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

Yeah I am a bit confused about posts like this. It’s bragging about breaking the law. There was a particularly bad one a few months ago where a kid had hacked Monster’s employee training site, and was sharing all this internal media in the post. I don’t understand how they don’t end up getting in some seriously annoying trouble with law enforcement. Well I looked it up just now and the post was deleted, I guess maybe he did get in trouble. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44997145

Could also just be lack of knowledge. Weren't we all a bit more risky and playful with other people's websites when we were kids and the internet was still accessed via modems? Remember talking about that with both other kids and adults without getting in trouble, but it was also decades ago. Once I saw others getting in real big trouble (like prison), then I kind of tried to find more beneficial ways of learning programming and computers.

> Could also just be lack of knowledge.

Huh ?

DNS tunneling is not exaclty something you do "by accident".

And if the person doing it on the flight "did not know" (which, given the text of the blog, I doubt) , then you can bet your botom dollar that the "roommate" that was summoned for remote assistance knew very well what was going on.

Didn't claim so either, but a lack of knowledge about that it is in fact illegal, hence the parallel to at least my previous experience where I've most surely have committed crimes in the past, because I didn't know it was illegal in the first place.

I don't know the age of the author, but it almost doesn't matter, sometimes people don't know (lack of knowledge).

> breaking the law

Not law per se. More like contractual obligations taken upon by connecting to the flight's WiFi.

IMO a certain amount of youthful indiscretion that takes the form of challenging systems and structures feels like it's both tolerable and important. Agitation prevents calcification.

> Not law per se. More like contractual obligations taken upon by connecting to the flight's WiFi.

Well, being pedantic, you could be said to be breaking Civil Law. :)

Jest aside, IANAL but most western countries have some sort of Criminal Law relating to mis-use of computers.

A brief search for Canada reveals Criminal Code (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-46)[1].

Again IANAL, but from my reading in this scenario it would be (c) -> (a), "uses or causes to be used ... a computer system" to "obtains, directly or indirectly, any computer service".

[1]https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-342.1....

I didn’t see this, but the monster hacker blog post is up on archive. Honestly the person sounds like a kid:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250823174801/https://bobdahack...

> Remember talking about that with both other kids and adults without getting in trouble.

A few kids doesnt matter. A few adults is only a problem if it's their stuff (If they are teachers, they will care more about unautorized changes of the wallpaper in the computer of the school that anything in a remote computer.) And yuo can even later claim they misunderstood or you were exagerating.

But here is an in written report in front of thousands of persons and about planes that is a sensitive topic.

Isn't this pretty straightforwardly "theft of service", like "stealing" cable TV service?

Most countries will have laws covering cases of unauthorized access, theft of services, and computer misuse.

The user agreement helps define the service as a paid service with defined access cases. Going around those would put the user in violation of some laws.

An analogy would be showing up to a paid event venue and noticing a back door was left open. Going into the building without paying is not okay, even though you never engaged with the ticket office to agree to anything.

If the user routed all traffic through a WeChat or other messaging service, they would just be using messaging.

Intent matters. In US legal jurisdictions that could potentially be prosecuted as a CFAA violation, although I'm not aware of any cases like that yet.

https://www.justice.gov/jm/jm-9-48000-computer-fraud

I was about to correct you and say that bobdahacker hacked McDonald's, but I guess he did both, and bragged about both.

This is theft. Stealing is illegal. Giving a blueprint for how you stole is the icing on the prosecutorial cake because you can’t claim lack of knowledge if you create a conspiracy to enable the theft.

This may be the dumbest write up I have ever read.