Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 210 posts

Re: Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

#161

Post by shrubble »

jasonjayr wrote: post #9

I imagine one of the ships officers will be tipped off by the IT team about the unusual number of free-internet activation attached to your booking id, and either give your room a visit to knock it off, or just bill some multiple of the $170 anyway. It sounds like it should only be used only a few times per booking, and this is going to hit at least 4/hour for multiple hours a day, so it will stick out like a sore th…

They likely have a canned solution like the Cisco Meraki or similar setup and are not looking for extra work; whatever they have is seen as in the category of set-and-forget.

Re: Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

#162

Post by dreamcompiler »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #27
jotux wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Went on a cruise last summer, the internet on board was starlink. It was advertised at $30/day.

It's interesting to contrast Starlink on airlines vs Starlink on cruises. AFAICT, all the airlines rolling out Starlink have made it free on their flights. Which implies cooperation from Starlink -- either Starlink has made "free" a condition of their service, or they've just priced it cheap enough to make free a reasonable option for airlines. There's no good reason why Starlink for cruise ships should be priced sig…

> There's no good reason why Starlink for cruise ships should be priced significantly higher than on airlines.

There's a technical reason for the case of airlines flying over land. Over land, the connection is just up to satellite and down to a ground station.

Over open ocean (whether airborne or on a ship), Starlink has to use their inter-satellite laser hops to eventually get to a ground station. I don't know for sure that Starlink charges more for this mode but if I ran the company I certainly would because those lasers are a limited resource.

Re: Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

#163

Post by saalweachter »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #27
jotux wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Went on a cruise last summer, the internet on board was starlink. It was advertised at $30/day.

It's interesting to contrast Starlink on airlines vs Starlink on cruises. AFAICT, all the airlines rolling out Starlink have made it free on their flights. Which implies cooperation from Starlink -- either Starlink has made "free" a condition of their service, or they've just priced it cheap enough to make free a reasonable option for airlines. There's no good reason why Starlink for cruise ships should be priced sig…

Were these airplanes over land or see, OOC?

IIRC Starlink gets more expensive when you need to route satellite-to-satellite rather than straight back to a ground station.

Re: Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

#164

Post by MBCook »

fn-mote wrote: post #76
jasonjayr wrote: post #9

I imagine one of the ships officers will be tipped off by the IT team about the unusual number of free-internet activation attached to your booking id, and either give your room a visit to knock it off, or just bill some multiple of the $170 anyway. It sounds like it should only be used only a few times per booking, and this is going to hit at least 4/hour for multiple hours a day, so it will stick out like a sore th…

> the unusual number of free-internet activation attached to your booking id, and either give your room a visit to knock it off Cruise lines want happy customers. They aren’t going to do something to piss you off for $170.

They want money more. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a $170 fee.

Re: Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

#167

Post by [deleted] »

dylan604 wrote: post #113
ryandrake wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I'd think something like onboard Internet is something set up once for the ship, and then basically forgotten about as long as the overall revenue is above some "reasonable" threshold given the number of passengers. Ain't no security team sitting there monitoring user registration metrics in real-time looking for fraud. At best, they might pull logs every quarter to look for vulnerabilities like this to close.

Why would someone in corporate IT responsible for this not ask Claude to write a script that does this on a much more frequent basis? That person might get a nice attaboi for it, but much less likely an actual bonus for it. Although, I can't imagine they are losing too much money on each cruise from this hack unless the next DefCon is on a cruise ship. Then realizing that 0 passengers signed up for WiFi might seem st…

[deleted]

Re: Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

#168

Post by jlarocco »

isawczuk wrote: post #8

I was watching some cruise crew videos, and it turns out their biggest expense is internet. I'm curious why they don’t just install Starlink to cut costs and maybe sell to guests some "piracy" internet?

Probably because they've had internet on cruises since long before Starlink existed and it's expensive to change. And why bother if people are willing to pay for it?

Re: Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

#169

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

sheiyei wrote: post #146
gwbas1c wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A cruise ship has people with nothing to do wandering around The major point of a cruise is that there is constantly something to do. It's wall-to-wall entertainment, 24-hours a day. My 2-year-old was too excited to sleep on a Disney cruise, so we just walked around and found character photos at 10PM. She was too shy to take her picture, so I got my picture taken with her hiding her face on my shoulder. (FWIW: A cr…

Cruises sound and look like absolute nightmares. Physical manifestation of brainrot. Cyberpunk hell

I can't stand them, myself. There's also tons of really good food. You need a forklift to disembark.

I'm a die-hard nerd.

My vision of hell, is a Caribbean beach, mid-80s, warm breeze, clear water, and no internet access.

Re: Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

#170

Post by codazoda »

bodhi_mind wrote: post #160

Side note, I’m pretty sure you can send iMessage on a cruise ship when connected to their WiFi with no internet package because apple has a mesh network between unrelated devices and finds one with an internet endpoint to funnel messages in and out. I’m just basing this on usage experience and my hypothesis.

I did not find Apple iMessage to work on my recent cruise without the room Wifi. I didn't really need internet with a tiny bit of planning though.

The cruise line had its own app and THAT had a chat feature. We didn't find it very reliable, however. You would eventually get messages, but it wasn't instant.

I downloaded my ebooks in advance and installed a small LLM on my laptop. I could read and code but I didn't get much of the latter done.

Post reply on HN