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Decades ago, my partner used Google Voice for texting -- really handy, texts just showed up in the gmail inbox, and could be replied to from there. She didn't like cellphones, but usually carried one of the old "Kindle Keyboard" models with unlimited 3G data. The Kindle had simple web browser that could load the low-spec gmail interface, so in essence she had a fully functional SMS device, with no monthly charges.

Notification of incoming texts was the only problem. I jailbroke the thing and started trying to schedule network requests, thinking I'd add some kind of new message counter on the home screen. This proved hard. But it occurred to me that the best place for the counter would be right next to the Kindle's device name, at the top of the screen. And the device name could be updated from her Amazon account.

So I automated a web browser on the home server to log into Amazon and update the device name to "My Kindle (x)" where x was the number of unread Google Voice texts. The Kindle would update the name on the home screen in less than a minute. This worked for years!

(Eventually that Kindle was stolen. I wanted to update its name to something foul but the device disappeared from her account too quickly.)

The AT&T bill (IIRC it was all under a single account) for the 3G Kindles was eye-watering. I recall a few byte-shavings yielding something like a million dollars of savings.

I was at Amazon in a Kindle adjacent team (the lockscreen ads) starting in 2012, and I can second this sentiment. For the first couple years, there were multiple tweaks made to minimize enormous roaming bills for customers taking their US region "global unlimited free 3g" kindles to really remote parts of the world. Things like not enqueuing push downloads of books/ads if they were roaming.

How profitable was this behavior and its paid removal?

I have always felt that the default display of ads on Lock Screen cheapened the devices—-even the flagship oasis model required an additional purchase to remove the ads.

That seemed completely at odds with the premium pricing and marketing.

Also, it seemed like there was always some way to call Amazon support and make claims about location or some other detail that would make support disable the ads for free. Are you aware of those requests and manual handling?

It's been several years since I left Amazon, and nearly a decade since I worked on anything relevant to those questions, but I'll answer what I remember.

The ads were profitable enough that customers buying devices without the ads for an extra $20 didn't quite make up for it. When they started selling the smart covers for the Paperwhite (IIRC the covers launched at $50) those made them more profit than they lost from reduced ad interactions on the lockscreen. I never knew the exact number though, and could be remembering wrong on some of that. Obviously I have no idea what the numbers would be today though.

There was a backend service with an endpoint which could un-enroll a device in ads, and I know that some customers were able to get ads disabled by just complaining. You can also, even today, just pay that same $20 for removal after you already have the device (I just checked on my own device here https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/alldevices, I go into the device and there's a button that says "Remove offers").

Also, I'm not sure I quite agree with the ads being at odds with the premium pricing. I could have easily turned off ads on my personal kindles (using the aforementioned backend services) and I never bothered because I really just don't find them all that intrusive. The lockscreens you get when ads are disabled are also really boring, so I kept the ads. Recently the tradeoff has shifted slightly, with some of the garbage AI covers I've seen, so I'm not positive what decision I'd make if it were still free (to me), but it's still definitely not worth $20 to me.

I had a kindle with the unlimited roaming and it was great. I bought it at a time when I was overseas for 9 months a year, they must have eaten so many roaming fees on my behalf.

My next kindle had the ads, and I did indeed call customer service and have them remove it for no charge.

I’m very anti ad, and when my current kindle kicks the bucket, I’ll certainly be going with something else. They aren’t intrusive, but the principle is that I want to control when my time is commercialized.

Aside from all that, Amazon retail has gotten horrible logistics where I am in a medium sized Canadian town (50k people, 1.5 hours from the nearest international container port, 5 minutes from the nearest international airport). The delivery times have gotten so long over the past year that AliExpress is pretty consistently the fastest shipping.

Amazon has gone from being the first place I go shopping to the last.

I'm so glad someone else is mentioning this. Last week, on what was Wednesday July 3, I needed to order a new suitcase and I obviously went to Amazon. I'm a Prime subscriber and not a single suitable suitcase (no pun intended) could be delivered prior to the following Monday - which was too late for me, as it'd be too close a call for my trip. That had never happened to me, ever, with Amazon. They were going to be unable to deliver on any day from Wednesday to Sunday, even though I was literally in the middle of Los Angeles rather than some remote location. For the first time, I am seriously reconsidering renewing Prime. I wonder what's happening behind the scenes.

I live in a decent sized city, ~1 million people.

On a commercial prime account, I frequently find items that are listed as next day delivery only to get them in my cart, go through the checkout process and on the final page find that shipping will actually be 7 business days.

Every time it comes up, I am now attempting to get our company to close its Amazon account. It's not convenient or useful if I have to spend an hour navigating through constant lies in order to find the 1 product that actually ships when it says it will. I can go to a department store or office supply store and buy the things for the same cost in less time.

What I wonder is: is this by design? ie: Amazon choosing to stop subsidizing certain types of shipments etc? Or is this still, in 2024, a result of pandemic-era supply chain strain and so forth?

I think its by design. I can't imagine any other reason for Amazon to show me "Will arrive tomorrow via prime shipping" on the item page and then, only when it is in the cart showing me actual delivery being 4+ days.

I am guessing that since it is such a hassle to go back to the cart, pull the item with the false shipping dates, and then find another similar item with good shipping dates, add to cart, go through checkout, find out that shipping is actually 4+ days, rinse and repeat until you either get lucky or give up, they're probably not going to fix it because it makes them more money to keep you frustrated.

Can't you find nearby local stores to buy items on the spot if you are in hurry?

I literally said I could go and buy them from a local store for the same price and get the items faster.

The problem is, the local stores don't have net 30 terms and we don't have corporate / business accounts with them, and it would be a huge hassle to add them.

I’ve actually found interesting book suggestions from the kindle ads so shrug.

Sure. But my point is that I only want to be shown those suggestions when I choose to go to the built in, unremovable book store app on my kindle. Not when I set my device down for 10 minutes to go make a coffee, and it decides that I have been away long enough to needlessly replace the content I paid Amazon for with content that someone else is paying Amazon to show me.

Isn't it enough that I bought their device, and that I fill it with content from their store that "makes suggestions" (shows ads) when I visit it?

I called in and complained about an awkward romance novel cover ad a few years ago and they disabled ads for me for free.

Free Internet was a very bold proposition. I used it a lot, via roaming, from a country that was in the very-expensive-roaming lists.

Worth it, I reckon. You can't buy this kind of advertising:

https://xkcd.com/548/

Amazon really missed the chance to call their network Sub-Etha. Or the Sub-Wave network.

I still have my Kindle 3g. I love it. The battery on mine is toast right now so it's not operable. I was going to buy a new Kindle but the prime day preview in Canada doesn't show any Kindles on sale and I was hoping Amazon was going to release an oasis v2 with USB-c before I replaced this.

I might just pay $30 for another battery and stick with this Kindle keyboard.

Was wondering if anyone was going to chime in about still having this old Kindle. I still have mine and use it daily. Battery lasts 3 weeks as long as the wifi is off and the free 3G still works too. Purchased it in July 2011. I also want a new e-reader but I also want to see how long I can keep this thing going.

Does the connectivity still work? Thinking about pulling out my DX and giving it a spin.

I have a keyboard 3G on v3.4.3 and the cell connectivity does not work anymore. It does still mention in the device info that it has 3G capability but if you try to do anything requiring a network connection it prompts you to connect to wifi. (Interestingly it also has the cell-style right triangle with five bars to indicate signal strength.)

I recall Amazon announcing a few years back that it would stop working; not sure if they pushed a firmware update, stopped paying the bill, or if 3G just isn't available anymore.

As of a few months ago there are no operating 3g towers in the US.

Did that finally happen!? I feel like they've been telling me it was going to happen "this year" for at least 5 years.

Yes. The last operational towers were a few up in the Appalachians operated by US Cellular and were shut down in January of this year.

None in Australia anymore either

I dont think any of the providers around me still have 3g networks for it to connect to, and I know in the US amazon said they would lose connectivity in the US 2021

Yes, the connectivity should still work, but it might be limited depending on the model and the network you're trying to connect to. Some older Kindle models may have issues with newer Wi-Fi standards. It's worth giving it a try, though! You might also want to check if there are any firmware updates available for your device.

The Oasis has been discontinued which is a big bummer for me. I’ve had 3 or 4 kindles and the Oasis is the only one I thought was truly great.

it being discontinued was exactly why I was hoping that meant a v2 coming out, with a more modern usb port. I looked at picking up an oasis but everything else I own is usb-c more or less, and I don't want to deal with a microusb port.

I think the kindle keyboard (3rd generation) was great. physical buttons for page turning. internet. a keyboard! was way ahead of its time.

Hm... I've just checked on amazon.de and it's still available in several versions.

I suspect once the stock is depleted, it will be delisted there as well.

https://www.thestreet.com/retail/amazon-quietly-discontinues...

Wow, that writer was definitely being paid by the word.

I used to have a few 3g Kindles. I believe they have dialed it back to 50mb a month, but they still get that free internet - and internationally too!

I loaned my kindle keyboard to a coworker for a trip and it was stolen from them in mexico. The joke was at the time it was probably the oldest working kindle possible, so I assume the thief just took whatever was in the bag.

Later I found another kindle keyboard for $20 in a flea market but it only worked for 6 months before the battery died. I still have the body around - I wonder how much it would cost to get a replacement battery.

I just replaced two, a new battery inc. shipping runs around $15

not too hard to pop open and swap in

It's probably a single cell so with some luck you can plonk whatever battery physically fits in there.

Batteries for it are pretty readily available across the Internet so you can get the exact right one. It's about 2 minutes worth of work to change.

Oh that 'free' 3g was amazing! I was able to hobble through gmail through the browser, and even wrote a kindle-friendly Zork website so one could play text games on it allowing you to choose from a bunch of zmachine roms. Had some traction getting mentioned on a few news websites.

Oh my god! I did this too!!! I didn't have the clever Kindle name change integration but I did use a keyboard Kindle with infinite 3G to text for a while.

Years ago before I got a smart phone I used my kindle keyboard to navigate on a long road trip. It could just barely run the Google Maps website.

I still use Google Voice for texting, but only from their dedicated web page. I never heard about being able to text from Gmail. I assume this feature is gone?

Google Voice still supports texting from their web page, but the feature to text directly from Gmail was discontinued a few years ago. It was a convenient feature, but now you have to use the Google Voice app or web page for texting.

I use it as my primary interface. I can't believe they haven't killed it.

I like it, it's useful, I rely on it, and it's from Google. How does it still exist?

no, it still exists.

[dead]

Google Voice has only existed since 2009, so it couldn't have been "decades" ago. That's how i know your story is fake.

Or just maybe, 1.5 decades and "decades" are compatible when parsed by a human. Calling a story fake for that is a bit much, people just get details wrong, and that's okay

I was on a ~20 hour ferry ship from Italy to Greece once. They had paid wifi using sattelite internet, which I did not want to pay. But for payments to work, they allowed access to stripe. Turns out, everything on stripe.com was accessible, even dev docs etc. So I started to waste their bandwidth by downloading gigabytes of images from the stripe website over and over again.

