We’ve all been there: You’re on a plane, you have WiFi, but you don’t want to pay a few dollars to watch dog videos. What do you do? We never encourage stealing services, but as an intellectual exercise, [Robert Heaton] An interesting idea was raised: could the limited free use of the network be used to access the general Internet? The answer is yes.
Yes, the connection sucks. Here’s how it works: The airline gives you access to your frequent flyer account, where you can change your name or other information. A machine on the ground can see the change and make it happen. And that’s all it takes.
It works like a drop box: it takes the TCP traffic, encodes it with fake information for your account, and enters it. Then it listens for the response over the same channel and reconstructs the TCP traffic from the remote side. Now the network is within reach.
There’s a lot more to it, which you can read about in the post. This is slow, unreliable, and something you should never do. But from a neat hack standpoint, we liked it. In fact, [Robert] Neither did he. He proved it worked, but did all of his development using GitHub gists as a drop box. We appreciate the hack, but we also appreciate the ethical behavior.
Some airlines allow free messaging, which is another way to tunnel traffic – if you can connect to something, you can probably find a way to use it as a tunnel.
