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I was on a ~20 hour ferry ship from Italy to Greece once. They had paid wifi using sattelite internet, which I did not want to pay. But for payments to work, they allowed access to stripe. Turns out, everything on stripe.com was accessible, even dev docs etc. So I started to waste their bandwidth by downloading gigabytes of images from the stripe website over and over again.

But that's quite unproductive. As it turned out, in order for stripe to work, it needs access to fastly CDN. And then I remembered that reddit also uses fastly. By connecting to stripe and changing the Host HTTP header to reddit.com, I could browse reddit! Images didn't work though (i.redd.it is not on fastly). I could edit my /etc/hosts and associate old.reddit.com with stripe's fastly IP address. After ignoring scary TLS errors, I could even log in.




I presume the only people you're hurting by downloading gigabytes of docs are the people on the plain that paid for the service. Maybe the company providing the service because those people experiencing the slow connection might never buy again. You're probably a also costing stripe for their upload bandwidth.

And here I am, avoiding downloading things on cell service because it might negatively impact other people around me.


Agreed. I applaud the initiative of figuring out they could access reddit via the CDN that Stripe uses - but downloading gigabytes of images for the sole purpose of "wasting their bandwidth"? Why??


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> Honestly this person probably felt they were truly sticking it to the big guy because how dare they charge for internet.

I get the vibe, though I agree this was an unproductive way to pursue it.

I strongly suspect the fee for access is not at all related to the cost to provide service; they’re leveraging the temporary monopoly on connectivity they have to get consumers to pay absurd prices. Cruise ships are similar; I think it was double digits per day for internet.

I don’t think it’s productive to metaphorically “take the ball and go home”, but that instinct would probably be much lower if the fees for access were something reasonable.


Marine satellite internet can get pricey especially pre-Starlink. Like, potentially thousands of dollars for a few gigs even today.


I went looking because I got curious; I found a reseller for Inmarsat’s Fleet Xpress plans, which are unmetered: https://www.pulsarbeyond.com/media/contentmanager/content/Fl...

The highest tier with a price on it is burstable 8x4Mbps with guaranteed 1x0.5Mbps for $9k a month, which feels about right for a ferry (especially with some aggressive caching). They would break even with 30 customers paying $10 for access, though really I would be surprised if a ferry went far enough out to sea to need specialized internet (I am out of my depth, though, so maybe they do).

All in all, interesting. The markups still feel high, but not nearly as outlandish as I would have thought.

I wonder if at huge economies of scale you can get cheaper marine satellite internet if you don’t need full-ocean coverage. Eg cruise ships seem to sail the same routes on repeat, they don’t really need coverage of the entire ocean. I wonder if Royal Caribbean et al get cheaper service because they have pretty static and pre-defined routes, making it easier for the satellite provider to ensure there are satellites overhead when the ships are there.


These are uncapped prices? Pretty cheap compared to what I was looking at a few years ago. Back then a lot of plans had data caps, it would be like $9k for only several gigs of data all things said and done. You'd pay link speed separate from your data allotment, so a few grand for the connection speed and a few grand for a bucket of data.


They are uncapped as far as I could find, but I didn’t read the fine print or anything.

On the 4 or so companies I checked, most were metered as you said but also clearly designed for personal vessels. They were also expensive as you said; I think the cheapest I saw was ~$1500/month for 5GB, and $0.39/MB for overages.

I am in no way an expert, this is just based off like 4 links. Someone said Inmarsat had more commercial-vessel sized plans so I checked them out, and they do seem way cheaper if you’re planning to use the link a lot.


They are competing like it or not with starlink 100Mb 1TB of usage in the middle of the ocean, unlimited usage near land (within about 5-15 miles) for ~$800 a month.

In that context it's a rip off, and higher latency/lower speed.


> And here I am, avoiding downloading things on cell service because it might negatively impact other people around me.

This is a noble activity and I salute you for it, but I'm pretty sure that towers have traffic shaping that manage QoS and fairness for you.


I think it’s misguided. If the cell carrier can’t deliver its service to normal people doing normal things without inconveniencing other customers, it’s the carrier’s fault, not the users’. No way am I going to treat the service I paid for with kid gloves to make Verizon’s job easier.

(Not talking about edge cases like BitTorrent or such. But if a carrier advertises watching streaming video on my phone, I don’t feel guilty downloading an app update. If their tower couldn’t handle that, it’s on them, not me.)


