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Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?

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Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?

#51

Post by coldsauce »

plants wrote: post #28
coldsauce wrote: post #24

In 2014, I had a similar problem so I created Cosmos Browser, an Android based internet browser which allowed people to connect to the internet via SMS. It's pretty much dead now, but wouldn't take a lot of work to revive it if you really wanted to. https://github.com/ColdSauce/CosmosBrowserAndroid

This is incredible - I remember seeing this project at a hackathon back when I was in college and thinking it was so cool! So funny to see the actual author of it posting about it on HN now :). Really such a cool project - would love to see this become more mature. Without actually looking through the code, I have a few questions: 1. How slow is it loading webpages? I think SMS would be a little sluggish since each m…

Thanks! Yeah it was fairly slow but we did some work to try to make it faster.

Our process was

1. Remove all JS and CSS from the HTML file

2. Compress the file into a gzip stream

3. Base64 encode the file

4. Send it as a stream of text messages with some metadata on sequence numbers, etc

SMS uses the GSM 03.38 encoding which is a 7 bit encoding. I think we were working on building a custom encoding scheme for it rather than using Base64's 6-bit encoding, but never got around to it.

I think reddit.com (back in 2014 when it wasn't so fancy as it is now) took about 20 text messages to load, so you can imagine it would take less than a minute.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?

#53

Post by lukeasch21 »

coldsauce wrote: post #51
plants wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incredible - I remember seeing this project at a hackathon back when I was in college and thinking it was so cool! So funny to see the actual author of it posting about it on HN now :). Really such a cool project - would love to see this become more mature. Without actually looking through the code, I have a few questions: 1. How slow is it loading webpages? I think SMS would be a little sluggish since each m…

Thanks! Yeah it was fairly slow but we did some work to try to make it faster. Our process was 1. Remove all JS and CSS from the HTML file 2. Compress the file into a gzip stream 3. Base64 encode the file 4. Send it as a stream of text messages with some metadata on sequence numbers, etc SMS uses the GSM 03.38 encoding which is a 7 bit encoding. I think we were working on building a custom encoding scheme for it rath…

This is crazy that I stumbled upon this post, I just learned about HackerNews today and saw this on the front page! I've been working on making a sort of revival project of Cosmos browser for a couple months now using a custom encoding and better compression. With the GSM 03.38 spec, I found there are 125 usable characters that I could use as a custom base, but I found out that for some reason the 0x10 column of the character set is mostly non-functional using any SMS API like Twilio. The characters from row 0x00 to 0x0A just show up as "?" instead besides the underscore. I contacted support for multiple API providers (Twilio and Plivo) and found that this is an issue on the operator level, which is quite surprising. I doubt this will ever be fixed because the problem runs so deep. This limits the usable characters to 115, which still has surprisingly good improvements in encoding efficiency compared to base64. I also used the (relatively) new Google brotli compression algorithm which allows me to compress even more efficiently. I'm still finishing a proof of concept so I don't have a GitHub repo up yet but I will soon (I'm a first-year CS student so I need to make my code somewhat presentable before it draws the internet's scrutiny, haha). Right now the server uses Python and the client app began as a fork of Cosmos browser. It turns out that getting code from the KitKat era to work on Android 11 isn't the best solution so I'm looking into rewriting the app. Regardless, thank you so much for your work! I'm super excited to finish the proof of concept and I hope to be able to implement the peer-to-peer system you briefly mentioned in the repo by having a "server" option you could turn on in the app that leverages a user's phone number and internet connectivity to allow other users to connect to that number.

Edit: I also want to add that I've looked into UCS-2 encoding (here: https://www.twilio.com/docs/glossary/what-is-ucs-2-character... ) but I'm not sure if the decrease in characters per message (only 70 instead of 160) is worth the greater amount of characters (theoretically 36,864 but probably includes many non-usable characters). It would also require a more complicated encoding algorithm, and I'm not sure how well supported this is by carriers internationally.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?

