Why United Does Not Allow You To Use In-Flight Screen As Extended Display
Confidentiality. Or porn. One of those things.
https://reason.com/volokh/2025/01/23/why-united-does-not-allow-you-to-use-in-flight-screen-as-extended-display/Open linkView original on lemmings.world184
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Bro, relax
Carries entire homelab onto plane so who's up for a LAN party? I'm hosting.
You joke, but I have absolutely created an ad-hoc wireless network and gamed with people I'm traveling with on a flight before.
I played splinter cell chaos theory coop with some random on my steamdeck on a transatlantic flight a few months ago. Can highly recommend!
Damn, I really wanna try this now. Halo 1 pvp on a flight with anyone who I can give a USB stick? Would take me back to high school
Hell yeah. Halo Custom Edition will run on a potato. We played it in highschool off of flash drives on Pentium 4HT desktops with integrated graphics.
Id fucking love this
There are very very few things that I believe deserve summary and immediate execution, and that's just made the list.
Eh. At least it looks like it's daytime. If it were on a redeye, I'd vote to push him out the nearest hatch.
I never recline my seat, but if I was sitting infront of that guy I would move it down for a bit. Then up again. Then down again. Etc for however long the flight is
No darkmode... Pedestrian flash banging the plane
Seriously. What a fucking ridiculous "problem". The photos in this article are absurd.
I'm already annoyed when someone is using their phone in the dark and doesn't adjust the brightness settings.
If you do this during night flights, sincerely, fuck you.
How?! How can they stand it themselves and not feel like they're being blinded?
They're just not letting their eyes get dark-adapted in the first place. They can't see anything but the phone screen, but they also don't care.
As someone with their phone set to the bottom third of the brightness spectrum almost always (unless I'm outside), I really don't understand this. Brightness is perhaps my most adjusted setting, since I use it a half dozen times a day or so. In fact, brightness is the least interesting spec when looking at a device, since I rarely run at max anyway. In fact, my computer screen I use for work is usually at 50% brightness.
How can people stand getting blasted with lumens all the time?
As someone who finds that most "dark mode" offerings aren't dark enough, I don't understand how they can tolerate it either. I suspect it's rather like spicy food: given enough exposure, you don't notice it's spicy (or bright) until reaching a level far above what people who aren't exposed to it on a constant basis would think was acceptable.
I like that analogy, because I love spicy food and many things I consider "mild" are too hot for others.
But surely exposing yourself to that much light causes actual problems like eye strain and poor sleep (esp. at night).
The thing is, would they make the connection? Some people aren't very good at linking up cause and effect where the link isn't practically screaming in their face.
Yeah, people can be idiots, myself included.
Probably just don't know what dark mode is
My wife does this. At 2am. Often mid week. And wonders why I wake up in the middle of the night and grumpy.
If it’s wireless someone will be sent porn by the creep 2 rows back.
yeah this whole article was an unnecessary rant which the author realized only after publishing.
Ah, the times when all phones and laptops in Tesco were unlocked for testing by customers and playing porn every day.
During the early days of Android phones, when most of them shipped with open bootloaders and still had microsd card slots, I've seen so many store display phones that were flashed with cyanogenmod by random people
Then you'll still have people screencast porn to their own screen, photograph it and post it on social media with a title like "United's in-flight entertainment".
Reminds me of the time when I was living in Phoenix and picking up a friend from the bus station. The bus departures came in one big door and right next to the door was one of them new standing internet kiosks that allowed you to browse the internet. This was back in 2003. I was checking it out to see what you could do and where it allowed you to go, when my friends bus came in. I was on goatse.cx and saw my friend and left the kiosk open and we went to leave and noticed many older Hispanic folks freaking out, or laughing as they entered the bus station. The timer ran out on the internet access, but it was a lot of fun with open monitors in public.
It would be pretty easy to require accepting a screenshare with a button press on the target screen. So I don't think trolling other people's displays is the main concern.