Why is BitTorrent an edge case? I paid for the bandwidth, if I want to host a... Linux ISO, why shouldn't I? What if I pay for, and download 30 movies for offline use onto my phone because I know I'm going somewhere that there is no service? Why is that wrong? What if I backup my entire phone to two separate backup services in the cloud?

ISPs have done a great job shaming people who use their service for what it is supposed to be. It's 2024, and we should all have fiber to the home by now. But no, they're only working on deploying more shitty wireless connections to everybody and letting all the land-based services rot. Fuck them.


Also from the "fuck them" department: I have gigabit at home, and about 1.25TB per month quota. The ISP recently was advertising me to upgrade to 2Gb. I was intrigued, checked it out... exact same quota. My math says that on 2Gbps I could use up the month's quota in 85 minutes (accounting for network overhead let's generously say 2 hours).


Yeah, wtf. Where does this 1.25 number come from. My parents reach that at day 20 from streaming crime dramas all day.


I think you are overreacting. They didn’t say either of those things are immoral. They said it was an edge case. It is an edge case. The vast majority of people don’t know what a torrent is much and much less are downloading torrents on to their phones.


What canes123456 said. Also, I was talking in the context of cell connections. I have a vastly different expectation for wired connections: use that sucker up to whatever level you want and can afford. You paid for it, you use it. It's on the ISP to keep their network capacity upgraded to meet demand. (But even then, don't be a freaking sociopath. I have 10Gb fiber with no cap and I use it without a second thought, but don't like have a daemon that deliberately saturates it 24/7 or something. I run backups when it's convenient for me. I stream movies whenever. I download software updates as I please. I don't leave a copy of `iperf3` running just because I could, because that would be using up resources just for the hell of it, and that's never a good look.)

Wireless is a bit different in that there's inherently limited bandwidth. You and I share the same RF fields. If I'm monopolizing them, you can't, and vice versa. Now, if you have a home 5G hotspot, do what thou wilt. Those are advertised to support a household. If they can't, they shouldn't advertise it. However, if I were at a baseball game with 40,000 other people, and I couldn't text my wife because I saw you having 300 torrent connections open on a laptop just because you could, I'd still kinda wanna throw a beer at you. It's like listening to music out loud on the bus. You can; you shouldn't.


Those bidirectional video streams where neither party is looking at the phone while talking about nothing use way more bandwidth than an audio stream or text message. There's no way for me to tell if it's causing slowness for me, but it certainly can't be helping.

There's no chance the carrier can give every phone in a cell full bandwidth at the same time, they rely on only a handful of people using their connection at any given moment.


Me and my wife merged our facebook accounts to not take up space in facebook


idid2


I'm literally just posting this to add another row to a database.


For anyone else who wants to add a row to a database, but can't be bothered to post a comment, you can upvote this comment; each (voter, comment, vote) tuple is likely a row, or at least some amount of data. You're welcome.


Let me clean that up for you. '; DROP TABLE comments; --


Stop that, Bobby!


Good thing HN doesn't use one!

Though I suppose once it's storage mechanism performs enough of the functions of a database, it's an ad-hoc database.


unethical!


> And here I am, avoiding downloading things on cell service because it might negatively impact other people around me.

You paid for that service, they should be able to provide it to you. If it negatively impacts other users, that's the provider's fault.


I think the same whenever I turn on my gardening watering system at 7am and the whole 250 person street group chat starts complaining about lower water pressure and the fact nobody can have a shower.

But, I'm not selfish so I just water the garden at 4am now.


As a firefighter...

If your neighborhood's water pressure is affected by you running a garden watering system that most likely maxes out at 15 gallons/minute, then you have a serious problem, god help you if there's a structure fire in the neighborhood.

Seriously though, if you're not just exaggerating to make an example, contact your town/city/whatever Department of Works, something is seriously wrong.


London (UK) has deliberately low water pressures because the pipe network has a lot of leaks, and the lower the pressure the less water leaks out.

It's low enough that some appliances like dishwashers and washing machines give 'water supply' errors unless you run them overnight. Some houses use pressure boosting pumps to get water to the top floor.

Apparently fixing the leaks is expensive and it's free to just lower the pressure and pass the problem onto householders.


A kinda rule of thumb is that municipal water systems lose 10% of their water through various small leaks. Water is generally cheap and your bill is more for maintaining the capital cost itself rather than gathering/processing the water.

