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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

#571

Post by extraduder_ire »

lom wrote: post #515
pklausler wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stupid question: how do civilian GPS units know that they're above 60,000' or faster than 1000 knots without, um, working?

I’ve managed to get a GPS lock while flying, it just takes a few minutes to find one. Was it misreporting my position? because it usually matched up with what I saw outside of the window

Probably because you were in a large aluminium tube at the time, and had no internet to get the AGPS data, so it had to receive the orbital elements from the satellites. (IIRC, this can take as many as 24 minutes worst case)

If you're using GNSS tracking on a flight, consider checking out the OSMand~ app for android. There's a map layout for flying, though I don't know if the navigation features work.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#572

Post by vertnerd »

barrkel wrote: post #557
sprokolopolis wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I was curious so I searched: https://simpleflying.com/inflight-entertainment-headphones-e... - pneumatic headphones from the 1960s were used on Delta as late as 2003, but electronic headsets debuted on 767 in 1982. Apparently the dual mono jacks are to d…

Interesting that I have only flown once since 9/11. Almost all of my flying took place in the three decades prior, so the pneumatic headsets are the only ones I remember.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#573

Post by extraduder_ire »

mulmen wrote: post #310
jandrese wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure. The same data packet claims that the flight has 2h 25m of flight time left to cover 1167 miles. That works out to 483 mph, which is pretty close to the stated 487 and might be explained by some padding added to the time to account for taxiing. Unless that 1167 figure is in a different unit it doesn't even come close to working out at 487 knots ground speed.

Coming at this another way: The blog says the destination was Oakland. The Oakland International Airport is at 37°43′17″N 122°13′15″W. The data packet also contains the current lat and long of the flight as 40.201 and -100.755 respectively. Plugging that in to a distance calculator [2] gives 1163 miles, 1010.6 nautical miles, or 1871.6km. So the distance value of 1167 appears to be miles. At 487mph covering 1163 mile…

You have to descend and wait for landing clearance when you approach the airport, adding track miles.

The two units are confusingly close to each other though.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#574

Post by extraduder_ire »

mcast wrote: post #152
fouc wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no "probing the network" involved here. The in-flight webpage was continuously fetching a specific end-point from the in-flight web server. This end-point is basically public data. All he did was duplicate what the webpage was already doing, and then do some basic analysis on the data the end-point was returning.

Cybersecurity and internet crime laws are notoriously outdated (created in the 80s). I could see a bad lawyer arguing that cURLing an API repeatedly is “hacking”.

Or getting tackled by an air marshal when someone sees white text on a black background and yells "hacking!".

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#575

Post by mavhc »

lxgr wrote: post #295
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…

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…

Turns out OWE doesn't work on non ARM Mac computers

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#576

Post by _moof »

darkerside wrote: post #567
_moof wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's called the navigation paradox, and it mostly came about with the advent of GPS. It's the reason we now have what's called "strategic lateral offset procedure," or SLOP, whereby aircraft on heavily trafficked oceanic routes fly zero, one, or two miles off the centerline, randomly chosen.

This is really interesting. But it seems like it could make collisions more likely, and the better solution would be separate corridors for east vs west traffic. Are there really 5 bidirectional lanes?

It's a bit more complicated than that. The routes I'm talking about are the North Atlantic Tracks, which are used for most traffic between North America and Europe. There are multiple tracks and SLOP is used within each track. All of the tracks run in the same direction at the same time, switching directions twice a day. They go eastbound at night, westbound during the day. SLOP is a mitigation to prevent aircraft in sequence on the same track from colliding. There are, of course, many other systems and procedures in place to prevent such collisions, but it's belt-and-suspenders up there.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#578

Post by nunez »

ilyt wrote: post #351
nunez wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how we get aircraft wifi with Meraki Air Marshall-like DDoS [0] for hotspots. Don't ruin it for us! [0] https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Monitoring_and_Reporting... . This basically detects any access points in a wireless network repeating a signal and automatically boots them. only works on 2.4GHz networks if I understand correctly.

... wouldn't that be a type of jamming and therefore illegal ?

Doesn't stop hotel chains from doing it

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#579

Post by duckqlz »

pak9rabid wrote: post #285
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…

lol, I used to do this all the time at non-free wifi hotspot locations, only I'd start off with a ping sweep of the entire subnet (nmap -sP) in order to get my ARP cache filled with a bunch of potential usable IP/mac addresses on the network. From there, I'd iterate through each one and set the IP & mac address until I found one that would let me through the firewall. Granted, being a NOC engineer at Wayport (now AT&…

If any lawyers or FAA employees are reading this I’m genuinely interested in what, if any, legal implications there would be for running nmap mid flight on an airline. Surely once you have spoofed the MAC address and IP of another passenger to gain unauthorized access to the planes LAN you have committed a crime but what about passively scanning?

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#580

Post by allarm »

Read this post while traveling on an ICE train. I decided to see if there was something similar in DB WiFi - and it turns out you can get two json files with current trip data. Here's a graph of the train speed for the last hour of my trip:

    km/h                                ice train speed
     160 +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
         |          +          +          +          +          +      **  +          |
         |*                                                            **             |
     140 |*+                                                           **           +-|
         |*                                                            **             |
         |*                                                            **             |
     120 |*+                                                           **           +-|
         | *                                                          * *             |
         | *                                                          * *             |
     100 |-*                                                          * *           +-|
         | *                                                          * *  *          |
      80 |-*                                                     **  ** * **        +-|
         | *                                                     ** *** * *           |
         | *                                                     ** *    **           |
      60 |-+*      *                                             ** *    **         +-|
         |  *     ****     *                                     ** *    **           |
         |   *    *  *     *                                    * * *                 |
      40 |-+ ******   *   ****                                 ** * *               +-|
         |   *****    *   ****                                 *   **                 |
         |            *   *  *                                 *   **                 |
      20 |-+          *   *  *                                 *   **               +-|
         |            *   *  *                                 *   **                 |
         |          + *   *  * +          +          +         *+   *      +          |
       0 +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
         0          50        100        150        200        250        300        350
                                             count
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