Mildly Infuriating

I mean they paid for the flight

I understood the mildly infuriating aspect to be how airlines find a way to extract value from you at every step of your trip.

For real. I'd rather watch an ad than have to pay $10+ for a couple hours of wifi.

I still open Plex and sync a bunch of shit to my phone or tablet before I take any flights. Old-school is still the way.

Any plane internet I've used has been spotty and terribly slow, but then again, I haven't bought it in years because of previous experiences. I can stand to be without it for 2.5 hours.

Plane wifi, in the Continental US, is typically done via cell networks. The plane just has stronger receivers and transmitters than your cellphone.

I doubt the ads are streamed over the internet, this could easily be done with local storage.

With a possible quick database update over the internet to log views

Agree, which is why this is mildly infuriating and not worse. Of course there were about 10 minutes of unskippable ads on their media screens before take-off which was a pleasure to be subjected to. That should get everyone free WiFi without needing an additional ad..

I once had a flight in two legs where the first leg was operated by a well known established airline for an okay ish price and the second leg was operated by a "sister" airline that did shorter ultra low cost flights. The first flight had infotainment screens and a few other minor comforts that are standard for economy flights these days and make it just slightly more bearable, whereas the 2nd flight had no screens, no food without paying separately and just made as uncomfortable as possible on purpose.

During the first flight, you could use their crappy as screens on the back of the chair in front or connect to their local network with your own device, which was free and didn't involve any shenanigans like ads or accounts. I made use of the service which worked by entering a URL printed on the back of the chair in front. On the second leg, there was no screens and no apparent mention of an onboard entertainment offering through your own devices but there was some sort of QR code which I assume was supposed to take you to a payment portal or something but which didn't even work. It was a different URL to the first flight.

I still had my tab open from the first flight though, and when I accidentally opened that tab on the second flight, I got access to the seemingly hidden entertainment service with no payment or logins or anything. Seems that sometimes it's just a question of knowing the magic URL.

Execs are furiously taking notes right now

Shhhhhhhh

Hold up, using the ntp port to skip WiFi sign in is a game changer. Any way to do that with Tailscale on iOS?

Ntp is the time protocol, right?

The airplane captive portals generally don't work if you use a different DNS.

I've always had to defer to "automatic" DNS and let DHCP give me the DNS address in order to access the wifi

If the ad is short and subsidizes free wifi, I ain't mad. But if the ad is unreasonably long, or if I have to keep watching ads every x minutes to use WiFi, it becomes a problem. Not sure what the case is here, but it should be spelled out on the screen so we know what we're getting ourselves into.

As opposed to an open source credit card?

Can confirm that on Android with Firefox mobile + ublock origin the ads wouldn't load and you were able to skip quite fast. (Not agreeing with the ads being displayed at all, that's just a greedy move)