Seems you don’t understand how often people just click ‘OK’ without thinking.
I don’t like how we have to limit everything to the lowest denominator at the punishment of everyone
This is why we can’t have nice things.
This is one where it isn't just that though. You know there would be people who'd wait for someone to go to the bathroom or fall asleep and then walk past and hit the OK button for them.
To be fair, that IS the consequences of their own actions kinda
There's no reason they couldn't expose an HDMI port, or even provide a cable that runs down the seat to the tray table.
I worked in a wine shop that had banks of conputers that people could ise to look up reviewer’s rating on wines or place orders on our website. I ended up having to get IT to lock them down to only 6-7 websites because people would use them to try to access their banking. I had to explain to way too many people with jobs in high finance the risks of them doing this on a public computer. Too many idiots would do banking on a flight only to get robbed.
When I bought my house it took the old owner ages to reroute all of her mail to whatever her new address was. At one point sje had a credit card sent to her and it came to my house along with the PIN number.
If I'd been so inclined I could have withdrawn all the money from her account.
Meanwhile when I moved in I spent the first 2 days basically doing nothing other than making sure all of my mail was coming to my new address.
People are just really bad at thinking
Right? I keep a list of every single company/service that I gave my email address, physical address, or phone number to. Every time I give it out I add it to the list. When it needs changing I go through the list and update it in all of them.
The article is about extended displays though. No traces left.
And The last time I flew the displays had viewing angles tht made it so only you could see the display, sp they were actually more private than laptops.
I've never seen angle protection on those screens and I've flown multiple carriers with them.
I've definitely seen them in American airlines at least in the business class. That was about 2014 ish so I'd be surprised if it hasn't become anything other than more commonplace.
I think they went the other way.
Are we talking about united in specific or carriers in general?
Because I am 99% certain that my last british airways flight had those protected angles
One of them was a BA flight.
No traces but you are still sharing your financials on a screen
I watched a woman log into her email at a Best Buy laptop kiosk then walk away. I went over and logged her out.
The user is a moron. Lock your shit.
I spent two years at that aforementioned wine shop emailing “I love you” to my co-worker buddy Rob should anyone have left open their email. Rob knew it was me but always made a point to thank the person who said they loved him.
People can’t behave themselves in public. Even more so on airplanes.
I just want to know when I can connect my noise-cancelling Bluetooth headphones to the display instead of the tinny pair of wired "maraccas" that I keep in my travel bag.
Idk, 150 people in a tin can all using Bluetooth could cause issues.
It would be better to get noise cancelling headphones with a 3.5mm headphone jack. I had some until my daughter broke them, and I loved them.
Loads of people use Bluetooth devices on airplanes already. Are there any reports of destructive interference as is?
Idk. But from my experience, it's usually something like 20 people (me included). If you made that the default way to connect, I think more people would use them.
Or maybe it's not an issue, idk. I don't know a ton about Bluetooth and airplanes.
I've been on budget flights where in flight infotainment was an app on your phone that connects to a media server on the plane itself. Everyone was using Bluetooth and there are no issues.
I would expect a plan to have a lot more than 20 people watching something on their phone with AirPods (or a clone thereof). Just about everyone that's watching or listening to something on their phone nowadays is using BT headphones, because most phones don't have 3.5mm jacks anymore.
Also consider smart watches.
If it could, planes would be dropping right and left. It hasn't been an issue in several decades
Number of stews who have the time to help you figure out the pairing rigamarole or why the radio on this unit is fucked: ZERO.
Number of issues with regular fucking headphones: zero.
Cases where the tinniness will impact your enjoyment of visual spooge: zero
People stopping you from buying some $15 apple 3.5mm pods for your earballs: zero
I'm thinking you'll be fine. Leave the air safety officers alone so they can do their job.
3.5mm earphones don't block 85db of plane noise
The ones that seal do provide sound isolation
And they're lots of fun when there's a cabin announcement.