But that's quite unproductive. As it turned out, in order for stripe to work, it needs access to fastly CDN. And then I remembered that reddit also uses fastly. By connecting to stripe and changing the Host HTTP header to reddit.com, I could browse reddit! Images didn't work though (i.redd.it is not on fastly). I could edit my /etc/hosts and associate old.reddit.com with stripe's fastly IP address. After ignoring scary TLS errors, I could even log in.

I presume the only people you're hurting by downloading gigabytes of docs are the people on the plain that paid for the service. Maybe the company providing the service because those people experiencing the slow connection might never buy again. You're probably a also costing stripe for their upload bandwidth.

And here I am, avoiding downloading things on cell service because it might negatively impact other people around me.

Agreed. I applaud the initiative of figuring out they could access reddit via the CDN that Stripe uses - but downloading gigabytes of images for the sole purpose of "wasting their bandwidth"? Why??

[flagged]

> Honestly this person probably felt they were truly sticking it to the big guy because how dare they charge for internet.

I get the vibe, though I agree this was an unproductive way to pursue it.

I strongly suspect the fee for access is not at all related to the cost to provide service; they’re leveraging the temporary monopoly on connectivity they have to get consumers to pay absurd prices. Cruise ships are similar; I think it was double digits per day for internet.

I don’t think it’s productive to metaphorically “take the ball and go home”, but that instinct would probably be much lower if the fees for access were something reasonable.

Marine satellite internet can get pricey especially pre-Starlink. Like, potentially thousands of dollars for a few gigs even today.

I went looking because I got curious; I found a reseller for Inmarsat’s Fleet Xpress plans, which are unmetered: https://www.pulsarbeyond.com/media/contentmanager/content/Fl...

The highest tier with a price on it is burstable 8x4Mbps with guaranteed 1x0.5Mbps for $9k a month, which feels about right for a ferry (especially with some aggressive caching). They would break even with 30 customers paying $10 for access, though really I would be surprised if a ferry went far enough out to sea to need specialized internet (I am out of my depth, though, so maybe they do).

All in all, interesting. The markups still feel high, but not nearly as outlandish as I would have thought.

I wonder if at huge economies of scale you can get cheaper marine satellite internet if you don’t need full-ocean coverage. Eg cruise ships seem to sail the same routes on repeat, they don’t really need coverage of the entire ocean. I wonder if Royal Caribbean et al get cheaper service because they have pretty static and pre-defined routes, making it easier for the satellite provider to ensure there are satellites overhead when the ships are there.

These are uncapped prices? Pretty cheap compared to what I was looking at a few years ago. Back then a lot of plans had data caps, it would be like $9k for only several gigs of data all things said and done. You'd pay link speed separate from your data allotment, so a few grand for the connection speed and a few grand for a bucket of data.

They are uncapped as far as I could find, but I didn’t read the fine print or anything.

On the 4 or so companies I checked, most were metered as you said but also clearly designed for personal vessels. They were also expensive as you said; I think the cheapest I saw was ~$1500/month for 5GB, and $0.39/MB for overages.

I am in no way an expert, this is just based off like 4 links. Someone said Inmarsat had more commercial-vessel sized plans so I checked them out, and they do seem way cheaper if you’re planning to use the link a lot.

They are competing like it or not with starlink 100Mb 1TB of usage in the middle of the ocean, unlimited usage near land (within about 5-15 miles) for ~$800 a month.

In that context it's a rip off, and higher latency/lower speed.

> And here I am, avoiding downloading things on cell service because it might negatively impact other people around me.

This is a noble activity and I salute you for it, but I'm pretty sure that towers have traffic shaping that manage QoS and fairness for you.

I think it’s misguided. If the cell carrier can’t deliver its service to normal people doing normal things without inconveniencing other customers, it’s the carrier’s fault, not the users’. No way am I going to treat the service I paid for with kid gloves to make Verizon’s job easier.

(Not talking about edge cases like BitTorrent or such. But if a carrier advertises watching streaming video on my phone, I don’t feel guilty downloading an app update. If their tower couldn’t handle that, it’s on them, not me.)

Why is BitTorrent an edge case? I paid for the bandwidth, if I want to host a... Linux ISO, why shouldn't I? What if I pay for, and download 30 movies for offline use onto my phone because I know I'm going somewhere that there is no service? Why is that wrong? What if I backup my entire phone to two separate backup services in the cloud?

ISPs have done a great job shaming people who use their service for what it is supposed to be. It's 2024, and we should all have fiber to the home by now. But no, they're only working on deploying more shitty wireless connections to everybody and letting all the land-based services rot. Fuck them.

Also from the "fuck them" department: I have gigabit at home, and about 1.25TB per month quota. The ISP recently was advertising me to upgrade to 2Gb. I was intrigued, checked it out... exact same quota. My math says that on 2Gbps I could use up the month's quota in 85 minutes (accounting for network overhead let's generously say 2 hours).

Yeah, wtf. Where does this 1.25 number come from. My parents reach that at day 20 from streaming crime dramas all day.

I think you are overreacting. They didn’t say either of those things are immoral. They said it was an edge case. It is an edge case. The vast majority of people don’t know what a torrent is much and much less are downloading torrents on to their phones.

What canes123456 said. Also, I was talking in the context of cell connections. I have a vastly different expectation for wired connections: use that sucker up to whatever level you want and can afford. You paid for it, you use it. It's on the ISP to keep their network capacity upgraded to meet demand. (But even then, don't be a freaking sociopath. I have 10Gb fiber with no cap and I use it without a second thought, but don't like have a daemon that deliberately saturates it 24/7 or something. I run backups when it's convenient for me. I stream movies whenever. I download software updates as I please. I don't leave a copy of `iperf3` running just because I could, because that would be using up resources just for the hell of it, and that's never a good look.)

Wireless is a bit different in that there's inherently limited bandwidth. You and I share the same RF fields. If I'm monopolizing them, you can't, and vice versa. Now, if you have a home 5G hotspot, do what thou wilt. Those are advertised to support a household. If they can't, they shouldn't advertise it. However, if I were at a baseball game with 40,000 other people, and I couldn't text my wife because I saw you having 300 torrent connections open on a laptop just because you could, I'd still kinda wanna throw a beer at you. It's like listening to music out loud on the bus. You can; you shouldn't.

Those bidirectional video streams where neither party is looking at the phone while talking about nothing use way more bandwidth than an audio stream or text message. There's no way for me to tell if it's causing slowness for me, but it certainly can't be helping.

There's no chance the carrier can give every phone in a cell full bandwidth at the same time, they rely on only a handful of people using their connection at any given moment.

Me and my wife merged our facebook accounts to not take up space in facebook

idid2

I'm literally just posting this to add another row to a database.

For anyone else who wants to add a row to a database, but can't be bothered to post a comment, you can upvote this comment; each (voter, comment, vote) tuple is likely a row, or at least some amount of data. You're welcome.

Let me clean that up for you. '; DROP TABLE comments; --

Stop that, Bobby!

Good thing HN doesn't use one!

Though I suppose once it's storage mechanism performs enough of the functions of a database, it's an ad-hoc database.

unethical!

> And here I am, avoiding downloading things on cell service because it might negatively impact other people around me.

You paid for that service, they should be able to provide it to you. If it negatively impacts other users, that's the provider's fault.

I think the same whenever I turn on my gardening watering system at 7am and the whole 250 person street group chat starts complaining about lower water pressure and the fact nobody can have a shower.

But, I'm not selfish so I just water the garden at 4am now.

As a firefighter...

If your neighborhood's water pressure is affected by you running a garden watering system that most likely maxes out at 15 gallons/minute, then you have a serious problem, god help you if there's a structure fire in the neighborhood.

Seriously though, if you're not just exaggerating to make an example, contact your town/city/whatever Department of Works, something is seriously wrong.

London (UK) has deliberately low water pressures because the pipe network has a lot of leaks, and the lower the pressure the less water leaks out.

It's low enough that some appliances like dishwashers and washing machines give 'water supply' errors unless you run them overnight. Some houses use pressure boosting pumps to get water to the top floor.

Apparently fixing the leaks is expensive and it's free to just lower the pressure and pass the problem onto householders.

A kinda rule of thumb is that municipal water systems lose 10% of their water through various small leaks. Water is generally cheap and your bill is more for maintaining the capital cost itself rather than gathering/processing the water.

I also use this analogy for smuggling and the resources spent trying to stop it: if 10% gets lost/intercepted/“leaked”, the smugglers just produce and send 11% more and demand is met. You can change the numbers but it doesn’t change the result.

Now do that math for the US southwest, where water is ridiculously cheap and also severely limited ....

It’s not severely limited, that’s why it’s cheap even ignoring people with huge water grants and purchasing on the open market.

Using the entire annual flow of the Colorado river doesn’t mean it’s severely limited. It just means society isn’t stupid and will use the excess to fill sunny deserts to grow crops.

As long as there are crops grown anywhere between Phoenix and LA, water isn’t severely limited.

> It’s not severely limited, that’s why it’s cheap

This is false.

Most western states associate water rights with land ownership. The marginal cost of a unit of water for a user with their own well is close to zero (wells do require electricity and maintanance, but these costs are generally very small).

However, the existence of those water rights (e.g. "this 5 acre parcel comes with 3 acre-feet of water") has nothing to do with whether the water is actually available, and increasingly in many parts of the southwest, it is not.

"Severely limited" in my book means that water usage could not increase by 50%. Fairly sure this condition applies to more or less the entire US southwest.

That’s still not severely limited and that definition is idiotic. That’s like saying the copper market is severely limited just because all of the supply eventually clears at some price.

It’s all being used because there is enough farmland and sun to absorb it. Cut out the farming and the remaining usage could easily grow several hundred percent.

People grow absolutely ridiculous shit in southwest Arizona because water is so cheap and is not “severely limited” by any notional definition of the term.

The only context in which it looks that way is to people coming from locations that are inundated with water but are land/weather limited.

If you want to see what “severely limited” water looks like. Take a look at Israel.

As long as people can pay $100 for 10,000 gallons of water to fill a pool, there is no severe limit.

I don't think you understand that a lot of water usage in the southwest is not paid for at all.

In the village where I live in rural New Mexico, at least 30% of the population here have private wells and pay nothing for water at all (other than pump energy costs and well maintanance costs). Ranchers to the south of the village pump their own water and use it to irrigate alfalfa fields without paying anyone anything at all.

The reason water is cheap here is because of the historical and legal situation. If water was managed here as it is east of the Mississippi, where it is considered exclusively a public resource, then water supply systems would be able to charge prices more like those found in the east. But because "water rights" are bound up with "land rights", there is no way currently to do politically-controlled water pricing outside of city water systems.

And yes, agriculture in this part of the world uses 75% or more of all the water that falls or flows through the land, and if that wasn't here, water would not be much of an issue. I advocate locally for changes in how agriculture is done here, and write articles for hyperlocal media here to raise awareness of this issue.

