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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?

#61

Post by mywittyname »

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…

This is a great, ambitious, but doable project for a first year CS student.

You should put up a github repo when you're done, regardless of how you feel about the way the code looks. It will absolutely help during a job search.

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

#62

Post by a-dub »

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…

most (all?) cell service providers also had built-in email/sms gateways... so you could build your own services that did this just by building simple email interfaces.

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

#63

Post by garciasn »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #56
whalesalad wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Hiptop / T-mobile Sidekick was a GPRS device which used a proxy to slim pages down to a manageable format for the device. I was using one in 2003 (the CSK) and it was quite the revolutionary piece of equipment for the time.

I still miss its ability to multitask, notify, and switch between apps while providing a full keyboard.

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

#65

Post by geocar »

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…

idk man. i look at https://www.gsmfavorites.com/documents/sms/packetformat/ and i think it's worth smarter protocol conversion - TCP would convert nicely into those status notifications. NAKs are better anyway.

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

#66

Post by PaulHoule »

kurthr wrote: post #60
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.

Couldn’t that blow up your phone? I could cat a million line file and it would take some time before I could do the equivalent of ctrl-c or close session.

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

#67

Post by itslennysfault »

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…

I dunno... reddit seems the same as it's ever been to me :-D

https://old.reddit.com

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

#68

Post by spookthesunset »

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.

Surely it was more than a penny a response. If each response took a minute then you’ll be making like $0.6 an hour. To make even $5 an hour you’d need to be sending a message every like 10 seconds.

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

#69

Post by jll29 »

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…

We developed an SMS-based automatic question answering service deployed experimentally under the disposable brand name "myNuggets.net": https://www.prweb.com/pdfdownload/203601.pdf Venture capitalists/UK business angels did not share our vision that the Internet's future would be mobile in 2004/5 - well before the advent of the iPhone.

I had the idea for an all-automatic SMS info service when I jumped in a taxi in Edinburgh to attend a conference overseas and had left my hotel address on the kitchen table. I phoned a friend and said "Google that hotel for me, please" - and when I thanked him and hang up, I realized a human wasn't needed for many tasks like that, as they were well within the capabilities of Natural Language Processing (Information Extraction, Question Answering) even then.

We were proud that the prototype engineered had a 2 s round-trip time, including Web-meta search, answer extraction and SMS-HTTP gateway calls (very expensive back then).

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

#70

Post by MYEUHD »

There's a free software android app called Silence that lets you send encrypted SMS. The functionality was originally in Signal, but at some point that project decided to remove it. So "Silence" is the fork of Signal that was made specifically to retain that feature. as a result, it uses the Signal encryption protocol. (but it can't federate with Signal)

https://silence.im

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