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PySkyWiFi: Free stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights


The plane reached 10,000ft. I connected my laptop to the wi-fi. The network login page encouraged me to sign in to my airmiles account, free of charge, even though I hadn’t yet paid for any internet. A hole in the firewall, I thought. It’s a long way from London to San Francisco so I decided to peer through it.

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. For my next prototype I wrote a program that would run on a computer back at my house or in the cloud, and would automatically send information from the real world up to me on the plane, through my airmiles account. PySkyWiFi is a highly simplified version of the TCP/IP protocol that squeezes whole HTTP requests through an airmiles account, out of the plane, and down to a computer connected to the internet on the ground.

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