But for now agriculture is here, using water wastefully and substantially, and that means that in effect the water supply is severely limited to the point that local jurisdictions will pay farmers to not use water that they have rights to.

I've lived in Israel (Rehovot). The Negev is a broadly similar climate (though much lower in elevation) as southern New Mexico and northern Israel is very similar to northern New Mexico. The Israelis are world leaders in the use of desalination, an option that makes no real sense for most of the US southwest (southern CA would be the obvious exception). This makes a significant difference to water availability both for agriculture and residential use in Israel.

Yeah we should probably stop subsidizing the heaviest water users. Instead we get high profile efforts that get a lot of attention and only save a token amount of water.

I believe the issue is that those water users own the water by right under the legal theory that the first users own it forever. The state could eminent domain it away but then they would have to pay some (probably very high) price for it, and nobody wants to do that. Eventually they are going to have to cough up the money.

So I guess London is just screwed if there's another big fire.

By law, houses must be built with fireproof (ie. Brick) walls between them, so a fire will not spread from one house to the next. This gives them a distinctive look [1].

There are no timber frame buildings, not any with flammable roofs like thatch or shingles.

They aren't going to make the mistakes of the great fire again!

It seems to work - I have never seen any fire burn more than one building.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/149wg3o/why_do_lond...

Very interesting. Still, you'd think they'd put a little more effort into having a modern, high-pressure plumbing system in their main city.

He DIDN'T pay.

But did you give? You gotta give? See, it’s completely user funded!

Never lose the opportunity to fuck corporations, also it's not your duty to preserve others experience, it's not like that corporations don't give a phuck about having enough bandwidth or don't oversell and then we have to be scared of downloading something

How communally-minded of you. That certainly is one way to solve the tragedy of the commons.

There is no such thing as "communally-minded" under private ownership. What we have is "rugged individualism" and free competition, ie "might makes right." I don't like it, but I can't escape it.

It's ironic that you mention "tragedy of the commons." Literally, what we don't have is a commons. What we have is enclosure. So it's truly not a "tragedy of the commons" but a tragedy of private ownership or, specifically, a tragedy of the commons' absence.

Again, there is no use in being "communally-minded" within the confines of an entity that has no community spirit, eg a ruthless, cynical, bottom-lining private corporation. In this context, "communally-minded" action cannot and will not be rewarded. It will only be exploited.

Everyone is a specific person, i.e. a "private" entity, and ownership represents the exclusivity of possession and use that is inherent in all economically rival goods. In order for anything to be owned and used by anyone, it must be owned and used by someone specific at the exclusion of others. In other words, "private ownership" is the only kind of ownership that actually exists.

"The public" is an abstraction that resolves to lots of separate "private" people in aggregate -- it's not a specific entity capable of acting as an owner of anything. When people talk about "publkic ownership", what they're really describing is one specific organization acting as the de facto owner, but nominally acting on behalf of "the public" by being bound up in fiduciary responsibilities to others. That sounds nice in theory, but the incentive structures applicable to those institutons are often not aligned with the interests of "the public" (presuming that any singular interest can even be attributed to it), and the mechanisms of fiduciary accountability often do not work properly. What "public ownership" usually amounts to is private ownership by political institutions, which have their own interests and agendas.

> Again, there is no use in being "communally-minded" within the confines of an entity that has no community spirit, eg a ruthless, cynical, bottom-lining private corporation. In this context, "communally-minded" action cannot and will not be rewarded. It will only be exploited.

The corporation is an organizational model employed by people. It has no consciousness or will of its own, so attributing any of the above qualities, positive or negative, to it, is meaningless. Corporations cannot be ruthless or cynical, or be communally-minded or have any sort of "spirit". They are just processes.

The people who are using the corporation as an organizational structure, on the other hand, can be any of those things. If you have a society full of greedy avaricious people, then commercial corporations will likely behave in ways that reflect greed and avarice. But then so again will every other expression of that society -- including political institutions and interpersonal interactions -- because it's not the abstract organizational model that possesses those qualities, it's the people.

The reality here is that doing destructive things out of some antipathy toward the abstract "corporation" has concrete negative consequences for its employees, its customers, and its investors (who aren't cartoon characters wearing top hats and monocles, but include ordinary people trying to fund their retirements).

> If you have a society full of greedy avaricious people, then commercial corporations will likely behave in ways that reflect greed and avarice.

I think it's possible to have corporations whose emergent values don't reflect their constituent values. In fact, I think it's inevitable; an LLC is not a cortical homunculus.

How do you figure, given that the corporation is just an organizational model employed by those people?

There's no tragedy of the commons here. A paid service provided by a private corporation is not "the commons". The commons refers to something like a municipal park owned by the public and run by the local government, and a tragedy of the commons is jerks going to the public bathroom there and leaving it a mess, stealing the toilet paper, etc.

"The public" is an abstraction, and the local government is just another specific organization. Everything is people, all the way down, and it is profoundly anti-social to rationalize away hostile, destructive behavior simply because you have an emotional prejudice against people who engage in commercial business.

The reality is that the behavior you are trying to justify doesn't impact the equally abstract "corporation", it impacts the actual people whose activities that concept represents -- employees, customers, investors, etc.

I am of the idea that the main issue are those at the top, but volounteers are also contributing to hide or make issues less pushy, what is the level of pain you're going to be able to support in order to let the community feel better, while execs pocket money?

What, exactly, do you get out of doing something like that? As an intellectual exercise I understand probing to see what exactly is accessible on a “blocked” connection, but intentionally wasting bandwidth seems the virtual equivalent of leaving the taps running in a public restroom to waste water, or perhaps clogging the toilet and overflowing it.

It reminds me of working on campus IT, and the sort of person who, at the end of the semester realize there are pages remaining in their "free print" allotment, print out every page completely covered in black ink to waste as much as possible.

I worked at a company that would provide "free pizza" during evenings to encourage people to stay a little later and get more work done. It wasn't long before people would simply grab armfuls of food, entire pizza boxes, and bring them to their cars, ending that little perk quickly.

That sounds dystopian.

why would anyone do that?? the remaining "free print" sheets is perfectly good scratch paper if you leave it blank!

I have also printed a blank document before to get blank paper, instead of dealing with accessing the paper tray, which may not have been feasible given the circumstances.

They're being a dick plain and simple. Some people are just wired that way.

Presumably because they perceive the operator as gouging/exploiting the captive audience.

Yes, I'd see it as a form of protest.

No one else would, especially not the company or the customers who paid for the service expecting to receive it. They'd see it as vandalism, and they'd be correct.

"The boat operator is charging too much for internet access, so let's ruin internet access for the customers who they've already received payment from! That'll show 'em!"

I ran a public anarchy Minecraft server in high school using a copy of a private server's map that got reimaged each week. Periodically someone would join, spend all day destroying buildings, then explain via a series of messages to nobody that he's only doing this to teach the admin a lesson about anti-grief plugins.

That's called domain fronting [0] and is disabled by all big CDNs now.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting

No, proper fronting is when you mismatch Host: header and SNI. It takes a bit more than just editing /etc/hosts, which results in TLS error (as grandparent mentioned), but editing /etc/hosts cannot be disabled by CDN.

I agree that's not proper domain fronting, but one point is that CDNs can and absolutely do restrict certain SNI/Host/sites to subsets of their IPs. It's not necessarily the case that if you can connect to one CDN node you can connect to all the sites that CDN serves.

OP here. It doesn't work anymore:

Requested host does not match any Subject Alternative Names (SANs) on TLS certificate [d22c2cdf866a373f3648c0d7c30f9399e974d07c8c5417566ff11059a06f5b40] in use with this connection. Visit https://docs.fastly.com/en/guides/common-400-errors#error-42... for more information.

But I'm just doing this from memory, it's possible I did something else a years ago.

Next, I left the water running in the hotel to teach them a lesson for daring to offer me a paid service.

[flagged]

Why was your first instinct to abuse or degrade functionality for a service you didn't want to pay for?

And then bragging about it. Wild.

I think it may be more of an emotional than rational response, given he would be stuck on the ferry for 20 hours

He probably knew how long the ferry ride was before he booked it.

Is being stuck on the ferry for twenty hours something that was done intentionally to provoke him, or is that just how long the trip takes?

A couple of decades ago, the idea of even having internet connectivity on a ship at sea was fanciful. The trip would have taken the same twenty hours, and there would have just been no internet access. Now, it's something that is available, but naturally has costs associated -- and the reaction here is that because you don't want to pay for it, it's justifiable to screw over everyone who is paying for it? That's almost sociopathic.

Something similar used to work for Delta (and probably some other airline's wifi) because they hardcoded the ability to access some Google stuff (like analytics) which enabled more interesting stuff (like Gmail, Voice, or a proxy running on Google Cloud)

> which I did not want to pay

> So I started to waste their bandwidth

...why? Trying to hack it for your own use I can understand, but why would you actively try to worsen the performance for everyone else paying, or try to run up the company's bill if it's metered?

sign o' the times

everything needs dns. host a http proxy at home on port 53. the world of paid wifi will be your oyster.

[flagged]

Isn't that exactly what a homo economicus should do? Remember that we are each in constant competition between each other, trying to satisfy our unlimited wants and trying to get others from satisfying theirs.

Homo economicus is motivated by maximizing their own benefit, not by spite. Trying to stop others from satisfying their own wants may be a useful strategy in many cases, but I don't see how it would be useful here.

When homo economicus is thwarted in its efforts to maximize its own benefit, spite arises.

If you think that living life requires you to constantly put down others, I just feel sad for both you and all the people who have to be around you.

I don't, but our economic system is based on and rewards that. It does feel sad.

Our economic system in no way rewards spite. It rewards value. It might not always be able to tell the difference between real value and underhanded tactics, but that's because the tactics masquerade as better value.

I dont think it rewards it at all. Things like this are just negative sum activities lashing out.

On the contrary, capitalism is based on providing value to others. It rewards those who do something that others actually WANT... as opposed to what some roomful of bureaucrats decide ought to be done.

What selfish purpose is there to download GBs of images from Stripe docs?

Even if we're purely selfish, wasting resources just to stick it to others is not really a productive use of our time.

I think it depends on just how much harm your target causing. Sometimes taking them down is the right thing. Doesn't feel justified in this case though.

yes, lets stare at the water for 20 hours instead

There are more than two options for a 20 hour wait, and I don't think that lashing out maliciously and staring at water are in my top 100. How about conversation, making friends, reading a book, writing emails, letters, or journals?

Genuinely curious where you get that impression.

Who in their right mind wants to stop others from getting what they want for it's own sake, or sees the quest for happiness as a competition?

Some people are simply not satisfied with maximizing their own gain, they also need to minimize everyone else's. Someone else's benefit is their loss. To the point where they'll make the game negative-sum in order to ensure The Other loses.

Some people are sadistic cretins who revel in the suffering of others, but I don't think that is the mainstream position.

I was pushing back on the idea that "homo economicus" or mainstream economics advocates for competitive sabotage. I have never heard academic economists advocate for this as a rational position.

If anything, the field is biased to over-emphasize positive collaboration.