I also use this analogy for smuggling and the resources spent trying to stop it: if 10% gets lost/intercepted/“leaked”, the smugglers just produce and send 11% more and demand is met. You can change the numbers but it doesn’t change the result.


Now do that math for the US southwest, where water is ridiculously cheap and also severely limited ....


It’s not severely limited, that’s why it’s cheap even ignoring people with huge water grants and purchasing on the open market.

Using the entire annual flow of the Colorado river doesn’t mean it’s severely limited. It just means society isn’t stupid and will use the excess to fill sunny deserts to grow crops.

As long as there are crops grown anywhere between Phoenix and LA, water isn’t severely limited.


> It’s not severely limited, that’s why it’s cheap

This is false.

Most western states associate water rights with land ownership. The marginal cost of a unit of water for a user with their own well is close to zero (wells do require electricity and maintanance, but these costs are generally very small).

However, the existence of those water rights (e.g. "this 5 acre parcel comes with 3 acre-feet of water") has nothing to do with whether the water is actually available, and increasingly in many parts of the southwest, it is not.

"Severely limited" in my book means that water usage could not increase by 50%. Fairly sure this condition applies to more or less the entire US southwest.


That’s still not severely limited and that definition is idiotic. That’s like saying the copper market is severely limited just because all of the supply eventually clears at some price.

It’s all being used because there is enough farmland and sun to absorb it. Cut out the farming and the remaining usage could easily grow several hundred percent.

People grow absolutely ridiculous shit in southwest Arizona because water is so cheap and is not “severely limited” by any notional definition of the term.

The only context in which it looks that way is to people coming from locations that are inundated with water but are land/weather limited.

If you want to see what “severely limited” water looks like. Take a look at Israel.

As long as people can pay $100 for 10,000 gallons of water to fill a pool, there is no severe limit.


I don't think you understand that a lot of water usage in the southwest is not paid for at all.

In the village where I live in rural New Mexico, at least 30% of the population here have private wells and pay nothing for water at all (other than pump energy costs and well maintanance costs). Ranchers to the south of the village pump their own water and use it to irrigate alfalfa fields without paying anyone anything at all.

The reason water is cheap here is because of the historical and legal situation. If water was managed here as it is east of the Mississippi, where it is considered exclusively a public resource, then water supply systems would be able to charge prices more like those found in the east. But because "water rights" are bound up with "land rights", there is no way currently to do politically-controlled water pricing outside of city water systems.

And yes, agriculture in this part of the world uses 75% or more of all the water that falls or flows through the land, and if that wasn't here, water would not be much of an issue. I advocate locally for changes in how agriculture is done here, and write articles for hyperlocal media here to raise awareness of this issue.

But for now agriculture is here, using water wastefully and substantially, and that means that in effect the water supply is severely limited to the point that local jurisdictions will pay farmers to not use water that they have rights to.

I've lived in Israel (Rehovot). The Negev is a broadly similar climate (though much lower in elevation) as southern New Mexico and northern Israel is very similar to northern New Mexico. The Israelis are world leaders in the use of desalination, an option that makes no real sense for most of the US southwest (southern CA would be the obvious exception). This makes a significant difference to water availability both for agriculture and residential use in Israel.


Yeah we should probably stop subsidizing the heaviest water users. Instead we get high profile efforts that get a lot of attention and only save a token amount of water.


I believe the issue is that those water users own the water by right under the legal theory that the first users own it forever. The state could eminent domain it away but then they would have to pay some (probably very high) price for it, and nobody wants to do that. Eventually they are going to have to cough up the money.


So I guess London is just screwed if there's another big fire.


By law, houses must be built with fireproof (ie. Brick) walls between them, so a fire will not spread from one house to the next. This gives them a distinctive look [1].

There are no timber frame buildings, not any with flammable roofs like thatch or shingles.

They aren't going to make the mistakes of the great fire again!

It seems to work - I have never seen any fire burn more than one building.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/149wg3o/why_do_lond...


Very interesting. Still, you'd think they'd put a little more effort into having a modern, high-pressure plumbing system in their main city.


He DIDN'T pay.


But did you give? You gotta give? See, it’s completely user funded!


Never lose the opportunity to fuck corporations, also it's not your duty to preserve others experience, it's not like that corporations don't give a phuck about having enough bandwidth or don't oversell and then we have to be scared of downloading something


How communally-minded of you. That certainly is one way to solve the tragedy of the commons.


