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A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

ramsayleung.github.io

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Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

#101

Post by Dylan16807 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #87
CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah "network neutrality", how you won initially yet lost over time...

I don't think there are any net neutrality laws that don't exempt things like in-flight Wi-Fi, where the upstream is so heavily restricted that providing balanced services to everyone is basically impossible or leaves the entire connection useless. With Starlink things may be looking a bit better, but I think demanding net neutrality on in-flight satellite internet and plane-to-cell-tower internet is excessive.

You can still have a very slow free tier, a normal tier, and a quality video tier. Limited bandwidth is not a good reason to abandon net neutrality.

Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

#102

Post by pixl97 »

gosub100 wrote: post #74
jacquesm wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that can be a lot more subtle than you might think. I've had a persistent very hard to debug false alarm triggered on pings sometimes not making it and most of the time they did. But very rarely that would happen three times in a row and that was the threshold for raising an alarm. We spent days on this. Finally, the root cause was tracked down to a BNC 'T' connector at the back of a media adapter that filtered o…

I'm a SRE and encountered this recently. To prevent DDoS, there is a buffer setting on the kernel that will limit the number of pings (a few settings actually). So if you have a group of machines that all ping a single destination at once, it's very possible to have some that fail to get a reply.

It's for reasons like this that ping is one of the worst protocols to use for aliveness.

Even worse is I've had completely dead Linux boxes that will gladly respond to ping and nothing else.

Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

#103

Post by pixl97 »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #92
VladVladikoff wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, ICMP tunnelling is also a common bypass method for captive networks, so simply blocking all ICMP seems logical.

Every time I've had to fight with path MTU discovery not working I've cursed the people who block all ICMP, though. If ICMP echo / echo-reply is the problem just block that. At the very least, allow destination unreachable / fragmentation needed thru (type 3, code 4).

Most of the people blocking ICMP have no clue that ICMP codes/types even exist.

Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

#104

Post by stackedinserter »

gruez wrote: post #60
stackedinserter wrote: post #37

Why does Air Canada charges $30 for internet, that's brutal. Especially on 12hr flight where it should be provided for free imo.

>Especially on 12hr flight where it should be provided for free imo. "Should" in the sense that "everyone should get free food, housing, and healthcare" or that other airlines actually provide it for free? I don't know of any airline that provides it for free, the most is some Asian/Gulf airlines providing "free for 1 hour" or similar. Compared to that, "free texting, unlimited" doesn't seem too bad, considering ther…

"Should" in the sense that they need to provide basic dignity to people on board. Same as toilet and basic necessities like glass of water or very basic meal.

Although "dignity" and modern planes can't be used in the same sentence, unless you pay 5x for business class, passengers are humiliated less there at least.

Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

#106

Post by stackedinserter »

triceratops wrote: post #61
stackedinserter wrote: post #37

Why does Air Canada charges $30 for internet, that's brutal. Especially on 12hr flight where it should be provided for free imo.

> Especially on 12hr flight where it should be provided for free imo That's junkie talk /s No but seriously if you think Internet access is so vital that it has to be provided for free on a long-ish flight, you may have a problem. Watch an in-flight movie, read a book, take a nap, look out the window. There are many ways to pass 12 hours.

> look out the window

They took even this basic pleasure. On B787 flights crew forcibly dim windows for the whole flight. I guess it will be paid feature soon.

Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

#107

Post by hluska »

eps wrote: post #22
VladVladikoff wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I am a bit confused about posts like this. It’s bragging about breaking the law. There was a particularly bad one a few months ago where a kid had hacked Monster’s employee training site, and was sharing all this internal media in the post. I don’t understand how they don’t end up getting in some seriously annoying trouble with law enforcement. Well I looked it up just now and the post was deleted, I guess maybe…

> breaking the law Not law per se. More like contractual obligations taken upon by connecting to the flight's WiFi.

This is theft. Stealing is illegal. Giving a blueprint for how you stole is the icing on the prosecutorial cake because you can’t claim lack of knowledge if you create a conspiracy to enable the theft.

This may be the dumbest write up I have ever read.

Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

#108

Post by palmotea »

pbh101 wrote: post #67
ceejayoz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is one of the weirdest IT problems I've ever encountered and it makes me wonder how much of what we rely on is actually marginal. Vernor Vinge had a character who was a "Programmer-Archeologist" on a relativistic starship. Feels more and more prescient as time goes on.

I thought that too up until this GenAI moment, and now I wonder if needing to be an archaeologist will be so valuable if one can get your needs met by a quickly GenAI-written script/program.

> I thought that too up until this GenAI moment, and now I wonder if needing to be an archaeologist will be so valuable if one can get your needs met by a quickly GenAI-written script/program.

I never have actually read those books (though I read some summaries about them, interesting concepts). My understanding is the "programmer-archeologists" basically had an archive of massive quantities of very high-quality software that did pretty much anything you'd want software to do. So it made more sense to find the software you need and glue it together than write from scratch.

And given GenAI doesn't write high quality software (at least not yet, and hopefully never), I don't think that "GenAI-written script/program" would be a good replacement (though an AI archeologist might make more sense, with such an archive).

Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

#109

Post by NoahZuniga »

I'm not following the reasoning here:

> Since acwifi.com is accessible but github.com is not, is it possible that the network has imposed restrictions on the DNS server, only resolving domain names within a whitelist (such as instant messaging domains)?

> If this is the case, can I modify /etc/hosts to disguise my server as acwifi.com, so that all request traffic passes through my server before reaching the target website (github.com)?

But by putting the host in /etc/hosts, you're skipping asking the planes DNS server, so how are you "disguising" an external server? And why go through the effort of proxying through acwifi.com instead of going straight to the example of github.com

Re: A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

#110

Post by adolph »

stackedinserter wrote: post #37

Why does Air Canada charges $30 for internet, that's brutal. Especially on 12hr flight where it should be provided for free imo.

If you had a window seat you could make bank with a starlink mini and undercut the Air Canada by a small amount, like $40 Canadian. Just use pfSense Captive Portal and make sure you forward any port 53 or 853 to the external interface to the local DNS.
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