Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

jamesbvaughan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 675 posts

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#481

Post by Dylan16807 »

spixy wrote: post #473
GuB-42 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have read somewhere that so much precision could actually be dangerous in some circumstances. This is because this way, if a pilot goes 3000 ft for instance, it will be exactly 3000 ft, if another pilot also wants to go 3000 ft on a collision trajectory, it will be a guaranteed collision. When altitudes are not that accurate, there is a higher chance it being just a near miss. The solution, I think, was to simply a…

how is it any better when 2 opposite planes choose same 2950ft?

It's not. But now that's half as likely. Several choices are even better.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#482

Post by dangus »

lxgr wrote: post #453
dangus wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I’m confused, none of what you’re describing is part of the article.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#483

Post by nenaoki »

dangus wrote: post #482
lxgr wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I’m confused, none of what you’re describing is part of the article.

It's responding to the scenario described in GGP.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#484

Post by bpye »

owl57 wrote: post #420
lazycouchpotato wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years ago, I noticed I could browse the Google Play Store on a flight WiFi without paying for it. No images would load and no apps would download, but I could browse through app listings and read reviews. Would this be related to DNS?

Probably not. I bet something in Android didn't work properly until they whitelisted some Google domains — for example, maybe it didn't detect the Internet connection when the user paid for it, or maybe something on the entertainment tablets broke (I don't know if they usually run Android or something else).

This seems likely. ~6 years ago on a Delta flight I noticed that I could use Google and view cached pages without paying for WiFi. I managed to catch up on the news on my flight…

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#485

Post by justinclift »

In this fragment here:

      // This looks like info about the system's satellite internet connection.
      "sat_commlink_portal": {
        // The connection is okay!
        "status": "conn_ok",
        // I'm not sure what this time is.
        // It hasn't changed at all.
        "time": "Sun Sep 24 22:02:19 2023"
The "time" field could be the timestamp of when the status field last changed. That's the most obvious thought anyway. :)

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#486

Post by [deleted] »

nucleardog wrote: post #466
inopinatus wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”…

[deleted]

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#487

Post by MBCook »

lxgr wrote: post #456
labcomputer wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

You might be able to just do the sign up on the in-flight entertainment system and have the user scan the resulting WR code.

Only works with IFE equipped planes, of course.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#488

Post by shortrounddev2 »

remram wrote: post #159
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…

You can use jq's string interpolation feature to simplify this: $ curl -s https://wifi.delta.com/api/flight-data | jq -r '"https://maps.google.com/?q=\(.latitude),\(.longitude)"'

In powershell

    Invoke-WebRequest https://wifi.delta.com/api/flight-data | ConvertFrom-Json | %{ "https://maps.google.com/?q=$($_.latitude),$($_.longitude)"

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#489

Post by MBCook »

hackmiester wrote: post #281
naikrovek wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the airline industry is nowhere nearly as stupid as the software industry with things like this. the communication between plane and wifi/entertainment system, if there is any, is almost certainly one-way. likely, the wifi system providing this info is receiving data from the flight systems and repeating it or transforming it a bit and providing that. it would not surprise me at all if the flight attendants have to p…

If the latter was true, then "wheelWeightState" (and others) would not work. But, they do work.

Not necessarily. All this could be reported up to airline HQ through the satellite link and then the IFE/customer WiFi could be downloading it again to serve locally.

That would prevent any need for direct connection between the systems.

Is that how it works? I doubt it. But it could be done.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#490

Post by MBCook »

bunabhucan wrote: post #290
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…

> "airspeed": null [nervously looks out window]

That’s just a sampling error. -NaN is when you get scared.
Post reply on HN