There is no such thing as "communally-minded" under private ownership. What we have is "rugged individualism" and free competition, ie "might makes right." I don't like it, but I can't escape it.

It's ironic that you mention "tragedy of the commons." Literally, what we don't have is a commons. What we have is enclosure. So it's truly not a "tragedy of the commons" but a tragedy of private ownership or, specifically, a tragedy of the commons' absence.

Again, there is no use in being "communally-minded" within the confines of an entity that has no community spirit, eg a ruthless, cynical, bottom-lining private corporation. In this context, "communally-minded" action cannot and will not be rewarded. It will only be exploited.


Everyone is a specific person, i.e. a "private" entity, and ownership represents the exclusivity of possession and use that is inherent in all economically rival goods. In order for anything to be owned and used by anyone, it must be owned and used by someone specific at the exclusion of others. In other words, "private ownership" is the only kind of ownership that actually exists.

"The public" is an abstraction that resolves to lots of separate "private" people in aggregate -- it's not a specific entity capable of acting as an owner of anything. When people talk about "publkic ownership", what they're really describing is one specific organization acting as the de facto owner, but nominally acting on behalf of "the public" by being bound up in fiduciary responsibilities to others. That sounds nice in theory, but the incentive structures applicable to those institutons are often not aligned with the interests of "the public" (presuming that any singular interest can even be attributed to it), and the mechanisms of fiduciary accountability often do not work properly. What "public ownership" usually amounts to is private ownership by political institutions, which have their own interests and agendas.

> Again, there is no use in being "communally-minded" within the confines of an entity that has no community spirit, eg a ruthless, cynical, bottom-lining private corporation. In this context, "communally-minded" action cannot and will not be rewarded. It will only be exploited.

The corporation is an organizational model employed by people. It has no consciousness or will of its own, so attributing any of the above qualities, positive or negative, to it, is meaningless. Corporations cannot be ruthless or cynical, or be communally-minded or have any sort of "spirit". They are just processes.

The people who are using the corporation as an organizational structure, on the other hand, can be any of those things. If you have a society full of greedy avaricious people, then commercial corporations will likely behave in ways that reflect greed and avarice. But then so again will every other expression of that society -- including political institutions and interpersonal interactions -- because it's not the abstract organizational model that possesses those qualities, it's the people.

The reality here is that doing destructive things out of some antipathy toward the abstract "corporation" has concrete negative consequences for its employees, its customers, and its investors (who aren't cartoon characters wearing top hats and monocles, but include ordinary people trying to fund their retirements).


> If you have a society full of greedy avaricious people, then commercial corporations will likely behave in ways that reflect greed and avarice.

I think it's possible to have corporations whose emergent values don't reflect their constituent values. In fact, I think it's inevitable; an LLC is not a cortical homunculus.


How do you figure, given that the corporation is just an organizational model employed by those people?


There's no tragedy of the commons here. A paid service provided by a private corporation is not "the commons". The commons refers to something like a municipal park owned by the public and run by the local government, and a tragedy of the commons is jerks going to the public bathroom there and leaving it a mess, stealing the toilet paper, etc.


"The public" is an abstraction, and the local government is just another specific organization. Everything is people, all the way down, and it is profoundly anti-social to rationalize away hostile, destructive behavior simply because you have an emotional prejudice against people who engage in commercial business.

The reality is that the behavior you are trying to justify doesn't impact the equally abstract "corporation", it impacts the actual people whose activities that concept represents -- employees, customers, investors, etc.


I am of the idea that the main issue are those at the top, but volounteers are also contributing to hide or make issues less pushy, what is the level of pain you're going to be able to support in order to let the community feel better, while execs pocket money?


What, exactly, do you get out of doing something like that? As an intellectual exercise I understand probing to see what exactly is accessible on a “blocked” connection, but intentionally wasting bandwidth seems the virtual equivalent of leaving the taps running in a public restroom to waste water, or perhaps clogging the toilet and overflowing it.


It reminds me of working on campus IT, and the sort of person who, at the end of the semester realize there are pages remaining in their "free print" allotment, print out every page completely covered in black ink to waste as much as possible.


I worked at a company that would provide "free pizza" during evenings to encourage people to stay a little later and get more work done. It wasn't long before people would simply grab armfuls of food, entire pizza boxes, and bring them to their cars, ending that little perk quickly.


