I used to work at one of the larger IFE providers and we always being asked to make the system as dumb as possible because flight crews hating supporting them. Not surprising to see this exists.
I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"
151–160 of 171 posts
Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"
#152The author has more courage than me, opening “hacking tools” (Wireguard and Terminal) on an airplane. (Yes, I know they’re not actually hacking tools, but try explaining that to a random flight attendant.)
"These are not hacking tools, I work in IT and these are harmless diagnostics for my laptop" seems pretty simple
Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tell that to the judge then.
The ignorant masses demonize what they don't understand. If you don't appreciate the subtleties of passive investigation vs. offensive intrusion, then why are you even here?
A layman only sees a terrorist hacker interfering with the operation of an airplane. The no-fly list at best or Gitmo at worst.
Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"
#154Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"
#155Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
We laugh as IT experts. But think about it from the end user perspective. Literally the most simple instruction; near fault proof. On an airplane that is thousands of feet from remote IT support (plus "costs"). The instruction to staff; problem with "the Internet"? - press the "Interest Reset" button. Far better than "router restart", "renew DHCP leases" or "reboot IT" Explicit, non ambiguous and without technobabble…
What's interesting is that the button need not actually reset the Internet right away. It's actually a user signal that "customers are complaining the Internet does not work". The button could initiate a whole series of diagnostics and target a fix.
That sounds mainly like yet another thing that could malfunction.
Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
What was hacked?
Running hacker tools against aircraft operations will get you easily indicted. This can be seen as probing an aircraft defenses for weaknesses.
Define a hacker tool - is the whole computer a hacker tool because it could be used by a hacker? How do we define tools that can be used both legitimately and illegitimately. The tools used were common network diagnostics tools.
Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Running hacker tools against aircraft operations will get you easily indicted. This can be seen as probing an aircraft defenses for weaknesses.
Define a hacker tool - is the whole computer a hacker tool because it could be used by a hacker? How do we define tools that can be used both legitimately and illegitimately. The tools used were common network diagnostics tools.
It's what the Feds decide to indict you with when you get caught, or are daft enough to put up a blog saying you did on an airplane.
Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every time I have to interact with a "captive portal", I'm annoyed at the hack implemented through DNS hijacking, rather than implementing and extending 802.1X and/or another layer-2 authentication scheme. The idea seems to have been tossed aside entirely. Instead, every device has to have a web browser. There's not even a way to do surrogate registration for devices that don't have browsers, with Apple TV and Ninten…
I have a work laptop (government) that hates captive portals. It has a security system that won't let it connect using the local DNS. So it doesn't get captured. Those of us with such laptops all have tricks for getting to a hotel's wifi login page using IP addresses. But we have to do it fast, before the security software fully wakes up and blocks the hack. We used to just login on our phones, then tether the work l…
> I sometimes login to the hotel wifi on my personal phone, tether that phone to my personal laptop, then setup that laptop as a router. The work computer can then connect to the wifi from the personal laptop
Why go through a laptop? Isn't this exactly what generating a hotspot from the phone does?
Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"
#160This reminds me of a conference, attendees were having sporadic problems with accessing the Internet and eventually I was able to capture a trace of the problem: when the main lease network filled up, it started allocating IPs from another block, but with the same gateway. I got a lease for something like 10.1.1.69/24 with a gateway address of 192.168.1.1. I went to the support person and she offered to reset the WiF…
And? Did she escalate it and was it solved? Don't keep us hanging!
She did, it got solved in a couple hours, once I was able to nail down the exact problem. It's hard when random attendees are only able to give reports of "it's not working", when it's something tricky like this. I think it took the better part of a day to nail the problem down, maybe longer (my memory is spotty on it).