Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tunneling Wikipedia through WhatsApp to (maybe?) get around WiFi restrictions

alexanderell.is

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 137 posts

Re: Tunneling Wikipedia through WhatsApp to (maybe?) get around WiFi restrictions

#31

Post by rschachte »

One thing that would be interesting is scanning for open ports. Once you find an open port, make a Twilio API and text the number (Since most airlines enable texting via SMS/Whats APP) that triggers opening the port on your VPS that is opened on the airplane.

Once you do that, you can tunnel into your VPS through the airlines open port or SSH into the machine. If you create a SOCKS5 proxy, then all traffic in your browser will tunnel through the VPS.

Haven't tried this, but just a thought.

Re: Tunneling Wikipedia through WhatsApp to (maybe?) get around WiFi restrictions

#32

Post by userbinator »

joshvm wrote: post #19

My experience with in-flight message-only WiFi is that they're just really slow and the ping times are long. Some services are actively blocked, e.g. Skype wouldn't work at all even for text messages, but browsing the internet is usually allowed. My VPN wouldn't work, but I suspect it might have if I used an obfuscated connection instead of OpenVPN or whatever the default is (e.g. over SSL). I could load GMail in the…

It sounds like what you're getting on a plane is actually satellite internet.

Re: Tunneling Wikipedia through WhatsApp to (maybe?) get around WiFi restrictions

#33

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

rschachte wrote: post #31

One thing that would be interesting is scanning for open ports. Once you find an open port, make a Twilio API and text the number (Since most airlines enable texting via SMS/Whats APP) that triggers opening the port on your VPS that is opened on the airplane. Once you do that, you can tunnel into your VPS through the airlines open port or SSH into the machine. If you create a SOCKS5 proxy, then all traffic in your br…

Back in 2019 when Indian government put a city of 8 million into a 9 month curfew including internet blackout, I was anxious yo get online. Then they permitted only dozen of "white listed websites", just ones that did not allow anti India propaganda. Anyways, I found amazon India worked. I went to aws, set up a vps and simply used ssh tunnel to it.

It worked, for a bit. They closed the default port and I could not spend time on a dedicated public internet terminals to " test" open ports so yeah, I have done exactly that.

Used foxyproxy btw

Re: Tunneling Wikipedia through WhatsApp to (maybe?) get around WiFi restrictions

#34

Post by dreamcompiler »

userbinator wrote: post #32
joshvm wrote: post #19

My experience with in-flight message-only WiFi is that they're just really slow and the ping times are long. Some services are actively blocked, e.g. Skype wouldn't work at all even for text messages, but browsing the internet is usually allowed. My VPN wouldn't work, but I suspect it might have if I used an obfuscated connection instead of OpenVPN or whatever the default is (e.g. over SSL). I could load GMail in the…

It sounds like what you're getting on a plane is actually satellite internet.

Satellite is always what you get on planes if you fly over an ocean. If you're flying over land, sometimes it's satellite and sometimes it comes from ground-based cells. Depends on the airline and the plane's equipment.

Re: Tunneling Wikipedia through WhatsApp to (maybe?) get around WiFi restrictions

#35

Post by toast0 »

MauranKilom wrote: post #6

Wait, is this filtering based on IP or DNS? How do they make sure their whitelist remains up to date? (I assume it's HTTPS, so those are basically the only two options...) If it's DNS based, there should be simpler workarounds, so I guess it's just IP based?

