This is just the raw data from the in-flight GUI. Is that it? What am I missing?
Nothing, I believe this gets the upvotes simply because it is fun.
Good point: I upvoted it! :)
WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
461–470 of 675 posts
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
This is probably the least-intelligent comment on this entire page. I would literally buy downvotes to bury this obnoxious stupidity into oblivion. There's a significant contextual, moral and ethical difference between "exploring a lock" and "opening it and stealing whatever it's holding from you". Also, you're another one who apparently needs to read the domain name of this site aloud to yourself again.
> I would literally buy downvotes to bury this obnoxious stupidity into oblivion.
How much will you pay me to delete it? I can send you an Ethereum address.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
20-30 feet change over what timeframe? The resolution of the chart data in the article is about 30 seconds. While I think the fluctuation is due to the accuracy of instrumentation, 20-30 feet change over the course of a minute seems like nothing.
That's significantly slower than a typical elevator, in fact. Slow elevators run at about 200 feet per minute.
My elevator takes almost a minute to go from the first floor to the second floor. I guess I have a slow one.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#464Earlier 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.
Wow I got HN’ed twice in one thread. This is not my day.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The rule is probably something like "if !paid: deny tcp 80, deny tcp 443". (Hopefully they got UDP for HTTP/3.) I suppose this has the desired effect of captive portals (break GMail until you pay), without having to field support requests from geeks ("I paid but SSH doesn't work, refund me"). I think their plan is that whatever obscure app you're using negotiates over HTTPS, but then actually transfers the data over some other port. I bet things like Zoom work that way. By not touching the obscure data paths, you avoid support requests.
Either that, or they just felt like throwing a fellow nerd a bone. If you ask the PM, "should I block SSH" they'll say yes, but if you just put it in there, who knows ;)
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They could, for the sake of a ridiculous but clear example, have a display hooked up to the avionics and a camera hooked up to a separate computer which reads the values.
There are various ways of connecting systems while physically guaranteeing one way data flow—a fiber optic link with the transmitter removed from one end and the receiver removed from the other is basically a less silly “camera pointed at a display” and used in the real world.
You could argue the exact semantics of “air gapped”, but for the discussion here that’s accomplishing the same thing. The fact that the passenger network has some visibility into the avionics network is not, in and of itself, any indication of an issue.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
For this same reason you used to be able to send messages via platforms like whatsapp without internet as well! I don't remember the airline I just remember I hadn't paid for internet but I could message and do a few other things but I couldn't browse the internet.
That was probably deliberate. I flew United recently and they advertised free wifi for certain messaging apps, or you could pay to access more apps or the general internet.
Here's my hack for United's free messaging. Works on iOS, and makes the flight more useful than before, but not as good as paid internet.
Messaging and Notifications basically follow the same protocol. Even though I usually have notifications disabled, I go and activate it for anything I care about - News, Weather, Slack, Whatsapp (yes I have that silenced). Every single message pops up as a notification. Could be bank alert, Ring alert, homekit alert, whatever ... it just shows. So you can keep tab on things you care about, and if you are really needed, well you can pay and get on the full Wifi. And anyways you can iMessage to communicate if needed.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#468When 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…
Love stuff like this, it's how kids get into computers. I used to make minecraft servers for my friends and I to play on when I was 12, which lead to a software engineering career. Sounds like you've got something similar on your hands
Minecraft servers and scanning IP addresses also mix in mischievous ways, especially servers with no whitelist...
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#469I have to wonder if some eager LEO would try to find some illegality in this, especially given all of the federal laws around aircraft. Obviously it's innocuous, but I'd think twice about writing about this kind of tinkering for that reason.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
> WA chat is not HTTPS (or even TLS) If you don’t mind, could you expend on this? Are there specific reasons to not be using TLS?
We didn't use TLS at Netflix either, and instead used our own encryption protocol that ran on top of HTTP. We could do this because we controlled the clients too. The why was because of trust store issues. Every device has its own built in trust store, and especially on devices like TVs and DVD players, they couldn't be updated. After looking at all the devices we supported, there was no common certificate signer amo…
Our solution for the same problem was to just have different subdomains for each cert signer (and make sure we ship the right base URL for each manufacturer's app), so we didn't need to do any clever device-sniffing at the SSL termination point. I think rolling our own encryption sounds much scarier, but equally we weren't running at Netflix scale.