Off The Hook - Wed, 12 Aug 2026 19:00:00 EST

But I wanted to start with a couple of things that are going on in the news.

First of all, I would really like to give an extra special welcome out there to everyone listening to us on Delta Airlines Wi-Fi.

Because that is, as I hear, just a wonderful place where nothing ever happens.

Except when a Delta flight was, quote, and this is on an air travel sort of blog called View from the Wing, where they were at a Delta flight hit by hackers after DEFCON Las Vegas crew says they jammed the in-flight Wi-Fi.

And what appears to have happened is a bunch of people coming home from that other hacker conference, which happened this past weekend, decided to have some fun on the airplane with the Wi-Fi.

They sent out a de-auth attack, which basically knocked everyone off the real Wi-Fi.

Then they put up another... uh, hotspot that was named Delta to get them to connect to that one instead.

And, uh, it's unclear what they were planning on doing with this or why they did this, um, if it was for the lulz or they were, uh, doing something, um, more evil than that.

But, um, of course, now that they've done that, that's, that's the word on everyone's lips in the news, in everywhere.

Uh, Fox News has, uh, has an interesting article about it, as you might imagine.

Um, but, uh, There has been a lot of discourse about this in the sort of hacker sphere online, with some folks saying it was just an armless prank, some folks saying what kind of idiots would do this on a plane and shake up an airline crew.

What do you folks out there think?

Well, hang on, because I...

Fly Delta more often than not because Delta flies direct to a city where we have family.

So we fly Delta not infrequently, which is fine.

And we're used to the spiel where they're like, Delta is on a journey to bring fast and free Wi-Fi to our entire fleet.

But unfortunately, the junky regional jet you're on right now isn't part of that plan yet.

So it sucks to be you.

Please pay us for Wi-Fi.

Mm-hmm.

And people who don't hear that spiel are probably, you know, used to just hopping on the Wi-Fi.

And I did read somewhere where someone pointed out that this isn't just so people can work on graphs and check Facebook, but, you know, they alter the flight plan on the Wi-Fi.

Yeah.

And you and I were having a discussion about this.

Because maybe it's naivete on my part, but I don't understand the appeal of doing this sort of thing.