I just saw my plane cross the mid-Atlantic, not by looking out the window, but by watching routing updates cascade across the Internet. I'm writing from a Lufthansa jet right now, travelling from Munich to Boston. This plane offers the (relatively) new Connexion by Boeing wifi + satellite Internet service. It's seriously cool stuff - high latency, but absolutely functional. I've been aware of it for a while since the Boeing folks did a NANOG presentation about it last year. But this is the first time I've been able to use it.
Renesys has been tracking Internet updates for a very long time. We set realtime routing alerts to tell us when changes in the Internet's structure are a violation of someone's routing or security policy. We have known that due to satellite connectivity, the Internet routing tables could be used for tracking aircraft and the like. But this is the first time I've been on an Internet-connected vehicle, travelling 950kph, that changed its connection to the Internet. If this interconnection architecture is used by others, this could signal the rise of all kinds of interesting uses of the global Internet for monitoring.