The position of the parent post is some strange application of group competition for a scarce resource to happiness.

It assumes that someone's goal is not be be as happy as possible, but rather happier than others. This is the only situation where it makes sense to actively put in work to make other people more miserable.

Spending time to cost a company a few hundred bucks doesn’t seem rational. There are higher EV ways to spend your time to try to satisfy wants.

Unless your mindset is one of “it’s not enough that I succeed; others must fail by my hand”.

That said I could easily imagine doing some stuff like this as a teenager for giggles. There’s some small joy in being a minor troublemaker in a way nobody would actually care about. It’s not something I’d brag about though.

no you describe narcissistic personality disorder.

Homo economicus would try get as much as possible for himself, or have others bear the cost (e.g. have society pay for roads but don't want to pay taxes).

They would not lower the quality of service for someone else out of spite without any gain for themselves, let alone waste time on it. They would also understand this would rise the cost of the service they might potentially want to use in the future.

Only narcissists would feel the desire to fuck up a service out of spite and ruin it for anyone else, just because they feel bad for not agreeing to the deal of having to pay

It's interesting that you can't see that what capitalism does is push everyone to contribute in doing something useful for others.

And then everyone lived happily ever after.

Unless you have a personal history with this user, you are making a lot of unfounded assumptions and sweeping generalizations about them.

How? The guy told everyone straight-up that he wasted bandwidth for no reason.

It made others worse off, rising his relative status and competitive advantage. That's exactly how rational economic agents should behave.

Rational agents in the real world should realize that conspiring with others to make the world better gives them more benefits than being a greedy shit.

It is only in academic exercises where collaboration is made impossible that sociopathic behavior is optimal.

Maybe the economy should be structured for the real-world behavior then?

It is.

OP's actions are super obnoxious of course.

But I'm puzzled by the idea his actions make any sense as a _capitalist_ impulse (Of course neither of us know anything about OP except his story).

Resentment over what somebody else has is the quintessential mental sliver communism uses to drive people to destroy the system. Perhaps the OP was just engaging in an outburst of his own destructive revolutionary zeal against his fellow passengers because they had something he didn't.

I don't have anything to back my theories up, but when ChatGPT was new, heavily resource-constrained, but was catching on and I tried using it for sustainability research and I kept getting errors (service down / system overloaded), my mind always went to "yeah, people trying to do the two plus two is five or generating adult content. Perhaps trying to use it to generate bomb recipes. Let's try using ChatGPT for research again in a few hours"

Clearly the solution is to just make Wi-Fi free by default. Once this is done, it becomes uninteresting to download gigabytes of crap to "hurt" people. Win-win for everyone. Just saying.

> Once this is done, it becomes uninteresting to download gigabytes of crap to "hurt" people. Win-win for everyone.

I would disagree. Here in my corner of EU, public buses have a limited 30min - 1hour free wifi access. What most everyone does immediately getting in the bus is connect to the free wifi and start mindless scrolling on TikTok, Facebook or Instagram. Around 20-30% of the people are super obnoxious and play all the videos over loudspeaker or start calling their friends and speaking loudly as if they are in their home or something, until someone else yells at them. So far, I have only seen two person this month appearing to do something valuable(one was writing an email and another was checking local news).

Just because you think entertainment (or rather, their specific form of entertainment, since you seem to consider reading the news OK but facebook not ok) isn't "valuable" doesn't make it so.

Being able to enjoy entertainment (or, as you'd probably see it, "mindlessly waste the time" that you have to spend on the bus anyways) is what makes public transit bearable.

I really agree with this point; who’s to say making the email is not less valuable or making the world just a little worse? I would probably agree more if the example was Netflix or even YouTubr but part of me is still biased toward feeling TikTok is just probably neurologically worse than anything outside of drugs.

>Around 20-30% of the people are super obnoxious and play all the videos over loudspeaker or start calling their friends and speaking loudly as if they are in their home or something, until someone else yells at them.

This is a culture problem, and has nothing to do with free Wi-Fi. This kind of thing never happens here in Japan, except maybe foreign tourists.

Except there's 2,500 people on that ship and the satellite bandwidth is 15mbps. Now making it free doesnt work because the resources aren't there.

If you want free wifi, that's great but the private sector isn't going to do it for you. How many of these public nuisance hackers are advocating for large socialized programs to make wifi a human right on all manner of transport? Usually the hacker demographic is right-wing libertarian and would never advocate for socialism.

So you dont want socialism but you want socialized services? Curious.

If this person's story ended with "Then I started a website to advocate for regulations and pricing for better transport wifi," then that would be great! Instead he just drowned out the internet connection of paying customers who are now making angry calls at some poor tech support person making minimum wage in a poor country. He did nothing but hurt people out of his own immaturity and cheapness.

These are paying customers, discouraging them from coming back is a net loss. Suppose your cabin includes a shower but you need to pay every day to actually use it. Nobody would think that’s reasonable, but because internet used to be difficult companies are still tacking on insane fees even though the actual costs are minimal.

With Starlink you’re looking at a lot more than 15mbps. We’re at the point where some cruise lines offer free Wi-Fi and people still see multi megabit connections anyway.

Reasonable is determined if you already paid for the shower, and then are denied it. Where does this sense of entitlement come from?

Commerce includes many unspoken agreements. Order a meal at a restaurant and expect to pay list prices +taxes etc, you don’t expect to be charged for using the salt on the table, or the price of a doggy bag etc. Airlines don’t charge people to go to the bathroom, though they may reserve better bathrooms for first class etc.

Companies breaking with these trends face a backlash assuming a competitive marketplace.

Reasonable is not wanting to be nickle and dimed for every amenity that could possibly be split into a separate cost.

Prices for such add-ons, especially ones that your average customer won't think of before, are also often unreasonably high because the operator knows they have a captive audience they can exploit - you either buy from them or go without.

Is there some demographic data that shows that "public nuisance hackers" are mostly right-wing libertarian?

There’s something to be said for this approach

Once my company instituted a per diem limit for meals while travelling, I stopped eating cheap food and would deliberately spend exactly the limit to spite the penny pinchers

Why do you put this on people who love capitalism? It seems like inserting a tangential pet issue.

If anything, I would guess they are anti-capitalists because they are so indignant about someone offering a paid service.

> You're just hurting honest working class people trying to do work, email/call their kids, manage things like doctors appointments

Right, so they can do all that important stuff on technology that was invented by nerds and hackers over the decades, while they were being demonized by society, bullied, put down, and shoved aside by the so-called sociable class.

Yeah, I’ll continue not shedding tears over Joe Sixpack’s inability to check his football scores for a few minutes.

This is such an incredibly bizarre victimhood mindset that I feel like I must be misunderstanding it. Degrading a utility for everyone else is fine because of some perceived wrong by society done to your in group?

If you piss in the punch bowl at a party attended by your in group and perceived out group, you’re going to be justifiably hated by both.

And probably not get invited to more parties.

It is a strange form of entitlement, not unlike incels.

Somehow people get in their mind that they are owed X, then spiral into bitterness and jealousy when they dont get it, and then lash out arbitrarily.

The part that I dont get is where the sense of entitlement comes from? Imagine such a deep sense of entitlement to free wifi on a boat that you feel the need to take revenge on innocents.

A more charitable view is that there are some people that grew up with BBS and then the Internet and it was just a very different place with a culture for which nerds could sort of call home and now it is decidedly not that thing and it can be kind of sad for some people.

Sad is pretty different than angry and bitter, but I think I get what you are laying down.

I’m sympathetic to this point because I used to strongly have this feeling of “the Internet is for us nerds”, so I get it. I think that ship has sailed though, these people don’t even know about us or that we existed. I mean, the Internet is the most popular thing in the world but no one could tell you who Vint Cerf is, even so-called programmers today.

Couple weeks ago, I took my kids to a class at the mall, then decided to use their free wifi. I logged in successfully with my laptop, but it said no Internet.

I checked the default gateway and it took me to a cisco modem. It had all sort of diagnostic tooling including the list of devices connected to the modem. However, it showed no Internet connection. I googled the model on my phone, and the admin is supposed to be the serial number with blank password and there was an example of the pattern. Surprisingly, one of the devices connected to the modem had a name that looked like said pattern.

And just like that, I was in. I toggled the Internet button, 15 seconds later it turned green. I set a new password on the device.

Award for good IT citizen goes to you, sir or madam or <insert honorary>.

Except for setting a new password on the device. Now nobody else can perform the same public service next time the Internet goes down on that modem.

Probably some kid working at the `All-Star Burger & Shake` stand wrote a script to reset the internet every 27 minutes and it "just worked" for 9 years until this guy came in...

IANAL, but it's probably also illegal (ie CFAA) by accessing other people's systems and denying their owners access to them by changing the password.

The Steam Deck is what I pull out on flights nowadays. It's quite amazing how fast it helps the time fly (pun intended).

I was visiting family and logged on to a neighbors insecure wifi one time to get in my work vpn. I couldn’t connect to the vpn and I noticed I could easily get into their router, so I did and changed an MTU setting on it and voila back in business. :)

This is awesome and I love hacks[1] like this. On the other hand, if I remember correctly, I've checked recently and global DNS in skywifi seemed to resolve fine without paying. So I think - at least in the plane I was in - just a regular iodine [2] tunnel would work

[1] in the original meaning of the word. [2] https://github.com/yarrick/iodine

Years ago I ran a “public” iodine service - anyone could connect, outbound traffic from the server went over Tor (to protect me from abuse requests).

I kept a log of all train/hotel/airport/etc networks that it worked on, and also offered some other tunneling protocols.

Was a fun project for a while. Wish I’d kept the thing running.

These days DNS tunnelling is a bit harder to do due to some DNS servers (notably Google) randomising the case in DNS requests which breaks certain encodings horribly.

Without understanding the nuances of the issues, it sounds like the issue of case randomization could be fixed with changes to iodine while sacrificing some bandwidth.

https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/security... as a security measure.

Why did end up stopping your service btw? Sounds like an awesome contribution to the free internet.

I want to host one now as well!

iodine worked for me (on another airline/wifi) 6 years ago. Fun for the idea and principle, totally useless in practice given its speed, unless maybe you run an IM on top of UDP ;-)

This was my experience too.

Had a Delta flight that used gogoinflight internet. On my initial outbound flight I noticed DNS still worked without paying, so when I was flying back home, I had set up a simple iodine tunnel on my homelab in advance.

I was surprised by how completely unusable it was. Of the few sites I even attempted to load, I only just barely managed stallman.org after modifying my browsers maximum timeout via a flag (and it look ~5 minutes).

SSH was also not usable, even a simple "whoami" took ~1 minute to finally execute.

So yeah fun as a cool gimmick, but other than _maaaaybe_ connecting to a single IRC channel, its not practical for anything.

Same experience here, I've never been able to use it for anything worthwhile. On one flight I was able to send an email by manually telnetting to an SMTP server and I eventually got an email out with a single line of text but that's been about it.