I worked on the technical side of WhatsApp's special pricing program (aka zero rating) from when it started, through integration with the Facebook Mobile Partner Portal until I left in late 2019. We provided partners IP addresses (well a list of cidr ip/subnet lengths) and email updates when IPs changed. Some partners wanted hostnames, but it wasn't usually effective to manage that way; hostnames seemed to work great for WAP based special pricing, but not for direct tcp. But AFAIK, airline programs were done by the airlines (or whoever does their internet service) without consultation with WhatsApp. (A special plan for messaging without multimedia wasn't within the WA policy, at least while I was there, so we wouldn't have helped them build the product they wanted anyway)

There are lots of possible ways to identify WhatsApp traffic, but I never had a chance to figure out what they were really doing. During that time period, if I was on a flight, I was usually with my young child and it's hard to keep focus for debugging networking on a plane, anyway. What I saw when I was looking was more like what joshvm describes elsewhere. The messaging only plans seem to allow most low bandwidth connections, with high latency, but they'll actively supress some things, and others stall beyond some threshold; sometimes you could get a couple media files to transfer, but then it would stop, etc. WhatsApp was engineered to work with the world's terrible networks, so it will usually work ok for messaging as long as packets get through eventually; connection and ping timeouts are long on client and server, because sometimes it takes a lot of seconds. If DNS doesn't work, that's fine too. Multimedia would usually retry and resume enough to work even if connections didn't last long, so I'd guess there was something actively supressing that, but I don't really know.

FWIW, chat isn't TLS, so SNI isn't the answer there, although at least in the past, the protocol was very identifyable. Been gone for a while and don't regularly tcpdump my connections to WA anymore, so I don't know if that changed though. Multimedia is https, and probably has SNI, although that used to vary by platform.

Re: Tunneling Wikipedia through WhatsApp to (maybe?) get around WiFi restrictions

#37

Post by pokeymcsnatch »

userbinator wrote: post #7

I wonder if anyone has stated a general law along the lines of "if you can send and receive a bit, you can send and receive anything." The only issues ended up being that 1) WhatsApp messages are limited to 1600 characters Concidentally, that's not much bigger than the MTU of standard Ethernet. I don't know how "transparent" the data channel is with respect to non-ASCII (and probably Unicode), but if you use one of t…

Electrical/embedded guy here. My similar law is "if you can blink an led, you can do anything".

Re: Tunneling Wikipedia through WhatsApp to (maybe?) get around WiFi restrictions

#38

Post by pennaMan »

iratewizard wrote: post #14
cortesoft wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is necessarily a law. There would be ways to actually restrict access in better ways... you would likely be right if you amended it to the ability to send a bit to an endpoint you control.

After writing code for locking down tablets used by prison inmates, I definitely agree that it's not much of a law.

I feel the urge to apply to that company and squeeze a backhanded backdoor on those tablets

Re: Tunneling Wikipedia through WhatsApp to (maybe?) get around WiFi restrictions

#39

Post by lolinder »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #9
userbinator wrote: post #7

I wonder if anyone has stated a general law along the lines of "if you can send and receive a bit, you can send and receive anything." The only issues ended up being that 1) WhatsApp messages are limited to 1600 characters Concidentally, that's not much bigger than the MTU of standard Ethernet. I don't know how "transparent" the data channel is with respect to non-ASCII (and probably Unicode), but if you use one of t…

> I wonder if anyone has stated a general law along the lines of "if you can send and receive a bit, you can send and receive anything." In my country we have a telecom service provider law, which states, among other things: ARTICLE 57. - Network neutrality. Prohibitions. Service Providers shall not: a) Block, interfere, discriminate, hinder, degrade or restrict the use, sending, reception, offering or access to any…

I think OP meant "law" as in "law of gravity" not as in legality.

Re: Tunneling Wikipedia through WhatsApp to (maybe?) get around WiFi restrictions

#40

Post by 7402 »

Sure, it's always interesting to investigate vulnerabilities and design deficiencies, and it can be beneficial especially when the goal is improving security for everyone.

But it's hard for me to celebrate someone whose motivation seems to be that they are simply too cheap to pay for something that other, more honest, people are willing to pay for. In this case, it probably doesn't affect anyone else if the author only downloads a few articles, but in general, if internet bandwidth on an airplane is a limited resource, then using large amounts up in this way to the detriment of others would just be stealing.

Post reply on HN