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How to get Gogo in-flight wireless internet for free

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Re: How to get Gogo in-flight wireless internet for free

#21
post #15
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, you're basically someone else's session who did the right thing and paid up. I fail to understand why anyone with a decent moral compass would want to do this.

This will be exploited by people without a moral compass. What are you trying to get at? The author isn't suggesting this as a life hack for free internet, he's just showing that it can be done.

"The author isn't suggesting this as a life hack for free internet"

The HN Title is (I can't see the actual article as the machine is hosed):

  "How to get Gogo in-flight wireless internet for free"
and the URL is

  gogo-in-flight-wireless-internet-free
Both of which, I would suggest, propose an article about "How to get internet for free", specifically "How to get Gogo in-flight wireless internet for free".

Or am I missing something?

Re: How to get Gogo in-flight wireless internet for free

#22
post #12

I was recently disappointed by the huge price hike of gogo in flight. It's been $10 for a flight for quite some time now which I'd felt was perfectly fair considering the quality. On my recent flight to NYC for work and play it was $10 per hour which essentially amounts to a 5x increase. I grabbed it for 2 hours and it was just as bad as always. Fine for email and Facebook but unideal for pushing a significant commit…

On a recent flight, I noticed they were asking $10/hr on my laptop but $6/hr on my phone, but they allow you to switch devices (as long as you only use one at a time) so I just bought it on the phone and used it on the laptop (you could also change your headers instead but I think that's technically "hacking"). It was also 3 hours for the price of 2, so it worked out as $12 for 3 hours which seemed almost reasonable.

Re: How to get Gogo in-flight wireless internet for free

#24
post #13

No tools needed: `arp -a` followed by `sudo ifconfig en0 ether $macaddress` should be enough. You'd be surprised on how many paid-for hotspots this actually works (ethical issues aside).

I haven't gotten TFA to load yet. Is this the same thing? What exactly does this do?

arp: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=arp&sektion=8

arp -a gives you a list of other connected devices on the network with their IP and mac address. For a paid-for hotspot this usually means devices that have paid for access and are active.

the ifconfig command changes your mac address into one of the chosen above; the AP thinks you're one of the earlier connected devices and gives you access to the internet.

Re: How to get Gogo in-flight wireless internet for free

#25
The researcher rubs me the wrong way for a few reasons:

1. 15 days for a major company not nearly enough to remedy this issue.

2. The activity log reads like a ransom timeline. This isn't some l33t hacker exploit it's simple session hijack and mac spoof. You're not owed anything for finding this.

Anyone that tries this could tread carefully. If you get caught (chances are slim), it wouldn't be hard to convince a jury that you're hacking an airborne plane's network.

Did you know a bathroom lock is woefully insecure!?! Time to hold the government ransom about this exploit and collect my millions. If they don't pay, I'll post it on the internet.

Re: How to get Gogo in-flight wireless internet for free

#27
post #5

This looks like it dups a paying customer's IP and MAC addresses. Does that work if both devices are running at the same time? I was under the impression TCP didn't like that.

TCP doesn't care. IP and Ethernet care a lot.

Layer2 attacks like this aren't clever, and can be very difficult to prevent because of the nature of communication at that layer.

In a corporate/campus/hardline environment, there are plenty of reasonable mitigation strategies. (802.1x &c).

For a shared hotspot, this type of behavior is just anti-social.

Re: How to get Gogo in-flight wireless internet for free

#29
post #20

Has anyone else noticed that Gogo shows higher prices to mobile phones? That seriously pisses me off. The fact that none of my mobile browsers can change the user agent string pisses me off even more.

In fact I've always had the opposite experience — that the smartphone-only plan costs less.
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