I'm wondering if the problem has something to do with TCP retransmissions exploding the number of DNS requests. In the iodine client terminal there was a continuous flow of DNS requests and (most of the time) answers, so the communication at that level was kind-of working... but at the SSH level, it was practically unusable.

if dns is allowed on the firewall, shouldn't you just be able to just use wireguard via udp/53, without fiddling with dns protocol itself?

The reason iodine works is not because any traffic to any IP on port 53 works, but because they allow traffic to a specific IP, and forward DNS queries.

Let's say the plane's DNS server is 192.168.1.53 and your DNS server is 1.1.1.53

You can't talk to 1.1.1.53 because that's blocked, so running wireguard on 1.1.1.53:53 doesn't help you. Instead, you run iodine there and configure "*.mydomain.com" to have 1.1.1.53 as its dns server.

Now, you can talk to 192.168.1.53 to make DNS queries, and then the dns server there, which isn't firewalled, will forward to 1.1.1.53:53, and proxy back the response.

Obviously, the plane's DNS server won't speak wireguard, nor forward wireguard for you.

That's the usecase for iodine, when you have access to some local DNS server which will forward requests for you, but you don't have access to the public internet, so you can access your own DNS server indirectly and thus do IP-over-DNS that way.

That's what Iodine's raw mode does (minus wireguard). It tries that first.

"I’d forgotten to charge my headphones so Limp Bizkit started playing out of my laptop speakers. Fortunately no one else on the plane seemed to mind so we all rocked out together."

People like this lack basic civility. I'm sure a lot of the people around Robert did mind, they were just too polite to ask him to stop imposing his gratuitous noise on them.

If the author wrote, "This is satire," it'd ruin the satire.

Poe's law. This doesn't seem completely absurd because there are plenty of jerks on planes who don't dim excessively-bright screens much less reduce the volume of crap music.

I've flown close to a million miles and can't recall a single time someone played music out of their speakers.

At least once or twice so far this year, for me.

Anecdotal evidence. We'll just have to agree to disagree.

If you have to explain that it’s a joke, then it wasn’t funny

What's the bar, though? If out of a million people reading a joke, 80% find it funny, 20% find it meh, and one solitary person needs the joke explained to them, I think it's still fair to call it a funny joke. There are multiple comments in this thread missing the satire so it's obvious the percentage is a bit higher than that, but I'd wager the majority of people didn't need the joke explained to them.

To you.

This doesn't apply to satire. Your lack of media literacy is not evidence of bad satire.

There’s enough people in this thread saying the same, to prove I’m not an outlier in my interpretation

HN is not a representative sample of normal people and has a long understood inability to recognize satire, or even just particularly strong sarcasm. HN not getting a joke is not evidence of it being a bad joke.

I've never seen an online community fail to grasp sarcasm as badly as HN. I deliberately make one out of 50 posts ultra-sarcastic (to the point where no normal person could possibly believe I'd hold whatever view I wrote), and they always, always go straight to -4.

Autism is a spectrum disorder and I'd say that spectrum is quite biased around here.

Coming from a family with several people “on the spectrum,” I want to point out that _some_ people with ASD have trouble with sarcasm.

I would also contend that HN, like my workplace (university math department) skews towards folks with ASD.

Usual caveats of “when you met one person with autism, you met one person with autism…” etc etc.

Hell, even jokes that have been properly marked get downvoted and flagged here.

It was obviously a joke, and not a bad one.

I read this as a joke. (Which I thought was funny precisely because so many people do lack this kind of basic civility—but I'm pretty sure not the author?)

While I didn't find the joke funny, it does thematically match the piece - the hacker who supposedly see the possibility to get free internet as a viable opportunity. Later in the piece the author does distance himself from that image, revealing the tone in the opening was merely a stylistic choice, a writer's device, as clearly he is not the kind of a person who will in practice exploit the airline systems.

I believe this is what the humans refer to as "humour".

Hopefully it was a joke like others have said - if not, then he’s incredibly rude and callous

It's very, very obviously a joke.

This response lacks a basic sense of humor.

Given the tone of this and other articles on the site I'd be inclined to suggest that _this was a joke_.

In my mind the whole plane was rockin to „… keep on rollin baby, you know what time it it is …“

It’s obviously a joke.

Did you really not read this as a joke? It seemed obvious that it was one to me.

For me it was 50/50. 50% it was a joke. 50% the guy was "one of those a-holes". They exist so it's hard to tell.

They aren't always American as some other commenters have pointed out. Was on a tour bus from Paris to Giverny and some Italian guy thought it was okay to watch his sport events out loud the entire way. Had a similar experience on a long distance train in Germany and another in a train in Japan (western person, not American). It's crazy to me people don't get how annoying it is. I'm sure they'd be annoying if I pulled out something louder but it apparently never occurs to them.

I did not read it as a joke. Granted,I'm not American and English is not my first language.

In a way it made me think "wow, it had to be an American who doesn't care about others than him and is rude and self centered"

Which is stupid a stupid generalization I know. And also goes to show the ambiguity of written language. And how strong our preconceptions can impact our judgement (as it did mine initially).

I'm overthinking this haha.

The dry sarcastic humor of the author made it very obvious to me that this was satire. I have a very similar sense of humor, at least partly. And I'm a native American English speaker.

Giveaways:

>I logged in to my JetStreamers Diamond Altitude account and started clicking.

Satire! It's not called that, but it's a similar marketing wankery version.

>This clickable rascal would allow me to access the entire internet through my airmiles account. This would be slow. It would be unbelievably stupid. But it would work.

"It would be unbelievably stupid but I'm going to do it anyway!"

>Several co-workers were asking me to review their PRs because my feedback was “two weeks late” and “blocking a critical deployment.” But my ideas are important too so I put on my headphones and smashed on some focus tunes.

Even this was a sarcastic/satirical leadup.

>I’d forgotten to charge my headphones so Limp Bizkit started playing out of my laptop speakers. Fortunately no one else on the plane seemed to mind so we all rocked out together.

Limp Bizkit is a very famous (or infamous) band that gets notoroiusly mocked. The odds of even a single person rocking out with that playing out of laptop speakers is tiny. Two people? Everyone on the plane? 0.0% chance.

I don't know why I put so much effort into explaining this.

I appreciate it . Thanks.

Well it's not funny so it's hard to read as a joke.

[dead]

I didn’t read it as a joke

It's clearly a joke

Jokes are funny.

The mental image of a plane rocking out to rap rock from tinny laptop speakers is funny.

Whoosh

Maybe take a stand-up comedy class or something

The author sounds so incredibly obnoxious.

Am I the only one who is always tired in the plane no matter what and cannot anything but close my eyes and wait til the flight is over?

The idea of pulling out my laptop or even a book is just… tiring. There’s a lot of noise as well (airbus anyone?) and I don’t have noise cancel headphones, so concentration is difficult. Without taking into account that I have spent at least 2h away from home among trains, trams and security controllers. The bad (unhealthy) food available in airports doesn’t help either. Half the year the weather doesn’t help either(it’s either too hot or too cold). Plus the 10 kilos backpack I have on my back is making me sweat no matter what.

So, basically, I’m never in the mood of doing anything in a plane.

> Am I the only one who is always tired in the plane no matter what and cannot anything but close my eyes and wait till the flight is over?

I suffer from adult ADHD. It is harder for me to focus when at work. But, on a plane or other busy places, I can achieve laser focus. Counterintuitive, but I am told that many ADHD brains work like this.

My time on the plane is the most productive.

Interesting. Sounds like John von Neumann, who was famous for this.

I'm glad I'm not the only one. This is me too. I don't get it. It's like doctors waiting rooms, traffic, etc I do some of my best thinking.

But give me a quiet room, what I need, and time and I do absolutely nothing. It's ridiculous.

I used to get my laptop out and try to do things. But ever since the seat pitch started shrinking, I find it really hard to get anything larger than a tablet out without it needing to rest on me or risk having the screen broken if the person in front of me leans back. The last one happened to a coworker a few years ago.

So these days I usually just pull out my iPad and noise cancelling headphones and catch up on my movies or TV shows.

Sounds like a case for lazy glasses.

No, you are not the only one. My body does the same thing, and I think this is related to lower amounts of oxygen in the air. It's not about the noise (noise canceling headphones do wonders), it's definitely about the air.

But apparently there are people who are not affected by this at all and can do useful work on airplanes.

I'm intensely jealous. I used to go to the doctor and get medication specifically to make me sleepy on the plane. I've decided not to take that kind of thing anymore and dread the next time I have a long flight.

I can deal with all the airport crap, but sitting on the plane for two 12 hour stretches is horrible.

> I can deal with all the airport crap, but sitting on the plane for two 12 hour stretches is horrible.

What's wrong with it? Perhaps I'm weird, I love flying and always look forward to my next flight, bonus points if its a long one.

It forces me to unplug from the internet, so I always bring along my kindle to take a decent chunk out of my book backlog.

Of course I have my laptop too, though its not useful for much besides cataloging my knowledge base and getting a head start on essays for school.

I'm curious why many people seem to dislike flying. I wonder if its more of an introvert/extrovert split or a young/old one. I want nothing more than to be able to do my own thing undisturbed, and flights are the perfect avenue for that.

I prefer to spend most of my time sitting down by myself and thinking, so it's definitely not a matter of unplugging, nor is it a lack of stimulation.

For me, it's almost always that I'm exhausted and basically unable to be physically comfortable. When I have 10+ hour flights with layovers it feels like enhanced interrogation: I'm prevented from getting any significant amount of good sleep, and I'm forced to be in a kind of sitting stress position where I can't get comfortable and I can't sleep. Forget about reading, I'm just not capable of doing it.

The noise isn't the only issue but it certainly contributes - I've noticed fixing the noise issue with headphones/earplugs does wonders. I would expect the air pressure (=oxygen availability) to contribute too, and another factor are the movements and vibrations.

You could test if this was the case by traveling to a high-altitude city and staying there long enough to acclimate before flying out.

I'm the opposite. I can't sleep or even get tired regardless of how tired or sleep deprived I am. Makes trans-Atlantics worse, and traveling with others almost feels like getting mocked when they fall asleep for eight hours at a time.

You are not the only one. I feel super hazy during flights and shut my eyes for the flight to land. I tried reading books and getting some work done too but my brain just checks out after 5-10 minutes.

Also, for some odd reasons, aircraft meals gives me bloating issues every single time and need medication immediately after I have landed.

Interestingly, I have flown in business class twice and was able to do some reading partially before my brain checkedout.

On long distance train rides, it is. easier for me to actually get some work done given that am sitting facing the direction on which the train is going. However, if the train gets fairly crowded, then my brain again decides to checkout.

Yes, travel is tiring/stressful, air travel doubly so (first the airport gauntlet, then a box full of noise, vibrations and with about 70% of normal oxygen levels available to your body due to the lower pressure).

However, you can make it suck less. Stow your backpack overhead so you have at least some leg room. Have comfortable clothes, possibly adjustable ones (zip-off pants, t-shirt plus a separate warmer layer you can take off). Wear earplugs - possibly from the point on where you leave your home - to reduce the added stress from noise. If you have noise cancelling over-the-ear headphones, those go over the earplugs, then you crank the volume up (given the surrounding noise, this should not leak enough noise to be annoying for your seat mates). If you don't, consider noise-insulating in-ear headphones + earmuffs.