That sounds dystopian.


why would anyone do that?? the remaining "free print" sheets is perfectly good scratch paper if you leave it blank!


I have also printed a blank document before to get blank paper, instead of dealing with accessing the paper tray, which may not have been feasible given the circumstances.


They're being a dick plain and simple. Some people are just wired that way.


Presumably because they perceive the operator as gouging/exploiting the captive audience.


Yes, I'd see it as a form of protest.


No one else would, especially not the company or the customers who paid for the service expecting to receive it. They'd see it as vandalism, and they'd be correct.


"The boat operator is charging too much for internet access, so let's ruin internet access for the customers who they've already received payment from! That'll show 'em!"


I ran a public anarchy Minecraft server in high school using a copy of a private server's map that got reimaged each week. Periodically someone would join, spend all day destroying buildings, then explain via a series of messages to nobody that he's only doing this to teach the admin a lesson about anti-grief plugins.


That's called domain fronting [0] and is disabled by all big CDNs now.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting


No, proper fronting is when you mismatch Host: header and SNI. It takes a bit more than just editing /etc/hosts, which results in TLS error (as grandparent mentioned), but editing /etc/hosts cannot be disabled by CDN.


I agree that's not proper domain fronting, but one point is that CDNs can and absolutely do restrict certain SNI/Host/sites to subsets of their IPs. It's not necessarily the case that if you can connect to one CDN node you can connect to all the sites that CDN serves.


OP here. It doesn't work anymore:

Requested host does not match any Subject Alternative Names (SANs) on TLS certificate [d22c2cdf866a373f3648c0d7c30f9399e974d07c8c5417566ff11059a06f5b40] in use with this connection. Visit https://docs.fastly.com/en/guides/common-400-errors#error-42... for more information.

But I'm just doing this from memory, it's possible I did something else a years ago.


Next, I left the water running in the hotel to teach them a lesson for daring to offer me a paid service.


Why was your first instinct to abuse or degrade functionality for a service you didn't want to pay for?


And then bragging about it. Wild.


I think it may be more of an emotional than rational response, given he would be stuck on the ferry for 20 hours


He probably knew how long the ferry ride was before he booked it.


Is being stuck on the ferry for twenty hours something that was done intentionally to provoke him, or is that just how long the trip takes?

A couple of decades ago, the idea of even having internet connectivity on a ship at sea was fanciful. The trip would have taken the same twenty hours, and there would have just been no internet access. Now, it's something that is available, but naturally has costs associated -- and the reaction here is that because you don't want to pay for it, it's justifiable to screw over everyone who is paying for it? That's almost sociopathic.


Something similar used to work for Delta (and probably some other airline's wifi) because they hardcoded the ability to access some Google stuff (like analytics) which enabled more interesting stuff (like Gmail, Voice, or a proxy running on Google Cloud)


> which I did not want to pay

> So I started to waste their bandwidth

...why? Trying to hack it for your own use I can understand, but why would you actively try to worsen the performance for everyone else paying, or try to run up the company's bill if it's metered?


sign o' the times


everything needs dns. host a http proxy at home on port 53. the world of paid wifi will be your oyster.


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Isn't that exactly what a homo economicus should do? Remember that we are each in constant competition between each other, trying to satisfy our unlimited wants and trying to get others from satisfying theirs.


Homo economicus is motivated by maximizing their own benefit, not by spite. Trying to stop others from satisfying their own wants may be a useful strategy in many cases, but I don't see how it would be useful here.


When homo economicus is thwarted in its efforts to maximize its own benefit, spite arises.


If you think that living life requires you to constantly put down others, I just feel sad for both you and all the people who have to be around you.


I don't, but our economic system is based on and rewards that. It does feel sad.


Our economic system in no way rewards spite. It rewards value. It might not always be able to tell the difference between real value and underhanded tactics, but that's because the tactics masquerade as better value.


I dont think it rewards it at all. Things like this are just negative sum activities lashing out.


On the contrary, capitalism is based on providing value to others. It rewards those who do something that others actually WANT... as opposed to what some roomful of bureaucrats decide ought to be done.


What selfish purpose is there to download GBs of images from Stripe docs?

Even if we're purely selfish, wasting resources just to stick it to others is not really a productive use of our time.


