Bypassing Gogo’s Inflight Internet Authentication
bryceboe.com
bryceboe.com
Stealing is stealing, no matter what "justification" one may have about high prices.
edit: grammar
I sent him couple of postcards telling about this but he never responded, so enjoy this free bread while you can!"
Also, the "marginal cost of information/bandwidth/etc is zero" is specious. You are not entitled to get things for their marginal cost. I can't take a Prada handbag out of store and leave the $50 marginal cost of the bag + $10 for restocking.
With relatively small number of paying customers (yet), you have to keep prices high to maintain the profitability of your business.
Think about this: if nobody pays, they will close this service. Just like the bakery will close if nobody pays for the bread.
Of course that is no justification for using the provided service without paying for it, but it's fundamentally different from theft.
I would just like to point out that I said more than once that I am not trying to justify the behavior described in the original article. Maybe I just didn't make myself clear enough, or people really just disagree. But all I've been trying to say that this illegal behavior does not run under the heading "theft".
The reasoning is similar to why illegal file sharing is not theft - it is copyright infringement.
It is also not relevant whether a paying customer will have less bandwidth to their disposal if someone accesses the internet service on a plane for free because the paying customer would also lose the same bandwidth if another /paying/ customer would use it. Thus the paying customer would not be able to sue the one who accesses the internet illegally.
The access provider could, but not for theft.
- Access costs $10
- Total bandwidth available is 5Mbps
- 10 users purchase access for an average of .5Mbps per user
If 10 more users pay for service, the original 10 are getting half of what they used to for the same price. In response to this (see other comments about "gouging"), airlines raise the prices of access. This act preserves some minimum level of service for those who are willing to pay.
If, instead of the scenario above, the second 10 users go on to use the service without paying, the first are "cheated" out of being able to get their minimum acceptable level of service even if they would choose to pay a higher price. When this happens, prices can be set arbitrarily high without having the intended effect of reducing the strain on the network.
Based on this logic, I disagree with your analogy to file sharing, but I also agree with you that this is not theft. It's more akin to pollution than anything else. If one chooses to smoke in a bar that doesn't allow smoking, everyone else suffers. In the same vein, if I access this service without paying, all of the paying users really do get less than they're purchasing.
The airlines are left with two choices here:
1) Plug the hole so this is no longer possible. This is the path they'll choose because it's profitable and it satisfies the already-paying users.
2) Open it up for everyone. This is impractical. If you've ever used Wi-Fi on a Bolt or Mega bus, you know that it can be painfully slow. There's no incentive for the provider to upgrade, because they can't profit by doing so.
This isn't really about taking from the big, bad corporations. It's about taking from your neighbor. It would be great if we had in-air broadband, but until that day, we'll have to find some way to regulate the use of a limited resource to prevent it from becoming over-saturated.
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Edit: formatting, clarity.
The case would only pertain to the single flight the thief stole internet access on. And on that particular flight, regardless of whether or not the thief paid or didn't pay he would be reducing the available bandwidth to other customers. Sure in the long run the airline can play with the pricing of their service to try and limit the number of active users on any given flight, however the price of the service would be locked for any single flight.
So doesn't kleiba's analogy of illegal file sharing still stand?
The airline would not have the right to charge the "thief" because the airline is not the victim. The only people able to charge the polluter (sticking with my other analogy) are those who paid for access to the network or someone representing them. They wouldn't do this because 1) it's kind of a ridiculous thing to do, and 2) the damages are far smaller than the cost of taking action.
The sensible way to do this (if stopping the practice outright was impractical) would be to grant some authority (the airline) the power to issue citations related to the pollution. It's then carried out similarly to regulating noise pollution. This is problematic, of course, because it requires identifying offenders. If we can identify offenders, we can simply stop the offense, so issuing any kind of ticket no longer makes sense.
This brings me back to a point I made above: the airlines will stop this practice. It's solvable, profitable, and generally beneficial to those who want it enough to pay.
No, the real issue here is that GoGo wants to have it all -- they want to have Wifi and they also want to charge individual users. A better plan would be to rent either wired access or to rent a "mifi"-style device that would require payment for N devices to access the Internet. It would be a bit more infrastructure to deploy, but if GoGo were really concerned about this sort of theft then this would be obvious.
I think the reality is that GoGo does not really care about the service provided to their customers, and that as long as most fliers remain ignorant about ways to evade the payment system GoGo will continue to provide their service.
You claim stealing is stealing, well to you, I say gouging is gouging and fuck them.
In-flight internet is a new product. They are establishing what an acceptable price point is.
jonafato mentioned in another comment that they could use the price to control usage rates, increasing the price to keep the number of users down and the bandwidth:user ratio up.
However, the article intrigues me because connecting to the outside internet is like a giant puzzle looking for a solution, which would provide plenty of in-flight entertainment. I don't consider that immoral (since you're not actually using the resulting connection), but I suppose if you get caught trying to hack through their system you'll get in some kind of legal trouble.