I tend to fall asleep on planes easily (usually aided by sleep deprivation because I procrastinated packing for way too long), but when I wake up, I tend to be perfectly in the mood for some dumb entertainment.

Totally agree. I’ve always assumed that high CO2 levels and low air pressure must have some effect on drowsiness and cognition

Edit: some googling shows that commercial flights can reach 1500 to sometimes 3000 ppm co2. Pressure is around 0.75 atm at cruising altitude. My understanding is that would be noticeable

Confirmed, flown SF-Toronto round trip multiple times, Toronto-SF-South Korea, Toronto-London, and on both narrow body and wide body aircraft I'm lucky to get less than 1800ppm, with peaks at 3100ppm (on the London flight) according to my aranet4 placed either at the top of the magazine pouch or in an open exposed pocket in my bag on the floor.

Strange, from my own measurements, I remember the co2 levels to be sub-600.

The study i saw this on was a review of data from 200ish US domestic flights. Maybe you were close to a vent, or some other variable im not thinking of, or just an outlier

Possibly increased ventilation post-COVID?

For me I find planes a good way to disconnect from the outside world.

Buy yourself some noise cancelling headphones, either over-ear or in-ear like Airpods Pro. At a minimum these provide a lot of comfort on planes to keep the noise down from potential passengers and the aircraft itself. I often wear them without any music at all.

I like to whip a book out and read or look out the window.

Sounds like a pair of noise cancelling headphones would be a good investment in your quality of life, then! Or you can get those noise-reduction things that look like headphones but just attenuate noise for construction sites. My brother tipped me off to that, it's great! (You can also listen to music / movies without having the volume on too high, too)

Funnily enough, a pair of AirPods Pros were the first thing that let me sleep on a flight!

I can burn hours reading on a plane, if I'm not really tired. But I feel the same as you about working on a laptop.

The shaking, not enough space to type properly etc.

Interesting, I'm the total opposite.

I feel the rare permission to live as if I'm in cryo stasis and time doesn't matter and no one expects anything from me.

The plane noise is like white noise which helps me focus, chilly temps keeps me alert and I'm cozy in a sweater. I bring snacks I enjoy.

And I get to coding. Or working on presentations. Or journalling.

Also I cannot sleep in a chair/on a plane no matter what (even if utterly exhausted, I'm swaying an and out of consciousness every few seconds). That is so dreadful that I always avoid red-eye. In fact I just avoid being tired on a plane in general, typically booking a morning/daytime flight, have a little caffeine (I usually avoid it, so it's a jolt), no big meals, ...

Definitely not just you. My wishful thinking compels me to bring a book on a plane, but I usually end up either trying to sleep, or playing yet another stupid game of iPhone Civilization.

drugs

Sending stock quotes, scores, weather, etc. reminds me of a service that Google used to offer via text message. I used that a ton before I got my first smartphone: text W[ZIP code] to 46645 (GOOGL) and it would text back the weather. Same for stock:[symbol] and many other things I've since forgotten. Of course Google killed it, but it was neat while it lasted!

In my days of messing around with PHP, I wrote a Twitter bot called "SongBuddy" for the purpose of looking up a song via SMS based on some lyrics.

You would send it a DM via SMS (which Twitter supported at the time) containing a few lyrics, and it would do a Google search of "<your input> lyrics", parse the search results, and in theory return the artist and title to you via SMS.

It never worked very well, but I was proud of it!

Yet the currency conversion site I use which is run by one prof, probably on a Pentium III computer stashed under a stairwell at their university, has been up and running for decades and will probably last a lifetime.

What website is that?

fx.sauder.ubc.ca

I made a backend with Twilio and an AWS instance to give me a SMS<->ChatGPT interface.

That allows me to ask ChatGPT questions from anywhere on Earth via a handheld satellite communicator (inReach Mini 2). It's kind of nice to be able to ask ChatGPT things from the middle of death valley.

I used that all the time from my flip phone. It took forever to type out a google search and results could take a minute or two to arrive but it was better than nothing.

Primarily I used it to google the address of a place I wanted to go so I could enter that in my TomTom. Times have changed.

I'm curious when that was. I came up with this idea around 1995 while working for a telecoms research company (a subsidiary of Ericsson). Flight status updates was my canonical example.

Nobody imagined that P2P messaging (requiring multiple presses of a numeric keypad to type one character) would become as popular as it did, so an information service was the best use I could imagine, especially given the growing availability of data through the nascent Web. (Teletext was also still a thing, and we had a separate project for scraping that...)

But guess what those of us with access to SMS (and the general public) ended up using it for?

I had an alphanumeric pager like this in the 1990s. It had a few dozen text channels that were constantly updated with topics like news and sport.

That is a blast from the past! This was around the time of slide-out keyboards, right? I remember using this now too.

I still miss those keyboards

Same. Evo Shift. I miss the days when I wasn't frustrated every time I type.

Apparently this is what my gen will rocker rant about.

HTC Touch Pro 2 and I could type better on that than any phone since. Even managed to get it running Android (it was a Windows Mobile phone which is... old)

Gladly! I’d go so far as to even say I was articulate.

we will look back on whatsapp bots and ai chatbots in 10yr like we look back on those sms services now.

Interesting to see how close the author got to producing an abstract "TCP-over-shared-editable-fields", which in itself would make a really cool tool.

Imagine a proxy where all you did was design at a high-level a way to write/read to a shared resource from two sides, and then it handled all the rest for you as a SOCKS proxy.

I think TCP/IP-over-DNS has been done for getting free internet over paid Boingo hotspots in airports.

Eventually free Wi-Fi became the standard and this is not a thing anymore.

We have just progressed to fighting the in-flight free Wi-Fi battle now. Eventually in-flight Wi-Fi will be free everywhere. It already is on several airlines.

Indeed it has with iodine[0] being a popular example.

[0] https://github.com/yarrick/iodine

I have thought about this for years, ever since ISPs in my country started advertising "unlimited whatsapp" on otherwise data limited plans. It would only work for text and not images or video, but it would have been good enough for general web browsing.

There is https://github.com/aleixrodriala/wa-tunnel to tunnel over whatsapp

Thanks! I knew the idea was so obvious somebody else had already gone through with it

Why could you not just proxy the images and videos as uploads to WhatsApp? They would be re-encoded possibly, but better than nothing...

I meant that the ISP would block wpp image and video traffic, but would allow text through. It has been several years since this happened, so I may be misremembering.

I belive you're misunderstanding what TCP-over-X means. If you can exchange messages, it means you could exchange bytes, if you can do that you can send any form of data, including HTTPS which is an application over TCP. HTTPS could then include video and images, encrypted and therefore difficult to specifically block.

GP was asking specifically about sending images and video as wpp images and video (which is why he mentioned them being re-encoded). I suspect that sending that amount of data as wpp text messages would run you into some sort of trouble, but maybe not! Somebody above posted an implementation of this idea, and they mention that using it could get you banned which is unsurprising imo

Few years ago, dean of our college decided to block lan network after 10PM because of “gaming impact attendance” blah blah.

Anyway, the way they implemented this is by blocking all traffic from/to ip addresses but not blocking tcp and completely forgot about ipv6 as it was not pretty new. So, I created a simple p2p chat Application which will work with ipv6. Only problem is that we had to share our ipv6 addresses with our friends which they have to maintain in contacts. It worked great until we figured tunneling to computer which is outside the network was much easier.

This reminds me, and perhaps a perfect example of writing useless software[1] and the subsequent HN discussion[2].

Is it a life changer? Probably not. Was it fun to write and explore? Most likely!

We definitely need to make more stuff like this.

[1]: https://ntietz.com/blog/write-more-useless-software/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37911900

A long time ago (2011) when I was teaching the networking course at Brown, the final assignment in the course was to create the equivalent of iodine, IP-over-DNS tunneling [1]. Being a course assignment, the handout only outlines the solution. We provided a set of domain names and DNS servers on VMs for students to use.

After the course ended, one student going home did manage to use his assignment to get Internet access from the airport, as we had forgotten to turn off the DNS server nodes.

Over the years we had a lot of fun with creative final projects in the course besides IP-over-DNS, including web-based phone tethering, DNS spoofing, openflow-based SDN routing, LT (Erasure) Coding, a BitTorrent client, and a DNS-redirection-based CDN with leaderboard.

[1] https://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs168/s11/handouts/dtun.pdf

Hacker: Those stupid website makers, they didn't think of this hole.

Website makers: There's a hole here, but we make it super slow so nobody in their right mind would use it and even if they do then there's no problem whatsoever. It would only waste their time.

>Author and programmer Sam Hughes, by the way, pushed this to the limit and invented Base 65,536, which includes basically every character from every language. It is ridiculous and unnecessary, but when has that ever stopped programmers?

https://youtu.be/gocwRvLhDf8?t=103

This is the third time I’ve been nerd sniped with something qntm related in a weeks time. I’ve never been more pleased haha.

Website makers underestimated the dedication of unreasonable individuals.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-10-30

Thank you to share! I never knew about SMBC (not Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation) before your post...

don't forget to click the red button on every comic!

Thanks for the tip! I knew about the “secret” text on XKCD comics but all these years never knew about the red button on SMBC!

Reminded of using Iodine to break out of captive portals using DNS TXT/SRV etc records https://github.com/yarrick/iodine

Most flight WiFi networks don't block DNS traffic, so if you set up a custom DNS server, you can tunnel everything through DNS. It's slow, but it's free internet!

I once found out on a plane ssh wasn't blocked even if I wasn't paying so I just used a remote vps that I had already setup as a socks proxy to browse the web.

how about spinning up a wireguard server on udp/53 and connect to it with wireguard client. I haven't tried it myself but it could work. Gonna try it next time I am going to fly

This doesn't work. I have tried it. The trick iodine tool uses works very differently.

I'm afraid to get on some kind of terrorist watch list that way.

Then don’t visit any terrorist sites till you’re back on the ground :)

It's been a long time since I audibly laughed out loud at a network diagram. Possibly never. There is a first time for everything.

A lot of cruise ships will let you pay for a messaging tier which unblocks messaging apps, but blocks everything else. I found this repo that uses whatsapp messages as a form of proxy. [1] It's pretty cool as a PoC, but in reality is much too slow to use for more than maybe checking the news.

[1]https://github.com/aleixrodriala/wa-tunnel

> Several co-workers were asking me to review their PRs because my feedback was “two weeks late” and “blocking a critical deployment.” But my ideas are important too so I put on my headphones and smashed on some focus tunes. I’d forgotten to charge my headphones so Limp Bizkit started playing out of my laptop speakers. Fortunately no one else on the plane seemed to mind so we all rocked out together.

He's not serious, right? Right?

Correct, it's a joke.

Queue the joke about "coding on a boat" from StackOverflow.

I needed to get a message to my misses while on a long flight home. It wasn't an emergency but it would have been a total bummer to let her know after I had landed.