I don't care about them, the seatbelt light is either on or off, don't bother me with what the temperature is at our destination
It doesn't work that way. They're piped through all audio channels at maximum volume.
Don't care, gaming on my steam deck
Most over-ear noise cancelling headphones I've seen have a 3.5mm input that works with the noise cancelling.
Yet I haven't heard of an earphone with this functionality
What? My 20 years of flying regularly with 3.5mm headphones must have been a very long hallucination.
I said earphones and you're talking about headphones
They make both.
edit: insult was unnecessary.
I haven't found a single model of wired noise canceling earphones in existence
@iopq @threshold_dweller There's been quite a few wired earbuds with ANC over the years. Not many now though. I would imagine they sound like a dreadful compromise.
And because you haven't found them, they must not exist?
No help necessary. Leave it as an advanced option and provide those who request assistance a cheap pair of 3.5 mm headphones. SOLVED.
Wire gets caught in my limbs because the seating area is so tight.
Wire jack is tucked up from people pulling headphones at odd angles. Wortsst case scenario (has happened to me): the jack is inoperable, incapable of holding headphones without continuous, upwards pressure.
No active noise canceling (you might still be able to find ANC wired headphones but they are a niche product if they still exist).
An extra item to pack, since my phone requires a dangle to use 3.5 mm headphones, so I either pack a dangle, or another pair of headphones for using with my phone.
I'm sorry you're not able to appreciate hifi sound but that's a a you problem.
Those sound like shit compared to the expensive pair of wireless ear buds that I already own.
Of course I'm fine. But what's this nonsense about bothering air safety officers? Nobody is berating airline employees about bluetooth headphones lol.
Found these pretty quickly.
The second we get a better short range wireless protocol so there aren't a hundred Bluetooth devices jamming each other on the plane.
If you travel a lot they do make airplane headphones that have a 3.5mm connector and run noise cancelling.
I've been on budget flights where the in-flight infotainment was an app on your phone which connects to a media server on the plane. Everyone was watching with Bluetooth headphones and there were no issues.
The budget airline handed out wireless headphones?
No, you bring your own.
So... I'm pretty sure the entire plane wasn't on Bluetooth headphones then.
And the entire plane wouldn't be on Bluetooth headphones if the in-flight infotainment systems supported it as an option so what's your point?
You don't engineer a system with such an obvious fail state.
They make a thing for that.
Reason is a shit rag, and I don't think their slop should be posted.
I think they're one of the better ones since they tend to cite their sources clearly. Media bias fact check agrees with me as well.
They are super biased though, and you'll get something between a libertarian and Republican lite perspective (think socially liberal Republicans). They absolutely shouldn't be your only source of news and they're very selective about what they cover, but when it comes to factual accuracy, they're pretty good.
Perhaps you disagree with their political bias, but that doesn't make them inaccurate. I highly recommend reading some high quality news sources with a different political bias than your own to get a broader perspective. It doesn't have to be Reason, but Reason is a decent option for left-leaning people because the factual accuracy is pretty high and the perspective is so different.
Reason is libertarian and MBFC has a massive libertarian bias. Reason is a poster child for lying with facts.
It absolutely has a strong bias, but my point is that they do a great job with citing facts, whereas a lot of large media orgs don't bother. That's why they get a strong factual rating.
I certainly could never recommend Reason as a primary news source (even as a libertarian myself), but it's fantastic as a secondary to whatever mainstream media source you like. It offers a different perspective and sometimes facts that other sources leave out (for their own biased reasons), and I find that really valuable. If you're not libertarian, it'll challenge some of your assumptions and hopefully make you think.
So you make a point with great arguments.
Care to elaborate?
What a jackass.
Rule 34.
I always thought it was so whatever company they contract with could show their brainwash ads
Yeah, that was my take as well. That, and adding the ability to plug in/connect costs money and probably isn't popular enough to make it charging for it profitable.
Ahh yes, the Volokh Conspiracy:
We're clever enough to come up with a superficially consistent frameworks that permit our awfulness, therefore we should!