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.
Time to consider instead: walk through the plane, look angrily at the other passengers, one at a time, asking: "Do you use 192.168.x.y?". That can solve the problem
Conference hotels often soak the companies with booths for internet access. One place I did for my company demanded $1500 for 3 days of internet access for up to 5 devices. In-room, you get free internet access, but in the windowless ballroom with spotty cell-service, there's nothing available for free.
I’ve also seen the opposite, where in-room Wi-Fi was charged, but in the hotel’s function spaces, it was free. The economics of this are confusing, at best. I have also had the situation where the in-room wi-fi was so slow that using my phone as a hot spot was faster!
If they give you free internet in your room, you won't pay for their pay-TV.
Especially the kind you won't be watching in public areas.
You could try iodine, which is an IP-over-DNS tunnel. This should work unless the gateway has very restrictive rules on where DNS traffic can go. https://github.com/yarrick/iodine
Most captive portals have gotten wise to this trick and block large DNS requests.
Yeah I recently found this out. It never really did work that well, I did manage to telnet into an SMTP server and manually send an email but for anything else it struggled.
I used to do the same thing at hotels. Still often works. nmap -sn 192.168.0.1-255 To find everyone on the network, then start spoofing each of their MACs until you find one that works
I’ve never been at a hotel that charged for WiFi - is that a US thing?
Thankfully competition from AirBNB made them re-think the idea. That's my theory why it mostly went away anyway.
There's still some stragglers though, offering "basic" access free but charging for higher data limits, faster bandwidth, more devices. You can often get the higher plan just by signing up for the hotel's loyalty program.
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…
"The computer network in the Dreamliner's passenger compartment, designed to give passengers in-flight internet access, is connected to the plane's control, navigation and communication systems, an FAA report reveals." [1] (I guess there's some kind of firewall, but we know that those are not always perfect) [1] https://www.wired.com/2008/01/dreamliner-security/
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…
I used to do this on airplanes and in hotels. I had more success in hotels, because there was less chance the other person was using it at the time and less chance of getting kicked off. There was another little hack that I used as a little kid. Remember when airlines would sell or rent special headphones to watch inflight movies? The port was just two holes beside each other and the plug was two tubes. Before a flig…
How long ago was this?
20 years ago, all I saw were dual mono bayonet jacks you'd need an adapter for to plug in normal headphones, but straws would get you nowhere.
If there's multiple hotspots behind the same controller, you may well get switch port fighting.
If STP[1] is enabled, but that is unlikely since you'd have dropped connections when roaming for the reasons you just gave. Most likely, STP is not enabled on these networks. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanning_Tree_Protocol
STP detects loops between switches, not MAC addresses moving between them (or between APs).
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…
What if the captive portal just had a link (or on an IFE screen, a QR code) that connected your phone to a different, WPA2/WPA3 protected, hidden WiFi SSID that was generated exclusively for you? Phones nowadays support joining a passphrase protected WiFi AP via a QR code, so I'd imagine that's doable. The hard part would be finding routers that support >300 different hidden SSIDs, but honestly I would hope that that…
You can have an AP accepting multiple different WPA2-PSK and/or WPA3-SAE passphrases, and since on WPA2 PMK depends on the password, and on WPA3 PMK is different for each client, you can put them in different VLANs or have per PMK MAC mapping if they share the same VLAN.
Yes. You often also have to pay for parking in many places. The price you see online is rarely what you pay for. But that's part of the culture, it's the same for restaurants, online purchases etc.
The sticker price is almost never what you pay, since tax is almost never included. Not sure how or when that norm diverged from the Euro one.
I’m imaging it’s because states and even cities can have differing sales tax rates.
Hard to advertise to a wide audience when the final price after tax is one of 12 different prices depending on where they live.