-prompt for a new password or just give up), but you could just make the EAP credentials per-user instead and redirect users to the captive portal again once needed.

This leaves clients not supporting WPA-EAP, but these could just continue using the regular unencrypted/MAC-authenticated service.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#457

Post by dramm »

jjwiseman wrote: post #284
dramm wrote: 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 don't know what sensors are feeding the API from the post, but most passenger jets do broadcast information about the accuracy of their sensed position, including vertical position/altitude. If you click on an aircraft on the map at https://globe.adsbexchange.com/ , and scroll the left sidebar all the way to the bottom you'll see a section labeled "Accuracy". ADS-B Exchange doesn't show Rc/v, the vertical position…

Pressure encoders, as I said. That's what feeds all aviation altitude data... i.e. anytime you see the word 'altitude' and its not qualified with 'GPS altitude' which is effectively not normally used. ADS-B Out concurrently transmits GPS height about the ellipsoid data as well as pressure altitude data. No use is normally made of the GPS height data. We are discussing pressure altitude data here, that's what aviation works off of. The accuracy and reliability metrics in the ADS-B broadcast you are referencing refers to the GPS data not the pressure transducer/encoder data. In cases of encoder failure being detected a flag is broadcast and the pressure aka baro altitude data field is set to all 0. ADS-B cannot give information about the pressure altitude accuracy or reliability like it does for GPS metrics. It relies on the encoders being better than their +/- 125' accuracy requirement and that's tested for periodically. ADS-B can in principle broadcast 100' or 25' resolution encoders, that info is in the messages. The ones here will be 25'. (I've got a long background with ADS-B related technology, currently helping the FAA out on some niche stuff).

edit: trying to improve clarity/correctness but there is too much to cover here.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#458

Post by sneak »

kkyr wrote: post #443
kristopolous wrote: post #231

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?

The wi-fi on planes is not encrypted.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#459

Post by jjwiseman »

dramm wrote: post #457
jjwiseman wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what sensors are feeding the API from the post, but most passenger jets do broadcast information about the accuracy of their sensed position, including vertical position/altitude. If you click on an aircraft on the map at https://globe.adsbexchange.com/ , and scroll the left sidebar all the way to the bottom you'll see a section labeled "Accuracy". ADS-B Exchange doesn't show Rc/v, the vertical position…

Pressure encoders, as I said. That's what feeds all aviation altitude data... i.e. anytime you see the word 'altitude' and its not qualified with 'GPS altitude' which is effectively not normally used. ADS-B Out concurrently transmits GPS height about the ellipsoid data as well as pressure altitude data. No use is normally made of the GPS height data. We are discussing pressure altitude data here, that's what aviation…

Cool, thanks for the info. (BTW I wasn't disagreeing with anything you wrote, I just wanted to mention, since the topic of resolution/accuracy came up, that lots of aircraft broadcast information about the accuracy of some of the sensor data they're reporting, which you can do some pretty cool stuff with. E.g. that's how https://gpsjam.org/ works.)

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#460

Post by dheera »

Gormo wrote: post #437
Martinussen wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that an American thing? Absolutely paying for the water here.

And public restrooms seem to be paywalled everywhere in continental Europe too -- not sure about the airlines, since I usually fly US carriers, but every restaurant or shopping mall I visited in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands required a euro or so to enter the toilet. I've never seen a pay toilet anywhere in the US.

On the other hand, my experience has been that a lot of toilets in US are "customers only" for males but free for females
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