The article alludes to further conversation via the image containing the Gogo employee's email. I established contact with Gogo via email and made my intentions clear about my desire to post such an article. After receiving an initial reply that another Gogo employee would contact me, I heard nothing from them after a number of days -- note the eight days between initial twitter contact and article posting.
The primary purpose of the article was not to provide a formula for free Internet (that was just the "cover" to the article), but rather to detail how allowing access to any one Google service can result in access to the entire Internet. In retrospect, I admit the comment at the end of the article is not consistent with the point I attempted to convey.
"Stealing" carries meaning and emotional reactions than are not applicable in this case. Yes, it's wrong; no, it isn't theft.
However, exploiting these holes on a wireless network is incredibly easy to detect and block for an admin worth their salt. It's quite likely that at least a few of the networks I've been on would start blocking traffic from an unregistered device making tons of DNS requests.
That being said, just pay the few dollars they charge for access. If your time is money, this small fee won't be noticed. If you just want to be able to refresh Reddit/lurk on HN, maybe you should take this opportunity to get away from technology for a few hours (while sitting in an aluminum tube hurdling through the skies).
The technical complexity of getting a seamless Wifi connection 30,000 feet above ground warrants its $12.00 in my opinion.
I'd be astonished if there were two HN readers on most flights.
It's called surge pricing, and it....... Works. It works really well. It preserves a scarce resource during periods of high demand for the users who get the most value out of it. You're the second person to make this comment. It sounds so petulant, like Gogo has suddenly been subjected to common carrier status.
The service suffering is a sign that they should charge even more next time. But it was certainly better than it otherwise would have been. A lower price point means more users getting a smaller piece of pie. I've been on several flights with free wifi. It's horrible.
A while back, Intel removed MAC address spoofing from some of its wireless cards through a driver update, citing vague "security" concerns. I felt very up in arms about it for a while (why on Earth would you hobble your customer's products so you can make sure they can't violate your moral code!), but eventually decided I couldn't really complain, since the only reason I could think of that I might want such an ability would be to steal internet access.
So, there was no need for ISP to get worried. Given how slow access would be and the skill level required to get it to work, it is thousand times cheaper to ignore the "security hole".
The Google app engine proxy looks more "useful".
1. Fifteen different prices depending on what alleged type of device you're using, and gasp whether you have more than one.
2. Internet access is only required for most tasks due to people's laziness of using webapps.
3. Alternatively, "yay, I can refresh reddit on a plane"
4. Partial Internet access given before payment, to make it as disruption-free as possible, even though it will necessarily end up admitting things like the original article.
5. These whole "enter your credit card" wifi networks in general. Network access is infrastructure. Yeah, it takes a bit of work to backhaul a plane. But it also took quite a bit of work to build the plane. Just make the infrastructure universal so we can rely on it instead of clouding the thing with massive transaction overhead.
6. Why give the spineless airlines any more money than you have to? This attitude is subject to change when they start sticking up for their customers by giving the TSA the boot.
But honestly I'm doubt I'm going to win any points for these views on HN. I should probably just turn my commenting threshold back down.
Laziness? How is it laziness if the best app for the job happens to be a web app?
> 1. Fifteen different prices depending on what alleged type of device you're using, and gasp whether you have more than one.
The device type is a good indicator of bandwidth usage. It's sensible to bill using this model for now. They could use metered bandwith, but something tells me you'd complain about that too.
> 2. Internet access is only required for most tasks due to people's laziness of using webapps.
What does this have to do with anything? People use the internet for all sorts of stupid stuff. I happen to use it mainly for vpn and ssh, but why does it matter?
> 3. Alternatively, "yay, I can refresh reddit on a plane"
So? Again, who cares?
> 4. Partial Internet access given before payment, to make it as disruption-free as possible, even though it will necessarily end up admitting things like the original article.
Partial access is given due to exclusivity deals and that sort of thing. Would you prefer the alternative of just not giving you anything? Who the hell complains about free? Seriously.
> 5. These whole "enter your credit card" wifi networks in general. Network access is infrastructure. Yeah, it takes a bit of work to backhaul a plane. But it also took quite a bit of work to build the plane. Just make the infrastructure universal so we can rely on it instead of clouding the thing with massive transaction overhead.
You do realize that Boeing, Detla, and GoGo are different companies right? Also, it takes a lot more than a "little bit of work to backaul." It took GoGo many many years working with the FAA, ISPs, and others to only just recently get this setup and approved. Look at what's happening with the dreamliner if you want an example of what can go wrong if you do this incorrectly. Finally, most of the planes in a typical airline's fleet are decades old. You can't just bake this cost into the price of the plane (as if that makes sense anyways. not all 747s are passenger planes). With your proposal, we'd maybe get wifi in 2030 (assuming this proposal would be possible at all, which I doubt it would).
> 6. Why give the spineless airlines any more money than you have to? This attitude is subject to change when they start sticking up for their customers by giving the TSA the boot.
OK, seriously, W.T.F. are you talking about? The TSA is employed by the airport, not the airline.