#55

Post by coldsauce »

lukeasch21 wrote: post #53
coldsauce wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Yeah it was fairly slow but we did some work to try to make it faster. Our process was 1. Remove all JS and CSS from the HTML file 2. Compress the file into a gzip stream 3. Base64 encode the file 4. Send it as a stream of text messages with some metadata on sequence numbers, etc SMS uses the GSM 03.38 encoding which is a 7 bit encoding. I think we were working on building a custom encoding scheme for it rath…

This is crazy that I stumbled upon this post, I just learned about HackerNews today and saw this on the front page! I've been working on making a sort of revival project of Cosmos browser for a couple months now using a custom encoding and better compression. With the GSM 03.38 spec, I found there are 125 usable characters that I could use as a custom base, but I found out that for some reason the 0x10 column of the…

That's awesome - feel free to email me (should be on my website) if you want to talk more. Can share some tips and tricks or answer questions you might have.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?

#56

Post by BoxOfRain »

whalesalad wrote: post #41
dashundchen wrote: post #31

Not that this is a solution for you now, but about 10-15 years ago there were a whole slew of SMS services which were super useful for those without data. Google 311 (EDIT: actually it was Google 411) let you conduct full searches, local listings, full text turn-by-turn navigation, weather, movie listings etc. You could also call a number and do an voice search that would text you back the results. Twitter, AIM, Face…

Texting Google in the early 2000’s was so cool. Felt like magic at the time.

Seeing the web on a GPRS device was pretty cool too! It was a bit like watching an elephant perform ballet, seeing it happen at all made up for the fact it wasn't very good.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?

#57

Post by arthurcolle »

nvrspyx wrote: post #43
dashundchen wrote: post #31

Not that this is a solution for you now, but about 10-15 years ago there were a whole slew of SMS services which were super useful for those without data. Google 311 (EDIT: actually it was Google 411) let you conduct full searches, local listings, full text turn-by-turn navigation, weather, movie listings etc. You could also call a number and do an voice search that would text you back the results. Twitter, AIM, Face…

I can't remember the name of it, but there was a service where you would text a question akin to a Google search and a real human would respond with the answer. If you signed up to be one of the responders (and proved your ability to find and return an accurate result quickly), they paid you like $0.01 per answer. I thought it was a neat idea back when everyone was still using dumb phones.

KGB (Knowledge Generation Bureau) was one, and then another one took its place

Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?

#58

Post by munk-a »

For consuming information I feel like it's pretty realistic to roll one (I don't know if one actually exists) but for any data modification (like replying to emails) isn't any sort of Authentication going to be 100% infeasible due to the weaknesses of SMS?

You might be able to get by it with some sort of SMS signing system but you really don't have a lot of room to work with and it'd likely make it unreasonable to handcraft any of these messages.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?

#59

Post by jabroni_salad »

Areibman wrote: post #12
judge2020 wrote: post #8

The main issue with SMS is that it's unencrypted and often intentionally being piped to third party firms for advertising and whatnot, so whatever you do it probably isn't advisable to send anything you wouldn't want people seeing (eg. I wouldn't suggest doing email via it). If you have even the smallest data cap, https://lite.cnn.com can be used for your news and https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/ (/h/ at the end)…

If this is the case, why do so many apps use SMS for 2FA and sending unique links? Are MITM attacks over SMS common?

because SMS already has near-universal adoption. As much as I love my yubikey I don't know anyone (in the real, not HERE) who uses one for a personal account.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?

#60

Post by kurthr »

jeroenhd wrote: post #21

IP 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…

You might also see if you can just restrict interaction to a shell. That's definitely going to be much lower bandwidth (and thus more responsive). Then anything you can do in the shell, you can do through SMS. Updating an 80col screen isn't a completely unreasonable number of messages... especially if you're doing compression.

Security is probably a bigger issue.

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