Live data from Hacker News

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

ramsayleung.github.io

61–70 of 169 posts

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

#61

Why does Air Canada charges $30 for internet, that's brutal. Especially on 12hr flight where it should be provided for free imo.

> Especially on 12hr flight where it should be provided for free imo

That's junkie talk /s

No but seriously if you think Internet access is so vital that it has to be provided for free on a long-ish flight, you may have a problem. Watch an in-flight movie, read a book, take a nap, look out the window. There are many ways to pass 12 hours.

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

#62
post #60

Why does Air Canada charges $30 for internet, that's brutal. Especially on 12hr flight where it should be provided for free imo.

>Especially on 12hr flight where it should be provided for free imo. "Should" in the sense that "everyone should get free food, housing, and healthcare" or that other airlines actually provide it for free? I don't know of any airline that provides it for free, the most is some Asian/Gulf airlines providing "free for 1 hour" or similar. Compared to that, "free texting, unlimited" doesn't seem too bad, considering ther…

On a recent 12h Air New Zealand flight I went on they offered free wifi for everyone. They say you can:

- Browse the web.

- Send and receive emails and messages.

- Check and post to social media

In practice I think they just whitelist a few messenger apps. Everything else was unusable - I couldn't even load this site. Only had my phone so couldn't check if I was actually receiving any bytes from other sites, but it at least wasn't immediately blocked.

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

#63

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…

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.

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

#64
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.

> Not law per se. More like contractual obligations taken upon by connecting to the flight's WiFi. Well, being pedantic, you could be said to be breaking Civil Law. :) Jest aside, IANAL but most western countries have some sort of Criminal Law relating to mis-use of computers. A brief search for Canada reveals Criminal Code (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-46)[1]. Again IANAL, but from my reading in this scenario it would be (c)…

[deleted]

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

#65
post #22

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…

> breaking the law Not law per se. More like contractual obligations taken upon by connecting to the flight's WiFi.

Most countries will have laws covering cases of unauthorized access, theft of services, and computer misuse.

The user agreement helps define the service as a paid service with defined access cases. Going around those would put the user in violation of some laws.

An analogy would be showing up to a paid event venue and noticing a back door was left open. Going into the building without paying is not okay, even though you never engaged with the ticket office to agree to anything.

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

#66

Limiting availability of third party services based on local service provider fee can only be done 100% reliably on a service side through an agreement with that provider, i.e. WhatsApp needs to disable certain functions to users coming from certain dedicated links or IP ranges, or even based on live user status metadata. There's an obvious size mismatch, and lack of incentive to implement compartmentalisation only n…

FWIW, WhatsApp does (or did) support special price networking. I used to be the engineering side of that. But the supported offerrings were for special priced everything (text+mms+voip) or just text+mms if real time voice and video was not to be special priced. Text only was not a supported offering while I was there. And you needed to be a mobile carrier to get the information about IP ranges (the IP ranges were public but not directly linked early on, but got limited later).

That said, many networks did these sorts of things without communicating with WhatsApp. Even without knowing IP ranges. WA traffic is easy to spot. Chat has a destinctive protocol that's neither http, nor https; mms is https with obvious hostnames in SNI; voip looks like voip.

You might be able to trick in-air wifi by looking like WA chat, but I've never been interested enough to check while on a plane. I'd rather use the time to watch awful movies on a tiny screen with terrible audio conditions.

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

#67

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 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.

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

#68
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.

Most countries will have laws covering cases of unauthorized access, theft of services, and computer misuse. The user agreement helps define the service as a paid service with defined access cases. Going around those would put the user in violation of some laws. An analogy would be showing up to a paid event venue and noticing a back door was left open. Going into the building without paying is not okay, even though…

If the user routed all traffic through a WeChat or other messaging service, they would just be using messaging.

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

#69
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without commenting on the appropriateness of what they did, the author doesn't say they did anything like a sweep. It looks like they were manually poking a few things with dig and ping, not firing up nmap.

Circumventing security on a network, on a plane, is definitely up there regardless if you sweeped or not. IANAL but that could put you in DHS crosshairs.

The exaltation displayed in this discussion thread is something everyone should ponder about. Some stupidity specific to certain era and place on Earth, just another tumour of uncontrolled bureaucracy which always grows, is discussed as some eternal property of God-given Universe.

Hijacked plane is a popular media spectacle with lots of ties to other images and scenes. Millions are ready to discuss it, or listen to the thrilling stories. “This is important for security!” is a shazam in that context. At the same time, much closer and routine dangers directly affecting many people (power plants, refineries, railroads and so on) are kept in check by underpaid workers who can't even make companies fix sensors or replace something until it is rusted through. Effectively, “this is not important for anything”, nor public is interested in TV shows about working pipeline that is not getting blown up. Those who want money and power naturally stick to impressions that work for the crowd they are given.

Propaganda is most successful when people do the required thing on their own, agree that it's absolutely impossible to evade, and even encourage each other. Something in this day and age makes people themselves adore certain forms of propaganda, and even demand to be told specific lies. Among other things, images of stupid social machines crushing someone (“they'll put you on the list”, etc.) seem to weirdly stimulate the crowd.

Even in so-called globalised world there are examples that crack the habituation. In country A, any big gathering of people needs to be formally approved, supplied with hordes of policemen (thankfully, not tanks), fences (thankfully, not barbed wire), entrance searches (thankfully, without stripping). When you ask anyone about that, they promptly respond with “What if terrorists/enemies decide to attack the crowd?” or “What if they start to riot?” (notice that “they”), etc. Even most obvious security theatre acts are automatically accepted with promotion to “psychological stuff that helps to detect those people in the crowd”. In country B, no less “civilised”, the same event is handled by some private company that is mostly worried about portable toilets or electric generators, and people come freely to the venue if they like it (just buy the ticket).

The odds of something wrong happening are roughly the same, but people reason about themselves and those around them very differently. That mental picture of the world shapes the thing that happens, not the alleged expert opinions or calculations.

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

#70
post #3

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

I haven't used iodine, but this seems simpler. Iodine wraps requests with actual DNS requests. In this case that wasn't needed, because port 53 wasn't filtered at all. So all they needed was a simple proxy on port 53.

iodine automatically checks several modes a "simple" proxy on port 53 being one of them. If you're trying to sneak traffic through this kind of block, it is really the first tool to try.
Post reply on HN