They also encourage you to provide info on yourself (create an account, provide birthday) to even use the screen on the seat back…
It’s a free wifi service provided by the airline while on the flight. One ad, when most other places are charging $10-20 per flight? I’ll watch the single ad. I’d rather that then someone, say, injecting adverts into sites and services. which is very possible.
on the bright side they could make you watch an ad to check your bags, check in, and find your seat the way things are going
Execs are furiously taking notes right now
Shhhhhhhh
And they all interrupt the “in flight entertainment” to read a VERY long and slowly delivered advertisement for their proprietary credit card (and in flight entertainment that you have to supply device for, so you end up with smaller screen, unstable connection, battery drain and watched at a painful viewing angle typically)
As opposed to an open source credit card?
Wireguard vpn+pihole and you won’t need to watch those ads. Set it up to use an ntp port, and you won’t have to sign in to use the wifi.
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
It is possible to use VPN over DNS. Some mad lads back in the '90s made a DNS server that would forward TCP packets over name service text records. The captive portals usually still let DNS pass. But it’s not like you’re going to be able to use any high bandwidth applications that way.