A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by Vespasian » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 8:51 AM UTC

varenc wrote: post #150

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.

If you never clicked "I agree" in the captive portal prompt, and still got free internet via port 53 proxying, could you argue you never broke the contract because you never agreed to the terms? Genuinely curious

I would bet a little bit of money that this is still illegal because you cheated yourself access to a service that is clearly meant to be paid and usually requires agreement (as indicated by the captive portal). Sounds like fraud to me.

As far as I know courts in most jurisdictions are allowed to look at a case in its entirety and that won't look good for you.

A defense like "I thought it was just an config error and couldn't possible imagine that someone would want payment" doesn't sound very plausible to me in particular if it comes from an IT expert who just used sophisticated means to surgically circumvent the block.

In this particular cases of course they confessed the "crime" while bragging about it in their post.

Now what if a random person downloaded an app called "Internet anywhere" from their store and it justed worked? Much muddier because they wouldn't even know it was circumventing anything. For all they know it could be a deal between Air Canada and the app vendor.

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

#162

Post by NoahZuniga » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 9:08 AM UTC

mixdup wrote: post #148

avidiax wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be that they allow any HTTP/HTTPS request that has Host: acwifi.com regardless of whether the IP address destination of the request is valid for acwifi.com. You see these sorts of shenanigans being used to get around country-wide firewalls. Plenty of deep packet inspection is unable to handle edge cases like the "Host:" header being misleading, having it fragmented into two TCP packets, etc. See "domain fron…

it's extremely unlikely that the plane wifi would be configured that way. trying to use a host file to make github.com respond on acwifi.com was definitely a red herring. It led to figuring out 53 was open, but was definitely not how the filtering was working

Also, this doesn't resolved the non sequitur in the OP. It claims there might be DNS blocking, not deep packet inspection. Also cloudflare has encrypted client hello turned on by default and the only domain that shows up for https connections in this case is cloudflare-ech.com, so if any Cloudflare website is whitelisted it would have to allow this domain, and consequently any other Cloudflare website.

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

#163

Post by DaSHacka » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 11:17 AM UTC

roygbiv2 wrote: post #160

DaSHacka wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It worked pretty consistently, but was extremely slow, bordering on unusable.

I didn't really end up using it and just read a book instead, but in theory it does work.

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

#164

Post by EvanAnderson » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 12:40 PM UTC

resonious wrote: post #152

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

I feel like an archaeologist working on code I wrote myself 20+ years ago. I can imagine the feeling is stronger when it's somebody else's code.

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

#165

Post by nickthegreek » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 2:28 PM UTC

stackedinserter wrote: post #155

nickthegreek wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

i’ll take that as a yes.

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

#166

Post by stackedinserter » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 4:41 PM UTC

nickthegreek wrote: post #165

stackedinserter wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

i’ll take that as a yes.

What do you take? I probably need to take it too, to tolerate abysmal service from airlines and airports.

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

#167

Post by int_19h » Mon, Oct 13, 2025, 12:29 AM UTC

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.

This is Hacker News. Hacking has a long history of being, well, not exactly respectful of legalities, especially when dealing with "profiteering gluttons". Phreaking was kinda what the early hacker scene was famous for, for example.

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

#168

Post by pbh101 » Thu, Oct 23, 2025, 12:10 PM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #90

pbh101 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mean, if you're willing to accept AI slop, that's fine. But if you're willing to accept AI slop, you'd probably be willing to accept human slop (at least if it claims to be AI) too, and then the job gets a lot easier.

We’re talking about a sci-fi scenario that presupposed a lot of things but not anything that wrote code for you to the extent that society found value in dedicated code librarians. The state of AI today has nothing to do with re-inspecting that future world in light of the last 3 years of GenAI progress.

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

#169

Post by pbh101 » Thu, Oct 23, 2025, 12:28 PM UTC

palmotea wrote: post #108

pbh101 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 soft…

The world in question is ours but later, with direct lineage from Unix systems indicated. So I see these archaeologists as a glorified priesthood of shell scripters, grep still having bugs, and the glue being programs themselves. Not too different than many roles today.

Beyond that, it is an odd hope on your part for GenAI to never be able to write high quality software.

Zooming out, my bigger point was that this was a sci-fi book written by the person who coined the term and concept ‘Singularity’ and the series includes a malevolent murderous sentient AI virus (IIRC) and it included some reference to how programming was accomplished and yet still, given all that, there was no anticipation of even our nascent current GenAI coding capabilities.