I think it depends on just how much harm your target causing. Sometimes taking them down is the right thing. Doesn't feel justified in this case though.


yes, lets stare at the water for 20 hours instead


There are more than two options for a 20 hour wait, and I don't think that lashing out maliciously and staring at water are in my top 100. How about conversation, making friends, reading a book, writing emails, letters, or journals?


Genuinely curious where you get that impression.

Who in their right mind wants to stop others from getting what they want for it's own sake, or sees the quest for happiness as a competition?


Some people are simply not satisfied with maximizing their own gain, they also need to minimize everyone else's. Someone else's benefit is their loss. To the point where they'll make the game negative-sum in order to ensure The Other loses.


Some people are sadistic cretins who revel in the suffering of others, but I don't think that is the mainstream position.

I was pushing back on the idea that "homo economicus" or mainstream economics advocates for competitive sabotage. I have never heard academic economists advocate for this as a rational position.

If anything, the field is biased to over-emphasize positive collaboration.

The position of the parent post is some strange application of group competition for a scarce resource to happiness.

It assumes that someone's goal is not be be as happy as possible, but rather happier than others. This is the only situation where it makes sense to actively put in work to make other people more miserable.


Spending time to cost a company a few hundred bucks doesn’t seem rational. There are higher EV ways to spend your time to try to satisfy wants.

Unless your mindset is one of “it’s not enough that I succeed; others must fail by my hand”.

That said I could easily imagine doing some stuff like this as a teenager for giggles. There’s some small joy in being a minor troublemaker in a way nobody would actually care about. It’s not something I’d brag about though.


no you describe narcissistic personality disorder.

Homo economicus would try get as much as possible for himself, or have others bear the cost (e.g. have society pay for roads but don't want to pay taxes).

They would not lower the quality of service for someone else out of spite without any gain for themselves, let alone waste time on it. They would also understand this would rise the cost of the service they might potentially want to use in the future.

Only narcissists would feel the desire to fuck up a service out of spite and ruin it for anyone else, just because they feel bad for not agreeing to the deal of having to pay


It's interesting that you can't see that what capitalism does is push everyone to contribute in doing something useful for others.


And then everyone lived happily ever after.


Unless you have a personal history with this user, you are making a lot of unfounded assumptions and sweeping generalizations about them.


How? The guy told everyone straight-up that he wasted bandwidth for no reason.


It made others worse off, rising his relative status and competitive advantage. That's exactly how rational economic agents should behave.


Rational agents in the real world should realize that conspiring with others to make the world better gives them more benefits than being a greedy shit.

It is only in academic exercises where collaboration is made impossible that sociopathic behavior is optimal.


Maybe the economy should be structured for the real-world behavior then?


It is.


OP's actions are super obnoxious of course.

But I'm puzzled by the idea his actions make any sense as a _capitalist_ impulse (Of course neither of us know anything about OP except his story).

Resentment over what somebody else has is the quintessential mental sliver communism uses to drive people to destroy the system. Perhaps the OP was just engaging in an outburst of his own destructive revolutionary zeal against his fellow passengers because they had something he didn't.


I don't have anything to back my theories up, but when ChatGPT was new, heavily resource-constrained, but was catching on and I tried using it for sustainability research and I kept getting errors (service down / system overloaded), my mind always went to "yeah, people trying to do the two plus two is five or generating adult content. Perhaps trying to use it to generate bomb recipes. Let's try using ChatGPT for research again in a few hours"


Clearly the solution is to just make Wi-Fi free by default. Once this is done, it becomes uninteresting to download gigabytes of crap to "hurt" people. Win-win for everyone. Just saying.


> Once this is done, it becomes uninteresting to download gigabytes of crap to "hurt" people. Win-win for everyone.

I would disagree. Here in my corner of EU, public buses have a limited 30min - 1hour free wifi access. What most everyone does immediately getting in the bus is connect to the free wifi and start mindless scrolling on TikTok, Facebook or Instagram. Around 20-30% of the people are super obnoxious and play all the videos over loudspeaker or start calling their friends and speaking loudly as if they are in their home or something, until someone else yells at them. So far, I have only seen two person this month appearing to do something valuable(one was writing an email and another was checking local news).


Just because you think entertainment (or rather, their specific form of entertainment, since you seem to consider reading the news OK but facebook not ok) isn't "valuable" doesn't make it so.

Being able to enjoy entertainment (or, as you'd probably see it, "mindlessly waste the time" that you have to spend on the bus anyways) is what makes public transit bearable.


