Brilliant! I love stories like this. This is real hacking :)
Am disappointed though to have reached the end of the article only to find no mention of stats regarding max speed, efficiency etc vs the paid-for wifi.
Also, not sure why you wouldn’t just use Base64 encoding for which optimised versions already exist instead of rolling your own conversion to/from base 26 (or 52).
> Also, not sure why you wouldn’t just use Base64 encoding for which optimised versions already exist instead of rolling your own conversion to/from base 26 (or 52).
It's mentioned in the article, but base64 includes weird characters that might not be allowed in a name field, like `+=/`. I also wouldn't be surprised if the airline name field didn't allow numbers.
Not to forget a stat about the number of "airline account name-change" e-mails sent to some (hopefully) junk e-mail account for each "name change". Ideally in relation to destination web-page design and amount of junk javascript embedded therein.
I think the first terminal-to-host connection I used at university was 300bps. That's about 30 bytes a second, and watching the characters of a large block of text appear on screen, it did feel like I could almost count them as they went past.
So I can attest from personal experience that a double-digit number of bytes per second is enough to perform useful work, yes.
Am disappointed though to have reached the end of the article only to find no mention of stats regarding max speed, efficiency etc vs the paid-for wifi.
Also, not sure why you wouldn’t just use Base64 encoding for which optimised versions already exist instead of rolling your own conversion to/from base 26 (or 52).