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Airpass – Easily overcome WiFi time limits

airpass.tiagoalves.me

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Re: Airpass – Easily overcome WiFi time limits

#141

Post by BobbyTables2 »

anon7000 wrote: post #75
aeonik wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern app bloat in one analogy: Business logic size: ~20 bytes Total app size: ~47 MB = 47,000,000 bytes Bloat factor: 47,000,000 / 20 = 2,350,000 Let’s scale this up and say the business logic is 1 pound. Then the whole app would weigh: 1 lb × 2,350,000 = 2,350,000 pounds What weighs ~2.35 million pounds? - A fully loaded Boeing 747-8: ~987,000 lbs - Another fully loaded 747-8: ~987,000 lbs - A blue whale: ~330,000…

Well, if you COULD ship something across the world on a private 747 with extra features to protect your cargo, and it has nearly no environmental downside and has no meaningful downside vs a smaller airplane… you’d probably do it! There’s no incentive in software to get a smaller, more efficient plane, and plenty of incentive to use the big thing for free that has all the extra features

People usually think that but when it comes to attack surface, change management, upgrade issues, etc —- the extra stuff isn’t entirely free…

Upgrades shouldn’t ever break things, bugs and vulnerabilities never exist, and Rube-Goldberg machines should work 100% reliably day in and day out.

Unfortunately reality doesn’t work that way…

Re: Airpass – Easily overcome WiFi time limits

#142

Post by BobbyTables2 »

leptons wrote: post #95
dented42 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That analogy doesn’t really work here. Because there is a downside. It’s slow, takes up a ton of memory, lots of disk space… When you have so many processes on a modern machine competing for resources, when every app chooses to be bloated and slow it really adds up.

It doesn't "take up a ton of memory" and if you think 47MB is "a lot of disk space" then maybe you need a bigger disk. Most laptops have at least 250GB, so this program would take up about 0.0188% of disk space, which is frankly not a lot. I had PDF files way larger than that. And you only need to run it once, you do not need to keep it loaded and running all the time, so it doesn't "take up a ton of memory".

47MB is about 3x the space once required by a widely used commercial graphical operating system. It was even enough to also include Microsoft Word with plenty of space left.

How far we’ve fallen.

Re: Airpass – Easily overcome WiFi time limits

#143

Post by righthand »

anthk wrote: post #130
righthand wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the easiest way just the most evangelized. A Qt app even would be a few lines of code, but we’ve done a good job scaring people that learning other languages is bad because we can’t ship features fast enough with non-evangelized frameworks.

Even TCL/TK would be smaller.

Every framework under the sun gives you a `main()` func to call your program code. But if all you’ve ever used is blogs telling you how to hack together an electron app, you’d probably assume electron was the gold standard for simplicity sake but in reality is the gold standard for Google’s sake (and whatever marketing company’s).

Re: Airpass – Easily overcome WiFi time limits

#144

Post by mcshicks »

andy99 wrote: post #134
mcshicks wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the name refers to the limits some airlines have. JAL for instance offers one hour free on some flights.

I was trying to understand how this could be used for flights. I've seen either having to enter your last name and seat, or loyalty plan number to get in-flight wifi. Are there really airline wifis that give every mac address a free amount of time? A lot of airlines now offer free "messaging" - usually just text on common messaging apps like WhatsApp. I've been meaning for years to write some kind of server that coul…

Pretty sure it will work on JAL at least right now. They just asked for an email. But it was also a new service so maybe to wanted people to try it. It occurred to me at the time that two devices with two emails should work for twice as long. For what I wanted to do on that flight, i.e. check and send a few messages the one free hour was fine. But yeah of course they could change it so that would not work.

Re: Airpass – Easily overcome WiFi time limits

#145

Post by BobbyTables2 »

alt227 wrote: post #103
kazinator wrote: post #6

This has been an option in Android network settings forever: randomize your MAC. I think it's enabled by default now? It's a basic privacy feature; you can be fingerprinted by your device's MAC.

How does that work with MAC address conflicts and clashes? I naively thought every MAC address had to be unique.

They must be unique in a LAN segment. And only the lower 3 bytes in a MAC are “unique” as the upper 3 are the vendor ID and relatively fixed.

In practice people put fewer than 256 devices on networks (class C), so they have less than 1/65536 possibility of complete failure. And far less because they have a mix of OUIs.

But yeah, if you put a few hundred or thousand security cameras or other device from a single vendor, all on the same network, conflicts are certainly possible.

MAC conflicts are also a bit nasty to troubleshoot, and less obvious than IP conflicts.

Re: Airpass – Easily overcome WiFi time limits

#146

Post by CamperBob2 »

WJW wrote: post #135
CamperBob2 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, these days, you ask an LLM and it spits out code that will, for something this simple, probably work the first time.

Should take you no more than 5 minutes then.

Whatever. I'm not the one who used 47 MB to distribute a single line of code.

Re: Airpass – Easily overcome WiFi time limits

#148

Post by rafram »

gopher_space wrote: post #114
rafram wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does a Mac-only app that shows a menu bar icon and a notification popup need to be Electron…? That’s 30 lines of Swift, max.

Is ActionScript still a thing on Macs? I feel like that tech was almost criminally overlooked while being the backbone for a lot of processing pipelines back in the day.

It (AppleScript) is, and you can actually write JS instead these days, with a criminally underdocumented Objective-C bridge (JXA).
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