Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

Summary

Picture this, you’re a teenager in the middle of the ocean on a cruise ship. All is good, except you’re lacking your lifeblood: internet. You could pay $170 for seven days of throttled internet on a single device, and perhaps split it via a travel router or hotspot, but that still seems less than ideal. I’ve been travelling Europe with family and am currently on Princess Cruises’ Sun Princess cruise ship. For the past two days, the ship has mostly been in port, so I was able to use a cellular connection. This quickly became not feasible as we got further from land, where there was no coverage. At around the same time, I wanted to download the Princess Cruises app on my phone, and realized that it would give me a one-time 15-minute internet connection. I activated it, and quickly realized that it didn’t limit you to just the Play Store or App Store: all websites could be accessed. I soon realized that this “one-time” download was MAC-address dependent and thus, could be bypassed by switching MAC addresses. However, doing so logs you out of the MedallionNet portal, which is required to get the 15-minutes of free internet. This means that in order to get just 15 minutes of internet, the following is required: Change MAC address Login to MedallionNet with date-of-birth and room number, binding the MAC address to your identity Send a request with your booking ID activating 15 minutes of free internet, intended to be used for downloading the Princess app Not completely sure, but it did initially seem that to activate unrestricted access to the internet, you would need to send a simple HTTP to play.google.com, although I don’t think this is needed. This process, on the surface, seems extremely arduous. But if this could be automated, it would suddenly become a much more viable proposition. After looking at the fetch requests the MedallionNet portal was sending to login and activate the free sessions, I realized that it shouldn’t be too hard to automate. Conveniently, my fa...