The problem was I had packed my wallet into my check-in like a dumbass. I couldn't figure out a way to sign up for in flight wifi. Plenty of apps and services have my credit card number on my phone but none of them would show the entire number without me signing on.

The flight however had Alipay as one of the apps to pay, which would have been great except it wasn't working. It still allowed connections to alipay. I figured out I could cancel the payment through a button hiding in a transaction details page and be dumped out to the alipay home screen.

The alipay chat feature wasn't working though, they'd must have thought about that. But some of the mini-apps did work, including the mini-app for my home automation.

It let me send a message to the terminal thingy at the door of my place where you buzz people in (there was a feature to send mail to other rooms, I just sent it to myself).

This took up about 40 minutes of the 11 hour flight.

Set up a password manager like Bitwarden or 1Password (which you should absolutely do anyways), and you can put all your card information in the manager. They typically will auto fill them as well

Reminds me of the "Bob Wehadababyitsaboy" GEICO commercial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JxhTnWrKYs

amazing how many people have that commercial burned into their memory.

In the early nineties, before logging into work from home was a thing, my friend created an email based terminal tunnel: he'd send emails with Unix commands to this account, executed the command, and returned an email with the result.

There were no security checks whatsoever: everyone who know the magic word that triggered the start of the commands could do whatever they wanted on the Alcatel servers.

Along the same lines, there are some programming contests that use a web based system for submitting solutions. They often restrict internet access to just the contest website, but a motivated user could use the same trick with the user profile fields to sneak information in/out.

As a bonus one of those contest systems allows users to upload a profile photo, which would greatly increase the bandwidth!

This is bonkers and I love it. A great hack in spirit but also a good primer on how a fundamental protocol like TCP kinda-if-you-squint-sorta powers everything else.

I wish I thought of it on my last trans-atlantic!

KLM, specially on long flights, has a free tier wifi where you can use major instant messaging without charge. If you want to surf the web, it’s pretty cheap. If i recall around 30-40 euro for a 9-10hours flight. Or pay less for an hour.

Was considering to “hack” my way out of the free tier. But paying was just too easy and it’s affordable.

Sorry for boring addition/story.

...it’s pretty cheap. If i recall around 30-40 euro for a 9-10hours flight.

I would love to be in a position where I could consider this cheap. FWIW, I pay about €46 per month for Internet service.

If you pay 1000+ for the flight an additional 40 Euros isn't that bad.

That’s how they get you.

The bias is known as “Anchoring Effect”, where your perception of subsequent prices is skewed by the initial high price.

Except you’re on a literal plane flying through the sky. This isn’t the same as being on the ground with permanent cables attached to your internet connection. Not only is this incredible that you’d get internet at all, it’s totally reasonable for it to cost a lot more!

Assuming there are 300 people on a flight and half of them purchase this, that would be $4-6000 per trip for internet access. What do you think the actual margins on this access are, especially relative to the other eye watering and obscene surcharges airlines impose?

Times have changed, with Starlink the cost is going to be a rounding error. Free high speed Wifi will probably be available on long haul flights within the next 3-5 years.

With “cheap” i meant it was still affordable. If it was 10x then it would not be affordable. Just like a bottle a water costs more at the airport, internet access costs more on a plane in the sky.

Perhaps i am a bit biased i would expense the bill to the company. A few hours of work definitely pays back the prepaid internet.

As mentioned, a decade or two ago, this was not possible or very limited to the elites. I certainly dont feel or behave like an elite. So it is “affordable” to me

singapore air has free unlimited wifi. only need a krisflyer account. speed is also decent.

Southwest Airlines offers free IM through iMessage and WhatsApp too. Should be able to tunnel internet traffic through iMessage.

I'm trying to recall the name of the app that does this, but one of the travel-tracking apps uses Apple's push notification system (which the network treats as "messaging") to send e.g. gate changes to subscribing devices through this "messaging only" network.

The APNS payload is a JSON blob that's limited to 4KB, with a few required pieces of information but mostly free-form, so it's definitely in the scope of e.g. a (text-only) blog post split over a few messages.

Believe you're referring to Flighty

What's an airmiles account? I guess it's some kind of frequent flyer thing?

By the way, many many paid WiFi networks leak DNS requests like a sieve when not logged in or paid and you can tunnel through it easily. There's a piece of software for that, iodine I think it was called. Never really needed it but it's there and it works.

Yes indeed. Us greybeards were tunneling ssh through DNS using a Perl-based hacking tool thrown together by Dan Kaminsky in 2004 called “OzymanDNS”. DNS tunneling is now ubiquitously used for data exfiltration and consequently all major DNS platforms have methods to detect it.

Mind you, this was before the age of WiFi on airplanes. But within other gated networks, it used to work quite well. I recall getting tens of Kbps.

So that was the name of it! I only had vague recollections of me setting up PuTTY with a proxycommand involving some kind of compiled to .exe Perl script. Worked out in the end with a free VPS and train station wifi. As usual, I spent far longer setting this up than actually using it, but it was one of the many small things that got me started on my career path.

Thank you for the trip down memory lane!

I “hacked” free WiFi on a very long flight to Beijing about 10 years ago when I was in my 20s. I was visiting my girlfriend’s family and didn’t actually have more than $20 to my name at the time.

It was a simple matter of joining the network, and then dumping the traffic in monitor mode. I could log MAC addresses of other devices on the network.

I made a list of addresses and then spoofed someone else’s address that must have paid, and blamo, I’m online.

I would rotate to another address when Internet access deteriorated: this meant the other guy was trying to use the Internet at the same time.

Yeah, I know I’m awful.

ARP spoofing was a thing most prevalent in the late '90's and early '00's.

Back then, TCP session hijacking coordinated with IP and ARP spoofing was fun. That was the era of airpwn and goatse injection into unsecured wifi. TLS and such made most of it moot.

Modern network security measures tends to shut most of it down now.

Also, I wouldn't do anything approaching hacking on a flight to the PRC. That would just be stupid.

I also accidentally brought my Adderall, having packed in a hurry. It’s just an illegal drug there. I didn’t realize until I was going through my bags in a hotel. I’ve never claimed I’m particularly smart.

In all liklihood if I had been caught they’d have just destroyed them or worse case sent me back to the US rather than doing the jail or international incident thing, I believe.

My ex’s dad had an important enough job as director of water resources for much of a province and was a party member and likely could have gotten me out of trouble besides him suffering some major embarrassment.

I have heard that you can often do this at the IP address layer instead of the MAC layer.

The trouble is that IP conflict detection may have to be disabled.

It won't work. IPv4 spoofing with multiple MAC addresses typically blocks one or the other. ARP spoofing also tends block one or the other device, but sometimes it sorta works.

Recently I found Cloudflare's WARP app let me bypass the chat-only restriction on some long-haul airlines. You'd get like 5kbps bandwidth, but it was enough to read HN.

Brilliant! I love stories like this. This is real hacking :)

Am disappointed though to have reached the end of the article only to find no mention of stats regarding max speed, efficiency etc vs the paid-for wifi.

Also, not sure why you wouldn’t just use Base64 encoding for which optimised versions already exist instead of rolling your own conversion to/from base 26 (or 52).

> Also, not sure why you wouldn’t just use Base64 encoding for which optimised versions already exist instead of rolling your own conversion to/from base 26 (or 52).

It's mentioned in the article, but base64 includes weird characters that might not be allowed in a name field, like `+=/`. I also wouldn't be surprised if the airline name field didn't allow numbers.

Reminds me a bit of this post: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

"People’s names are not transport protocols"

Not to forget a stat about the number of "airline account name-change" e-mails sent to some (hopefully) junk e-mail account for each "name change". Ideally in relation to destination web-page design and amount of junk javascript embedded therein.

"several bytes per second"

I think the first terminal-to-host connection I used at university was 300bps. That's about 30 bytes a second, and watching the characters of a large block of text appear on screen, it did feel like I could almost count them as they went past.

So I can attest from personal experience that a double-digit number of bytes per second is enough to perform useful work, yes.

I pay for WiFi on long-haul flights because I am bit scared of flying and it keeps me distracted and connected to the world and friends and relatives (maybe I am scared because I feel isolated?).

Anyway, on my last flight I tried WiFi Hotspot and I was able to give WiFi to my girlfriend and dad, just paying for one account on my device. It isn't free but at least it allows everyone on my party to be connected.

WiFi-to-WiFi hotspot is a good idea, I don't think all phones can do that though. I once used my rooted Android to spoof my Wifes MAC address to use her in-flight WiFi she paid for after she was not using it anymore.

If I understand correctly, if your WiFi chip comes with 2.4 and 5 GHz bands, it's "trivial" to connect to the network using the one band and provide the hotspot on the other one - it already has 2 antennas - at least the issue wouldn't be the hardware.

Lots of hardware supports being operated in access point mode and station mode at the same time -- on the same radio/antenna(s).

Even the venerable (and ancient) WRT54G could do this with appropriate firmware.

IIRC, I've even used this functionality with Windows ICS on my laptop many moons ago

It's not necessarily an efficient function, but efficiency isn't always the most important thing.

(These days, I often travel with a Mikrotik device that I've set up to be a hotspot abuser, so as to provide myself and whoever is with me a slice of Internet while having the immediate appearance of being a solitary device. It does this trick very well indeed.)

AFAIK this only works if your hotspot device functions as a NAT and not a bridge

ZeroTier, Tailscale, and several other UDP based mesh protocols will sometimes work in “free” mode on planes, but it tends to be horrifically slow.

If UDP is completely open, then QUIC would work too. Quite a bit of the public Internet works fine with QUIC.

And there's already a protocol to proxy over QUIC, called MASQUE.

Did they forget to block UDP? Or they left it totally open for DNS to work?!

Usually: it’s left open to unfuck DNS.

Some of them will try force you to use their local resolver, but often UDP will be left open (or left open on port 53) because it is easier.

When they force a local resolver you can often tunnel over DNS requests, though this only works sometimes :)

setup your wireguard server on udp/53 and voila.

I was recently on a cruise ship in the Caribbean, and they sold "Starlink powered" internet service for $40 a day. Interestingly, they seemed to let notification service traffic through. Any data delivered through a platform based notification made it through just fine, including large images in a youtube notification.

I assume it was to entice you to buy the wifi for some important notification. Or just so you would GET that important notification in the first place. Either way, probably eminently abusable on android at least.

That said, who the hell buys overpriced internet connectivity on a 7 day cruise? I have an addictive personality and spend pretty much all my free time on Youtube or Reddit, and it was refreshing to be without. I especially felt sad about all the young teens who were obviously scrolling tiktok or instagram. What parent buys their child a $3000 cruise ticket and then also pays an additional $300 per child for them to completely not do it? Cheaper than a week of babysitting maybe.

This is exactly the sort of post that gives me a ray of hope that the Internet still has some of its old magic in it.

Thank you for this. Very well done.

The lengths that people will go to to avoid paying $10-20 for onboard WiFi is nuts.

Not that I condone stealing, but it really surprises you that people do not want to pay for service that has a $0 marginal cost to the company?

