Software engineer achieved free plane Wi-Fi at a terrible cost — PySkyWiFi bypasses firewall but is limited to plain text endeavors

Earlier this week, software engineer Robert Heaton posted the entire story behind his open-source PySkyWiFi project— or how he achieved free Wi-Fi on an airplane by painstakingly subverting the existing firewall. Be prepared, though— even if you can duplicate this yourself using his existing work or recreating it on your own, the final results aren't that pretty, and you'll most likely want to pay for your plane Wi-Fi the regular way, anyway.

The process started when he realized that his Airmiles account page, not blocked by the firewall, was still connected to the broader Internet, and this gap could be exploited. He also had two laptops on hand, one of which he used the standard Wi-Fi on (though he claimed his wife could have helped set this up from home had she been willing to follow his instructions), and the other he used to develop and test prototypes for PySkyWiFi.

The final form of PySkyWiFi can load all web pages, but the earlier prototypes focused on plain text endeavors like "Instant" Messaging, stock prices, and even football scores. It was all done with Python, which is where the "Py" in the final name originates.

So, how would PySkyWiFi perform if you were to grab it from its official GitHub page? Per Robert's extended blog post, you can expect a complete PySkyWiFi setup to run at speeds of "several bytes per second." That's right— several bytes, not kilobytes. Those plain text prototypes make a lot of sense considering the bandwidth constraints of carefully freeloading through a firewall, so don't expect to watch videos or consume much of anything but plain text documents. Even those won't be done promptly.

As Robert says, you probably shouldn't do any of this. Even with most of the work done ahead of time for those who wish to follow in his footsteps, it's way less headache and trouble than simply paying the obligatory plane Wi-Fi fee and moving on with your day. You can also...sleep on the flight, bring a book, or do any potentially constructive activities while not connected to the Internet.

But it's cool that widespread, free plane Wi-Fi is technically possible through the existing firewalls...it just almost certainly isn't worth doing for anything besides a quick giggle at the novelty before you realize you need pages to load quickly more than you need that five dollars or whatever they're charging you. Still, though— it is hard to beat the price of "free"!