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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

#151

Post by EvanAnderson »

kulahan wrote: post #132
EvanAnderson wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it's important to remember, too, that a failed PING tells you nothing other than your echo request did not receive a response. If the remote host received your request, and if it responded, are both things a failed PING can't tell you, because both of those things could be true but you still end up with a failed PING. I've seen technicians get tripped up in troubleshooting thinking that a failed PING tells the…

I've always assumed that in situations like this, a traceroute is better. You can get more information simply by reaching the next stage in the trace, even if you're given zero information beyond "I'm now at the next server".

Nothing says the Time Exceeded packets elicited by your traceroute have to follow the same path back to you that you initiating packets followed out. It's a convenient fiction to think about IP networks acting like circuit-switched networks and in most LAN and small WAN applications they do. Mostly you can get away with thinking that way in more complex networks, too. When you end up in a situation where path asymmetry is causing you grief, thought, it's nice to have the understanding that each datagram can have a unique routing destiny.

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

#152

Post by resonious »

ceejayoz wrote: post #63
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…

> 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 work on regular web stuff and people already call themselves archeologists when doing routine tasks on our 15 year old codebase.

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

#154

Post by bigbinary »

jxf wrote: post #25
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…

IMO a certain amount of youthful indiscretion that takes the form of challenging systems and structures feels like it's both tolerable and important. Agitation prevents calcification.

Wait till that guy figures out what the hacker in hacker news means

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

#155

Post by stackedinserter »

nickthegreek wrote: post #149
stackedinserter wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

You feel a loss of dignity if you can’t connect to the internet for a few hours for free? But are too cheap to negate that loss for $31?

Following your logic, it will be ok for you if airlines start charging for washrooms, reclining seats, windows or anything on board except just being alive. Why wouldn't you pay for washroom $15/minute + water and toilet paper?

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

#156

Post by somehnguy »

traceroute66 wrote: post #6

> We affirm our strict adherence to all relevant regulations and service terms throughout this project. Except if you bypassed payment and used the service in a manner that was not intended, most likely you were by definition not undertaking "strict adherance" to service terms ?

Counterpoint: who cares?

Wake me up the first time someone gets into legitimate trouble over a little harmless computer fun like this. Until then..who cares?

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

#157

Post by forgotoldacc »

hluska wrote: post #107
eps wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Theft comes with the connotation of taking someone away from someone and depriving them of their possession.

Using their internet connection without paying is unlicensed usage/illicit access, but nobody is being deprived of it. Mega corps tried, and failed, to get people to think watching a free movie on YouTube was theft. Same logic, very few people agree with the claim.

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

#158

Post by brailsafe »

tempestn wrote: post #143
brailsafe wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nature of the non-transaction was such that they were given access to a service that was constrained in certain ways. They used the service, and the constraints that AC technically applied still applied. They used what was available to them under the constraints and weren't required to pay for any other service but the removal of the constraints. I don't see how any theft occurred. Likewise illegality is just a b…

Courts don't tend to be impressed by arguments like this. It was made very clear what was being offered and what wasn't, and technical barriers were even put in place. The fact that the barriers weren't foolproof doesn't give carte blanche to bypass them. I agree more with your second argument, though that tends to be strained when the exploit is published.

> Courts don't tend to be impressed by arguments like this.

This is a court of casual opinions, but incidentally when all Air Canada employees recently went on strike—grounding and/or rescheduling all flights, including my own, and causing plenty of inconvenience—and were quickly ordered back to work by the federal government, basically everyone supported them continuing to refuse to work even though technically it was illegal because the government just decided it was. The government's move ended up backfiring and turned into a negative mark on their record after the employees basically won and everything went back to normal with more equitable pay. The CEO outright said they hadn't planned for the situation in which the employees just said no to the order.

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

#159

Post by ogurechny »

barbs wrote: post #138

Can someone please explain what project X/Xray is? Judging from the context I imagine it's some sort of proxying software but I can't seem to find out more. The website and github seem to be littered with vague jargon or is in Chinese and Googling brings up something called XTLS?

It's a system for steganographic traffic proxying plugins that evade advanced detection systems. https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-examples

Chinese, Russian and Persian links could've given you a hint. Though after recent developments in Britain, I'm sure English docs will also appear.

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

#160

Post by roygbiv2 »

DaSHacka wrote: post #129
roygbiv2 wrote: post #3

Iodine has done this for many years. https://github.com/yarrick/iodine

Yeah, I was gonna say I've used Iodine to get free Wi-Fi on Delta flights for years at this point.

Does it work well? I've never actually got it to work consistently. Either it works for a very brief period or just not at all.
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