I'd love to see remote shell over SMS. Seems a pretty fitting mapping. Not very secure, though.
Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
101–110 of 122 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#102Not exactly what the OP asks, but still surprised that no one mentioned M-Pesa yet:
> M-Pesa (M for mobile, pesa is Swahili for money) is a mobile phone-based money transfer service, payments and micro-financing service, launched in 2007 by Vodafone and Safaricom, the largest mobile network operator in Kenya.
> The service allows users to deposit money into an account stored on their cell phones, to send balances using PIN-secured SMS text messages to other users, including sellers of goods and services, and to redeem deposits for regular money. Users are charged a small fee for sending and withdrawing money using the service.
> M-Pesa is a branchless banking service; M-Pesa customers can deposit and withdraw money from a network of agents that includes airtime resellers and retail outlets acting as banking agents.
> M-Pesa spread quickly, and by 2010 had become the most successful mobile-phone-based financial service in the developing world. By 2012, a stock of about 17 million M-Pesa accounts had been registered in Kenya. By June 2016, a total of 7 million M-Pesa accounts had been opened in Tanzania by Vodacom. The service has been lauded for giving millions of people access to the formal financial system and for reducing crime in otherwise largely cash-based societies.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#103I was part of a project at Oxford where we installed sms transmitters on waterpump handles in Kenya, which sent sms signals giving us data about the pumphandle's movement (and therefore water consumption, and state of the pump).
It was amazing how much we could do with SMS. It really is a great medium.
If I remember correctly, we used FrontlineSMS https://www.frontlinesms.com/ It worked very well. I can't remember the exact details now, but I think the messages were sent to a modem, connected to a PC which ran frontlinesms, which automatically triggered actions depending on the nature of the incoming sms.
Later on I think we switched to a completely managed solution, which stored the data for us and allowed us to download from the 'cloud'. The "modem connected to a computer" thing sounds more like what you're after, but conceivably with the right scripts you could also make use of a cloud solution.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#104I wrote a trilingual one (Chinese, Korean, English) circa 2005 which allowed fuzzy search and directory services.
The main issues are expense, per-message character limit (which is based on your character encoding; note Unicode UCS-2 is super-wasteful vs. other alternatives), latency, and questionable inter-network reliability.
If you're in Alaska, honestly, if you're not really hard up for money just get a satellite deal like the sailors use, they're getting way cheaper.
Don't even begin to dream about forcing IP down SMS. You could do a batched shell service if really desperate, but it would verge on unusable and you'd likely get rate limited at some point.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#105Some of these projects kinda remind me of the http tunnel over icmp/ping to bypass in-flight wifi restrictions. That was an interesting hacker news post a while back.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#106What you want if your comms layer supports it is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_Supplementary_Ser... It works on dumb phones and is extremely lightweight. Think of it as connection based SMS. Very popular in places with low connectivity.
Telcos and Mobile Money services where I come from (Malawi, Africa) use USSD extensively and it works well. So much so that even though some Telcos have Android applications for some of those services - people still mostly rely on USSD menu-driven applications to perform tasks like buying airtime, and sending and withdrawing money.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#107Which part of the world?
Alaska. It is possible to get LEO phone / data, but it is more cost prohibitive. Unlimited SMS plans on LEO satellite services are relatively cheap.
I assume we're talking a deep Bush situation, as all but the tiniest villages have regular Internet service nowadays.
Might be worth looking into Starlink, if you haven't already. I know it does have coverage in at least some regions of the state now.
Source: have lived in Alaska for many years.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#108I intend to build one, eventually. We'll try.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#109What you want if your comms layer supports it is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_Supplementary_Ser... It works on dumb phones and is extremely lightweight. Think of it as connection based SMS. Very popular in places with low connectivity.
Telcos and Mobile Money services where I come from (Malawi, Africa) use USSD extensively and it works well. So much so that even though some Telcos have Android applications for some of those services - people still mostly rely on USSD menu-driven applications to perform tasks like buying airtime, and sending and withdrawing money.
Yes, that's how I know about them (M-Pesa, specifically, not in Malawi I believe, but in Kenya and Nigeria).
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#110IP packets contain 20 bytes of headers, the rest is data. Theoretically you could create the world's worst VPN by stuffing the 140 bytes of an SMS absolutely full of binary data, with some compression of course. So I went looking for "IP over SMS" and actually found this: https://github.com/spandanb/ipos but it's for web browsers only. This old HN thread talks about the same concept: https://news.ycombinator.com/item…
I managed to do something useful with iodine (IP over DNS), a couple of times. Performance is abysmal, but a simple SSH session might have some hope. Most web applications are impossible, and for email you must be lucky.
I remember staying at a hotel in the UK that rented internet in 500MB chunks... i figured out that if I tunneled everything via DNS they didn't count the traffic. I wish I had known about Iodine at that point ;)