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

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

#71

Post by kangs »

roygbiv2 wrote: post #3

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

Dan Kaminski popularized this in 2007-8 or so. Not that it didn't exist here and there, but he made the perhaps first public version of a dns tunnel (ozyman). he inspired iodine and others and was a fairly well known guy.

Dan passed away in 2021, rip.

if you search for it its hard to find. his blog is down (hea dead...), and many companies and people talked about it on his behalf to drive traffic (hi duo sec..), so you can see the internet forget, rediscover, and rewrite some history even in a few years.

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

#72

Post by octo888 »

andy99 wrote: post #7

> The only downside was that although we broke through the network restrictions and could access any website, the plane’s bandwidth was extremely limited, making web browsing quite painful. Unfortunately this is also the downside of paying. Many times I have paid for internet, only to find it unusably bad. To be fair, I just flew a transcontinental flight on Air Canada the other day and the wifi was fine.

Do consumer rights exist in the skies? Genuine question!

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

#74

Post by gosub100 »

jacquesm wrote: post #55
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…

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…

I'm a SRE and encountered this recently. To prevent DDoS, there is a buffer setting on the kernel that will limit the number of pings (a few settings actually). So if you have a group of machines that all ping a single destination at once, it's very possible to have some that fail to get a reply.

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

#76

Post by mjr00 »

sheepscreek wrote: post #33
andy99 wrote: post #7

> The only downside was that although we broke through the network restrictions and could access any website, the plane’s bandwidth was extremely limited, making web browsing quite painful. Unfortunately this is also the downside of paying. Many times I have paid for internet, only to find it unusably bad. To be fair, I just flew a transcontinental flight on Air Canada the other day and the wifi was fine.

I’ve been the unfortunate one who paid and endured the slow-barely-usable/mostly unusable speeds. However, that was before the Starlink era. So if you’re gonna pay for WiFi, it’s worth checking if the flight is equipped with Starlink.

Yeah, I just flew WestJet from Canada to Honolulu and was amazed; full 1080p YouTube with no hiccups and I was able to play some (non-latency sensitive) online games, all over the Pacific. This was fully intentional; there wasn't any back-of-the-seat iPad for watching movies or anything, they straight up tell you to use your own device and watch Netflix. I did some research after and found a lot of airlines in NA are going to be rolling out satellite internet in the next year or two.

For some reason, being fully connected at 50mbps+ on a plane seems more futuristic sci-fi to me than everything AI.

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

#77

Post by jacquesm »

pbh101 wrote: post #67
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 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've yet to have my needs met by a GenAI-written script/program. Archaeologists tend to be a lot more precise in their statements, especially about what is speculation and what is not.

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

#78

Post by jacquesm »

gosub100 wrote: post #74
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…

I'm a SRE and encountered this recently. To prevent DDoS, there is a buffer setting on the kernel that will limit the number of pings (a few settings actually). So if you have a group of machines that all ping a single destination at once, it's very possible to have some that fail to get a reply.

Oh, that's nasty. How long did it take you to troubleshoot that?

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

#79

Post by theideaofcoffee »

apple1417 wrote: post #62
gruez wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 a…

> - Browse the web.

> - Check and post to social media

> In practice I think they just whitelist a few messenger apps. Everything else was unusable

That was probably intentional, because to the vast majority of the users of these services, 'the web' is just a handful of the same social sites. As long as they can post a few things about their trip, that's the extent of the web access that they need or care to want. Sucks when you're expecting the whole kit and kaboodle, but the airlines seem to know their customers.

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

#80

Post by woodrowbarlow »

ogurechny wrote: post #69
reactordev wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

i appreciated this comment, even though it downplays real pragmatic concerns. from a security perspective, should getting on an airplane (especially for domestic flights) really be all that different from getting on a bus? are the potential outcomes different enough to justify the differences in security measures?
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