On a site where many of us (in the US) make crazy money slinging code and the author of this article works for literally one of the hottest tech companies out there right now as a SWE, absolutely yes.

I vaguely recall a story from a long time ago when companies like AOL and CompuServe sent you CDs in the mail with demo versions of their products. You could dial up using them and access a subset of their services before purchasing full access. Someone figured out that although the rest of the internet was firewalled, they still relayed DNS requests to the original DNS servers (maybe needing a low TTL) and used this to tunnel via a custom DNS server. Et voilà! Free ISP :)

It's all fun and games until they shut down your frequent flyer program account. That seems to be the way airlines prefer to dish out punishment.

Somebody’s getting fired at air miles

At a company I used to work for long ago locked the network down pretty good, so a coworker used ping requests and a server at home to get around it.

> At first I thought that I’d write them using Go, but then I realised that if I used Python then I could call the final tool PySkyWiFi.

Hmm, GoFlyWiFi? GoHighWifi?

Nah it was definitely worth picking Python for the quadruple rhyme.

JumboGoSlowTelco?

Considering that some of those paid Wi-Fi services are provided by Boingo, maybe BoinGo is a nice name

>> my feedback was “two weeks late” and “blocking a critical deployment.”

>> I’d forgotten to charge my headphones so Limp Bizkit started playing out of my laptop speakers. Fortunately no one else on the plane seemed to mind

Talent or not, managers commonly say that 10% of people cause 90% of the headaches. I guarantee the others on the plane minded very much, but were just to polite to say anything.

I have used iodine, which though isn't the easiest to setup works on every airline I have tried, to bypass airline Internet firewalls. DNS packets are one of the few things they don't seem to even try to filter. I wouldn't be surprised if you could just run wireguard over UDP/22.

Cool hack aside this part really grates me

> Limp Bizkit started playing out of my laptop speakers. Fortunately no one else on the plane seemed to mind so we all rocked out together.

No they were just being too polite to speak up and say this is inconsiderate AF.

It’s bad enough when people do this on public transport, but on a fuckin plane?!?

I believe it was satire, meant to be humorous..

You realize that this part was a joke and didn't actually happen right?

Haven't you ever been on a night flight where you had to ask someone to turn down their Samsung phablet from the brightness of indoor landing light? That's roughly the level of inconsideration that is routine on flights, so this passage isn't so extreme as to fall under Poe's law and falls in a gray zone of ambiguity. If they had said Bodysnatcher at full volume for 20 minutes and no one complained, then it would've been absolutely certain to be satire without a doubt. I kind of like the idea of it remaining ambiguous, almost as much as I enjoy appearing to lie while telling people the truth.

I certainly applaud the author’s creativity, but aren’t there potential very significant downsides to using abusing an account linked to your identity in order to fraudulently obtain services?

And then to write about it under one’s own name?

Isn’t this kind of thing that goes against the CFAA?

PRs can wait — not worth criminal charges.

He notes in the blog post that he didn't actually use his airmiles account more than a couple proof of concepts (the IM stage) - he also says not to actually do this - it was just a creative bit of hacking.

It's very interesting how afraid we've become, as a culture, of legal repercussions if you "mess with computer stuff in any way".

Changing your first name field on a form too often? Welcome to prison!

> It's very interesting how afraid we've become

You make it sound as if this is some kind of irrational response to nothing.

When in reality it's an entirely reasonable response to the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act [1].

The interesting observation here wouldn't be about us "as a culture", it would be about the government.

Because obviously it's not about "changing your first name field on a form too often", it's about using that field for an unintended use, in order to bypass controls to give yourself access to communications the company didn't authorize you for.

I don't know why you think a kind of cultural fear is the thing to focus on here, rather than the very real law that sends people to very real prison.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

I think you're probably right, but the thing that always gets me is this: if nothing in their terms or UI prohibits you from encoding data into your name and changing it as often as possible, then is doing so actually unauthorized? I can't imagine that every conceivable activity you might perform with a computer system would need to be explicitly documented as ok before you can perform it. In other words, if the system owner lists things you can do and things you can't do, then are you in trouble for doing things not mentioned? They never authorized me to use the brightness control on the entertainment system, but I did anyway, uh oh!

They're charging money for normal easy communication with the ground, and they're not charging for slow convoluted communication with the ground. I see the problem with getting the former without paying, but it's harder to find a problem with getting the latter without paying. They configured their system to allow it, and then failed to list rapid changes and encoding as either authorized or unauthorized.

The intent to bypass the paywall is extraordinarily clear here. The name field is obviously not being used for its intended purpose.

I don't know how a court would actually decide, and that would depend on the precise jury as well.

But the point is that it's entirely reasonable to be scared that this could land you in jail. Cases are decided by people who have common sense.

I would hope the server literally authorizing the user to modify the field after correctly authenticating the user implies "authorized use" under the CFAA, but I'm not a lawyer and I'm not familiar with the law here.

> how afraid we've become

Widespread proliferation of pseudonyms modeling/nudging self-censorship is not a proxy for fear in humans-who-hack.

Not in hackers, the population.

not nearly as impressive, but i got past the software lock at a gaming internet café as a 16 year old by hitting (i think it was) Win + I to open a windows accessibility screen, which had a link to a Microsoft page. when clicked it opened a web browser and bam.

Oh memories!

There was a Windows built-in input method (智能ABC) that will show a small floating bar wherever there's an input. So you can trigger that bar, right click and select "Help" to open the default CHM viewer, then you can open any URLs from there.

Or alternatively the input method has a secret sequence that will crash any apps: v UP DEL ENTER and boom.

I still use the browser dev tools trick with T Mobile's free 1 hour for mobile clients. change laptop user agent to mobile — log in for planes’s wifi — turn off user agent change. I assume the plane is provisioning internet access by mac address.

> Several co-workers were asking me to review their PRs because my feedback was “two weeks late” and “blocking a critical deployment.” But my ideas are important too so I put on my headphones and smashed on some focus tunes.

This is the way

I know that Robert Heaton will appreciate this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpQ_W_lQ9Jo

Care to add an alt text?

... to a youtube link... are you afraid.

it's a spoof 80s song that Robert aludes to in his blog tagline.

I had a similar idea to do internet over free-on-the-plane SMS payloads but ended up abandoning it after Twilio asked me to verify I was a legit business.

Sorry if this isn't the thread for it, but is airplane wifi costly to provide?

Is there any hope for a future where all airplane wifi is free?

(Maybe if cellphone plans automatically include satellite wifi?)

In the US, it’s free on Delta for SkyMiles members, which is in turn free to join. It’s also free for everyone on JSX with no strings, and they actually are the first airline I know of to use StarLink.

Additionally it’s free on most US airlines for T-Mobile customers, but only on devices that actually have T-Mobile SIMs (so not most laptops).

This isn't important; but Delta's "free with SkyMiles" offering is for domestic US travel. For international travel they're still charging $8/hour. Supposedly they may expand the free offering to some flights to Europe though but YMMV.

I have to imagine this comes down to how they provide the Internet connection. Over land they can use cell towers. Over sea they're forced to use satellites.

The question was if it's costly to provide, not how much customers have to pay

On AA, the "free one hour for TMO subscribers" through their app doesn't actually check to see if you're using a TMO SIM. It only checks the phone number against their customer list.

After burning up the first free hour I switch to my wife's number, then my kids, etc. It never complains.

You can literally bump the last digit of any T-Mobile number (:

Yeah that should work...for a while. Eventually numbers get ported out and the space fragments. Area codes don't mean much anymore.

Re: T-Mobile - On United you can just set your laptop user agent to a mobile one and sign on with your phone number. Works fine for both the short period and full flight options.

On a recent Hawaiian flight there was free StarLink-powered WiFi. It was free and worked incredibly well.

Zipair, a budget airline subidiary of JAL, offers free Wifi [1] on all their international flights. They operate in the SEA area.

[1] - https://www.zipair.net/en/onboard/service

maybe when we have abundant Starlink capacity, otherwise any satellite-to-ground roundtrip at a reasonable speed is costly

> but is airplane wifi costly to provide

Depends on the location. Over populated land areas, no. Over oceans far from land, yes.

I guess the airlines want to monetize all they can... so probably not.

Once upon a time when mobile data wasn't as common and cheap, I found that starbucks wifi allowed ping to any where :)

A very important quote:

> NB: at this point I didn’t want to send any more automated data through my airmiles account in case that got me in trouble somehow. [...] I therefore proved to myself that PySkyWiFi would work on my airmiles accounts too by updating my name ten or so times in quick succession. They all succeeded [...] I then wrote the rest of my code by sending my data through friendly services like GitHub Gists and local files on my computer

> I’m going to keep talking about sending data through an airmiles account, because that’s the point I’m trying to make.

Disappointing! I would not be surprised if things break when updating name millions of times (and you do need millions of updates for basic website) - maybe there is a history table, or a queue, or a easily overloaded service...

I was wondering about this. How well would the protocol cope if the name field suddenly changed back to the previous value, because the database is not that consistent? In addition to counters, you'd probably need signaling to indicate a missing packet, at least.

Many times have I hacked to get free in flight and hotel wifi, often using brute force algos.

Never have I thought of an idea as hilarious as this.

Well done.

I love the part where he paid for the wifi so he could develop a workaround that he would never need. True hacker spirit.

It was a shame to see the author stop proving this over the actual hole. That's where I switched off sadly.

Clever exploit of a website security hole! Except you need to give your credentials to a trusted party.

Did he say that played Limp Bizkit on his speakers and made everyone the plane listen to it?!?

TCP-UP , TCP over User Profile

> I’d forgotten to charge my headphones so Limp Bizkit started playing out of my laptop speakers. Fortunately no one else on the plane seemed to mind so we all rocked out together.

After reading this, I’m not interested in anything else the author has to say. People won’t always tell you when you are being a jerk.

This reads like an obvious joke.

I hope so.

cloud computing

220 comments and no "Bob Wehadababyitsaboy"? Surprising!

boingo wifi lets you connect to AppStore and Android store to download Boingo mobile app.

use this knowledge to get free internet access :-)

Is the trick that these app stores are on a CDN?

I didnt have a laptop, so only was able to test it with my iPhone. but basically after going to their captive portal and clicking AppStore button your client will open AppStore and even can start Download app (and cancel immediately) and then you switch window to regular browser and start browsing

> I’d forgotten to charge my headphones so Limp Bizkit started playing out of my laptop speakers. Fortunately no one else on the plane seemed to mind so we all rocked out together.

Eh. I would probably mind but depending on my mood and the level of conflict avoidance in me, you wouldn't notice.

its a joke.

On a plane, I would guess anyone trying to do this would be stopped by the stewards :-)

This is amazing but honestly I'd rather just pay for wifi.

[dead]

Tldr: $1,000 worth of engineering time to save $10 on inflight WiFi

I’d forgotten to charge my headphones so Limp Bizkit started playing out of my laptop speakers. Fortunately no one else on the plane seemed to mind so we all rocked out together.

Here's where I parachuted out of this article.