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WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
491–500 of 675 posts
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt Delta made this. It’s an official the shelf product that can do ships, trains, planes, etc.
But they also have airplane/flight specific identifiers like “flightNumber”, “flightId”, “noseId(?)” and “airSpeed”. Maybe vehicleId is part of a base class or primary key somewhere and that abstraction is leaking.
Those could apply to an air taxi service or something using helicopters as well.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#493Earlier 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.
The plane has a transponder that reports this information to the ground, ATC, other aircraft etc. The infotainment server has a receiver that gets this data. Or in some cases they instead pull it from a ground based service via the internet. The transponder is not able to receive signals, so it is air gapped.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#494I remember the days when I poked around like that too, and go to 128.65.70.1 and find the Hughes admin interface for the satellite link itself.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#495Earlier 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.
It would theoretically be possible to bounce clients which you know are already authorised on the paid network.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#496Earlier 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.
Use Bluetooth instead of WiFi for the password generation channel
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#497“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…
For small planes a 20-30 foot range isn’t abnormal for hand flying if you’re paying attention. I’m sure in cruise an airliner is using an autopilot though.
I once had ATC ask if everything was cool on flight following after a hundred foot drop and I was surprised they were paying that much attention. I had forgotten to put my life jacket on before a water transit and while I was putting it on handed it off to my wife who hadn’t taken lessons yet (she later got her license!). It was interesting to see that their tracking was precise enough for them to chime in.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not understanding the point of the comment. The Flighty team did some amazing engineering work for anyone who doesn't pay.
> amazing engineering Background updates are a built-in, supported, documented feature, widely employed by applications on the platform, and accessible to anyone that reads the two pages of documentation required to use them: “Pushing background updates to your App — Deliver notifications that wake your app and update it in the background.” https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/... edited for po…
I don’t know what you have against Flighty but you through considerable lengths in the thread below to spend time on letting everyone know how unimpressed you are about their efforts.
Your lack of amazement is duly noted, I suggest you don’t waste any more time on it.
That said, I, like others, are indeed impressed for a couple of reasons.
For starters because of the simple fact that they’ve found a novel way to use background notifications to provide users without unrestricted internet access with flight updates.
Contrary to what you imply, and subsequently fail to substantiate, there aren’t many, if any, other apps that use background notifications in such a novel way, certainly not in a way to circumvent restrictions and limitations on data connections.
Moreover, I have never seen background notifications being used to push concrete data to apps. This is because there are severe payload size constraints on notifications, including background notifications.
Typically when background notifications have been used, it simply contains an instruction to download data from a remote server, something that wouldn’t work on a limited connection.
Instead, Flighty uses the minimal payload size to push the actual concrete data used by the app.
Additionally there are some limitations in how often a background notification gets delivered to the tune of a few times per hour, worse yet, delivery of these notification is inconsistent because it’s beyond the app’s control of they get delivered at all.
To account for this, Flighty will use the background notifications to update the data where it can and make estimations in times it cannot not until the next time it can receive an update.
I’d go as far as call that amazing engineering.
You might not and I don’t know your qualms with Flighty, but you’re doing a poor job of convincing people to see it your way.
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For Panasonic's in-flight wifi specifically, a login would only work for one device at a time.
Great time to have an Android device with hotspot handy. :)
Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
#500WiFi with internet if you use a DNS VPN, they are handy and cost you nothing to use