Ah, does that hack still work though? I would be surprised if it did, since the story was from years ago.

I used to play with IP-over-DNS, which more or less worked on an awful lot of these plane wifi systems. Haven't tried it in the past couple years though; it's always slow the point of barely being usable. You can probably get your mail via IMAP if you're patient and nobody's sending you large attachments, that's about it.