EmFi's Musings

I attend CUSEC in Montreal this week. To keep costs low I thought I would try an alternate route. After seeing adds around the city for months about trips as low as $1 to Montreal for the Megabus. I decided to do a little more research.

The is operated by Coach Canada. It serves a number of reasonably close cities. Tickets prices are determined by supply and demand, such that the ticket price is directly proportional to the number of people who have already chosen your trip. When booking my voyage, I couldn’t find any trips cheaper than $18 CAD, which is still a phenomenal deal for a one way trip to Montreal from Toronto. However the cost of your trip will depend on travel time. Luckily, I had the luxury of being able to travel during off peak times (Wednesday and Monday during regular business hours).

After I bought my ticket I heard many rumours about the Megabus that seemed too good to be true. In reality all of the rumours were truths. The bus came even better stocked than I expected. Both of my trips were on double decker busses. Each was equipped with a power outlet for every pair of seats, free wi-fi a second level and a wash room. There were also a few unused amenities. Every seat had a headphone jack tuned to a local radio station and each floor had a few LCD screens around for movies but neither saw much use.

The Toronto – Montreal trip took 5 hours & 45 minutes. Apart from the screaming child sitting two rows up on my trip out, I have no complaints. However on the return trip another passenger was asked to either move or shutdown his laptop because the light it was giving off distracted the driver.

Some stats about the Megabus internet connection:

Downlink: 1.4 Mbps
Uplink: 800 kbps
Provider: Bell Mobility
Surprisingly the gateway is using OpenDNS.

I get various results in my attempts for geolocation based on IP. One test put me in Manitoba within 30m of the Nunavut Border. Another put me in Etobicoke, Ontario.
It’s also worth noting that the wi-fi on the bus is insecure. Which means a few things, in increasing order of maliciousness.

• If you feel like keeping pace with a Megabus, you can use their network from a car following on the highway.
• arpspoofing can be used to inflict the Upside-Down-Ternet on passengers using the internet on your bus.
• Wireshark can be used to snoop the traffic of every device connected to the network.
• sslstrip makes it easy to grab passwords and other very sensitive information.

So as always be mindful of where you connect. You’re never really safe from these attacks unless you’re using SSH tunnelling or other security tricks. On the upside it seems I was the only one thinking of these things on my ride. But who knows how who else will be watching your traffic when you connect from anywhere.

Here are some pictures of the bus from my return trip:

There's a table with cupholders on the bus

The view from my lap

Surprise! There's a hidden outlet under those garbage bags.

Stuck in Montreal Traffic

Now Connected to the Megabus' internal Wi-Fi network