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Show HN: Smozzy (for Android/T-Mobile) - browse the web without a data plan

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Re: Show HN: Smozzy (for Android/T-Mobile) - browse the web without a data plan

#91

Post by logic »

e1ven wrote: post #17
hollerith wrote: post #9

Great. Now we need a way to send IP packets over a mobile voice call (using the same principles used by old-fashioned modems).

That's surprisingly hard to do ;( Neither android nor iPhone give access to the voice stream.

Interesting thing about that: if you're curious, dig into the SoCs used for this stuff, and you'll see that's really not about "giving access". The voice handling in most smartphones never leaves the SoC, and the OS just communicates with it like you would with a modem: "call XYZ", "hang up", etc, usually with a familiar AT command set.

Useful side-effect: if the OS crashes, your phone call will typically remain alive. (You probably won't be able to hang up without powering off, though, and definitely won't be able to dial another number.) Or, if you have an original iPhone 3G like mine that's sluggish at the best of times, it doesn't affect the phone call. :)

Re: Show HN: Smozzy (for Android/T-Mobile) - browse the web without a data plan

#92

Post by Tutorialzine »

rwolf wrote: post #83
rokhayakebe wrote: post #15

Man, you are clever. Check this. If this is based on SMS/MMS, then I should be able to text you an address and have you return the pages as MMS.

You would still need an app that could translates the MMS back into a page and open it in a browser on your end.

Unless it reformatted the page, returning only the textual content. With the maximum size of an MMS being around 100kb (depends on the operator), this is a lot of text.

You could fetch a number of pages at once and read the response even on a feature phone. This can also be combined with a web interface to bundle pages or feeds together and associate them with a shortcode.

Re: Show HN: Smozzy (for Android/T-Mobile) - browse the web without a data plan

#93

Post by niels_olson »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #79
mdasen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, there is a distinction to the carrier. Text messages are an interesting one. Essentially, they cost nothing to the carrier in that they get transmitted as part of the control channel. However, there is a cost to supporting a phone idling on a network. The control channel has to be in communication with it using up bandwidth. So, the SMS gets put in with the control channel instructions and so its marginal c…

"Essentially, they cost nothing to the carrier in that they get transmitted as part of the control channel. " That was true at one point, but the popularity of SMS has completely swamped the capacity of the control channels.

Care to elaborate? Doesn't my phone always have a control channel signal?

Re: Show HN: Smozzy (for Android/T-Mobile) - browse the web without a data plan

#94

Post by FaceKicker »

qjz wrote: post #67
FaceKicker wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have a "don't send passwords" warning. I should definitely add some kind of warning/disclaimer page that pops up when you boot the app. I display a warning when the user tries to navigate to an HTTPS URL that messages sent to/from Smozzy aren't encrypted and it's not recommended that you proceed. I had a general idea for an encryption scheme (hardcode Smozzy's certificate's public key into the application…

What User-Agent string are you using? It's a clever hack, but I can't allow my users to access sensitive information via your proxy. It sounds like you might be changing or adding hosts as you gain users, so blocking based on User-Agent will be a good start (unless, of course, you choose to use your powers for evil, in which case I'll have to resort to my own clever devices).

The user-agent is somewhat configurable within the application. You can currently choose between 4 options: Nexus S, iPhone 4, Windows 7 Chrome, or None (no user agent string sent). I didn't want to change the actual strings from what is used on these devices, because I wasn't sure if sites would still recognize the string as corresponding to a mobile device (in the cases of the Nexus S and iPhone 4 options) if I altered it. Maybe this wasn't the best decision but I wasn't intentionally trying to "use my powers for evil". If anyone can think of an alternative let me know.

You are obviously welcome to block my domain/IP (not that I could stop you). I don't currently plan to expand beyond a single host. Even in the midst of all this coverage my single VPS seems to be working fine. Sorry in advance if I cause problems for you or any other admins...

Re: Show HN: Smozzy (for Android/T-Mobile) - browse the web without a data plan

#96

Post by BrandonM »

saurik wrote: post #34
SwellJoe wrote: post #5

One of these days, the network providers are going to stop putting arbitrary labels on their data, as though "voice", "text" and "data" are not all travelling through the same towers and pipes.

These three activities have different QoS constraints: "voice" data is real time, lossy, and therefore has hardware assisted compression and routing; text messages and data are non-lossy, but have drastically different timing and retry constraints. So, even if they "traveled through the same towers and pipes" (they don't, a detail more expanded on by mdasen in his comment), it wouldn't make sense to charge the same f…

So it's UDP vs TCP? And why can't these be going over the same pipes?

Re: Show HN: Smozzy (for Android/T-Mobile) - browse the web without a data plan

#97

Post by FaceKicker »

rexreed wrote: post #77

How does this work for sites that use Ajax / Javascript that requires server connections? What about streaming audio / video, and how about cross-site stuff? Does all that get passed through SMS as a proxy?

None of those things work right now (and honestly probably never will). This only has very basic HTTP functionality.

One of the most annoying ones is when sites have Javascript redirects, because my server doesn't know how to follow those. So going to "twitter.com" doesn't work because they have a Javascript redirect to HTTPS. :|

Re: Show HN: Smozzy (for Android/T-Mobile) - browse the web without a data plan

#98

Post by jbuzbee »

Cool hack! Along the same (disturbed) lines, I wonder if it would be possible to do tcp/ip over SMS using a tun or tap type driver? i.e. take the packet, encode, break into parts, SMS to a remote gateway, undo the packing, reassemble and send it on it's way. Sort of like RFC 1149, "A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers" but using SMS. Probably slower than pigeons though :-)

Re: Show HN: Smozzy (for Android/T-Mobile) - browse the web without a data plan

#99

Post by sklnd »

niels_olson wrote: post #93
bryanlarsen wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Essentially, they cost nothing to the carrier in that they get transmitted as part of the control channel. " That was true at one point, but the popularity of SMS has completely swamped the capacity of the control channels.

Care to elaborate? Doesn't my phone always have a control channel signal?

At least as far as CDMA and WCDMA go, control signalling is shared for all mobiles camped on a cell. In CDMA, while a mobile is just camping there's not a lot of traffic going between the cell and the mobile on the access and reverse access channel. The mobile registers as per the registration settings, and the idles its radio until it is paged by the cell, it originates a call, or the registration settings require it to register again. When idle, there is no signalling going back and forth on the access channel, so that bandwidth can be allocated for other things.

I'm not at all familiar with GSM, so I can't say how it works. I expect it's similar, though.

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