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

WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

jamesbvaughan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 675 posts

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#321

Post by ssaannmmaann »

jjwiseman wrote: post #284
dramm wrote: post #136

“According to this data, the plane’s altitude was only fluctuating by about 20-30 feet. This is more stable than I expected!” Autopilots are very good and they are servoing to the pressure altitude. Many pressure altitude encoders used in modern aircraft (for example to drive altitudes that transponders report to SSR radar or via ADS-B) have 25 ft encoding resolution. That 25ft resolution is likely what is being seen…

I don't know what sensors are feeding the API from the post, but most passenger jets do broadcast information about the accuracy of their sensed position, including vertical position/altitude. If you click on an aircraft on the map at https://globe.adsbexchange.com/ , and scroll the left sidebar all the way to the bottom you'll see a section labeled "Accuracy". ADS-B Exchange doesn't show Rc/v, the vertical position…

I went down a rabbit hole by clicking on globe.adsbexchange.com :)

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#322

Post by havnagiggle »

pantalaimon wrote: post #280
KMnO4 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to do the same thing at hotels. Still often works. nmap -sn 192.168.0.1-255 To find everyone on the network, then start spoofing each of their MACs until you find one that works

I’ve never been at a hotel that charged for WiFi - is that a US thing?

Dialup speeds is free, but if you want to taste those megabytes, you better fork over those megabucks.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#324

Post by acka »

arcanemachiner wrote: post #128
renewiltord wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

We've come full circle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU

"Oh no, not again..." quoted from (not stolen, not infringing any copyright because of fair use) from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

This nonsense has to stop. Copying a movie, or using the internet on someone else's plan is not piracy is not theft.

Quoting from memory from my old Webster's dictionary which I have owned since I was a student a long time ago:

Theft: The act of taking property and removing it so that the rightful owner is no longer in possession of it.

Piracy: the practice of attacking and robbing ships at sea.

Equating copyright infringement or violation of terms of service with theft or piracy is completely unwarranted messing with definitions of terms that have served their purpose for centuries.

Worse yet, the abuse of these terms in recent times misdirects people's attention away from the underlying flaws: artificial scarcity and the inability to enforce restrictions on use; you can not steal data (unless you steal the physical medium the data is stored on) nor can you pirate a service.

Making unauthorized copies or violating the terms of use of a service may be deemed objectionable but these actions are most certainly neither theft nor piracy.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#325

Post by dclowd9901 »

kvmet wrote: post #44
jamesbvaughan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good catch! I'm not very familiar with knots - what specifically makes the speeds here look like knots to you? edit: Updated the article. Thanks!

Knots are typically used for aviation. Also different planes have their own optimal speeds for efficiency that the airlines aim for so if you know the airframe you can derive what they are most likely targeting. You can also compare the value to the filed flight plan and see if it is similar.

Knots are used for aviation, but this data looks like it's being consumed by the in-flight UI, and most _people_ are not familiar with knots in terms of speed. Indeed, using the UI shows MPH vs. knots. My money is this speed being mph.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#326

Post by aeternum »

pak9rabid wrote: post #285
commandlinefan wrote: post #205

When my son was younger - maybe 9 or 10 or so, we were on a plane and he was using his phone and I looked over his shoulder and realized he was on the internet... but I hadn't paid for an internet plan. I said, "son, how are you using the internet?" He said, "oh, a kid at school showed me - if you go here" (he opened up the wifi settings where the DHCP assigned IP address is) "and start changing the numbers, eventual…

lol, I used to do this all the time at non-free wifi hotspot locations, only I'd start off with a ping sweep of the entire subnet (nmap -sP) in order to get my ARP cache filled with a bunch of potential usable IP/mac addresses on the network. From there, I'd iterate through each one and set the IP & mac address until I found one that would let me through the firewall. Granted, being a NOC engineer at Wayport (now AT&…

Yes the key to doing this more seamlessly is to spoof both the IP and the MAC so your machines are not constantly fighting with the other person over the ARP table entry.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#327

Post by seabass-labrax »

capableweb wrote: post #225
KolmogorovComp wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airline planes never use mph but only knots.

Well, most airlines. I think both China and Russia already switched to SI units (so km/h), and supposedly ICAO recommends using km/h but there is exception for using knots and there is also no end date to stop using knots, so everyone just continues to use knots.

It's not that they 'already switched', but rather that early Russian aircraft had used the metric system for instruments and China acquired much of their early aircraft from the USSR.

In the West, it was well into the 50s before knots became conventional. Many (but not all) British and American aircraft used miles per hour, and most of non-communist mainland Europe used the metric system. I am not aware of whether there was some agreement to choose knots, but by the 60s almost all western aircraft had instruments in knots and nautical miles.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#328

Post by mulmen »

chx wrote: post #40
jamesbvaughan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good catch! I'm not very familiar with knots - what specifically makes the speeds here look like knots to you? edit: Updated the article. Thanks!

487 miles per hour would only be 0.63 Mach which is very slow. 487 knots would be 0.73 Mach which is much closer to the rule of thumb 0.78 Mach cruise speed expected. https://krepelka.com/fsweb/learningcenter/aircraft/flightnot... (and yes, it's a simulator but it's still good for real world)

Mach is a product of altitude and we only have ground speed so we'd need weather information and heading to compare.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#329

Post by ruune »

ahoka wrote: post #279
system2 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WiFi signal is received by both. Packages are ignored if they are not requested by either one of the systems. You can also receive anyone else's packages while you are using your internet but ignoring the ones you don't need. (If interested try aircrack-ng.)

Only if it’s unencrypted, of course. Rarely the case nowadays.

If it's important but you got time, you could always save the packets and crack them when quantum computing comes out for consumers. You have to wait a couple of decades probably, but maybe it's worth it

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#330

Post by hackernewds »

dag11 wrote: post #18
atourgates wrote: post #4

I'm an Alaska (relatively) frequent flyer. That airline offers a free "messaging" plan, that lets you send and receive messages on apps like iMessage, Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. Though, it somehow prevents images/attachments from coming through on those platforms. I've always wondered how this is implemented technically, and if it might be possible to setup some kind of protocol/wrapper to send data that looks…

Hi fellow Alaska frequent flier. So about that! There's this iOS app called Flightly that does a brilliant little hack where the app updates itself in (almost) real time on the "free messaging" plan. The way it works (according to a friend) is that their servers send your phone a push notification every couple of minutes from take-off until landing, containing some serialized info such as lat,long,alt,eta,etc. And th…

so why would I use this Flightly app? seems it delivers messages all the same?
Post reply on HN