I really agree with this point; who’s to say making the email is not less valuable or making the world just a little worse? I would probably agree more if the example was Netflix or even YouTubr but part of me is still biased toward feeling TikTok is just probably neurologically worse than anything outside of drugs.


>Around 20-30% of the people are super obnoxious and play all the videos over loudspeaker or start calling their friends and speaking loudly as if they are in their home or something, until someone else yells at them.

This is a culture problem, and has nothing to do with free Wi-Fi. This kind of thing never happens here in Japan, except maybe foreign tourists.


Except there's 2,500 people on that ship and the satellite bandwidth is 15mbps. Now making it free doesnt work because the resources aren't there.

If you want free wifi, that's great but the private sector isn't going to do it for you. How many of these public nuisance hackers are advocating for large socialized programs to make wifi a human right on all manner of transport? Usually the hacker demographic is right-wing libertarian and would never advocate for socialism.

So you dont want socialism but you want socialized services? Curious.

If this person's story ended with "Then I started a website to advocate for regulations and pricing for better transport wifi," then that would be great! Instead he just drowned out the internet connection of paying customers who are now making angry calls at some poor tech support person making minimum wage in a poor country. He did nothing but hurt people out of his own immaturity and cheapness.


These are paying customers, discouraging them from coming back is a net loss. Suppose your cabin includes a shower but you need to pay every day to actually use it. Nobody would think that’s reasonable, but because internet used to be difficult companies are still tacking on insane fees even though the actual costs are minimal.

With Starlink you’re looking at a lot more than 15mbps. We’re at the point where some cruise lines offer free Wi-Fi and people still see multi megabit connections anyway.


Reasonable is determined if you already paid for the shower, and then are denied it. Where does this sense of entitlement come from?


Commerce includes many unspoken agreements. Order a meal at a restaurant and expect to pay list prices +taxes etc, you don’t expect to be charged for using the salt on the table, or the price of a doggy bag etc. Airlines don’t charge people to go to the bathroom, though they may reserve better bathrooms for first class etc.

Companies breaking with these trends face a backlash assuming a competitive marketplace.


Reasonable is not wanting to be nickle and dimed for every amenity that could possibly be split into a separate cost.

Prices for such add-ons, especially ones that your average customer won't think of before, are also often unreasonably high because the operator knows they have a captive audience they can exploit - you either buy from them or go without.


Is there some demographic data that shows that "public nuisance hackers" are mostly right-wing libertarian?


There’s something to be said for this approach

Once my company instituted a per diem limit for meals while travelling, I stopped eating cheap food and would deliberately spend exactly the limit to spite the penny pinchers


Why do you put this on people who love capitalism? It seems like inserting a tangential pet issue.

If anything, I would guess they are anti-capitalists because they are so indignant about someone offering a paid service.


> You're just hurting honest working class people trying to do work, email/call their kids, manage things like doctors appointments

Right, so they can do all that important stuff on technology that was invented by nerds and hackers over the decades, while they were being demonized by society, bullied, put down, and shoved aside by the so-called sociable class.

Yeah, I’ll continue not shedding tears over Joe Sixpack’s inability to check his football scores for a few minutes.


This is such an incredibly bizarre victimhood mindset that I feel like I must be misunderstanding it. Degrading a utility for everyone else is fine because of some perceived wrong by society done to your in group?

If you piss in the punch bowl at a party attended by your in group and perceived out group, you’re going to be justifiably hated by both.

And probably not get invited to more parties.


It is a strange form of entitlement, not unlike incels.

Somehow people get in their mind that they are owed X, then spiral into bitterness and jealousy when they dont get it, and then lash out arbitrarily.

The part that I dont get is where the sense of entitlement comes from? Imagine such a deep sense of entitlement to free wifi on a boat that you feel the need to take revenge on innocents.


A more charitable view is that there are some people that grew up with BBS and then the Internet and it was just a very different place with a culture for which nerds could sort of call home and now it is decidedly not that thing and it can be kind of sad for some people.


Sad is pretty different than angry and bitter, but I think I get what you are laying down.


I’m sympathetic to this point because I used to strongly have this feeling of “the Internet is for us nerds”, so I get it. I think that ship has sailed though, these people don’t even know about us or that we existed. I mean, the Internet is the most popular thing in the world but no one could tell you who Vint Cerf is, even so-called programmers today.




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