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

alexanderell.is

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

#51

Post by lidder86 »

jamal-kumar wrote: post #46

I've tried this before, it's a fucking nightmare lol it's not full-duplex at all so this severely limits your ability to do things at a reasonable speed for most shit. For me it was because at the time Zuckerbutt was giving out 'free' internet in the third world, but only for whatsapp, instagram, and facebook, so me and my friends wanted to see if this was exploitable, but it was just way too slow. It really gave me…

Vpn over websocket.. in Indonesia even worked when they "turn" off the internet for nyepi with a simple host file hack as you could browse the isp website was based on name not IP so yes the vpn was unencrypted but you couldn't see it was a vpn

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

#52

Post by xeromal »

This reminds me of back in the day when internet cost on mobile phones. An og "hacker" could text a website to some number he had set up and it would MMS him back a picture of the website. Worked in a pinch. This was in 2005-2008ish. I can't remember who did it though. So many years ago.

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

#53

Post by toast0 »

mgarciaisaia wrote: post #47
toast0 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I always thought WhatsApp published their list of IPs (segregated by standard chats vs media), but it seems they only share CIDR blocks with operators privately: https://www.whatsapp.com/cidr.txt And you say there's no segregation between chat and media - and I trust your out of date info more than my completely made up guesses.

Yeah, that text file included messaging and multimedia (and verification and the website, etc); there was another one that included those and VoIP relay servers (but VoIP also can do p2p, so it's harder to include in special pricing), until it moved to the private portal. Customer service would sometimes provide the link to that text file, and operators we had an active agreement with would get an email when the file was updated (or sometimes when my scripts broke and did stupid things, sorry operators). (While I was there) We never provided a chat only file, because chat only is not a user experience we wanted to have happen.

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

#54

Post by Cerium »

pokeymcsnatch wrote: post #37
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".

My take has always been: If you can't blink an LED, you can't do anything.

My first priority is to get an LED blinking, and keep it blinking. Every other feature is less important.

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

#55

Post by t-0 »

jjeaff wrote: post #30
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…

I carry one of those tiny wireless routers in my carry on wherever I go. If I have to buy internet on the plane or if I am in a hotel that limits the number of devices, I always connect through the router and use it as an access point for all the other devices. The other added benefit is that all my other devices already have my AP's wifi creds and will connect to it automatically.

I've been thinking about doing somethign similar and am really interested in what hardware you're using for this and what your setup looks like. Do you run a VPN service directly on your router, for example?

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

#56

Post by cranekam »

axiosgunnar wrote: post #24
stefan_ wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand, what's the domain of.. WhatsApp? Not to mention you are just as likely to hit some Round-Robin configuration.

This is a very good question. I would also assume that Whatsapp might change the servers used with updates of the app. How would Delta deal with that? Just wait for the complaints to come in?

WhatsApp (now, since it moved into FB's infra) connects to g.whatsapp.net, which is a CNAME to chat.cdn.whatsapp.net, which in turn is an A record to a VIP on Facebook's edge network. The A record you're returned can change — it's intended to be one that's closest to you (as determined by your DNS resolver's location and probably EDNS Client Subnet) but traffic engineering policies might cause different responses over time.

Since on a flight it's likely everyone will use the same resolver on the ground somewhere in Delta's infrastructure a simple mechanism to resolve the IP periodically and update a whitelist (or to cache one VIP location and always return that) might work. Alternatively, as other commenters have suggested, it'd be better to identify traffic with SNI or other profiling.

Updates to the app almost certainly won't change the address it connects to.

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

#57

Post by 3np »

jjeaff wrote: post #30
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…

I carry one of those tiny wireless routers in my carry on wherever I go. If I have to buy internet on the plane or if I am in a hotel that limits the number of devices, I always connect through the router and use it as an access point for all the other devices. The other added benefit is that all my other devices already have my AP's wifi creds and will connect to it automatically.

Which one do you use?

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

#58

Post by kgeist »

My first thought was to abuse the Web client. Run a server somewhere which hooks into JS in headless Chrome, parses commands and sends messages (requires a dummy user). The client could be based on the Web client, too. But I'm not sure if it's feasible and it's probably against the Terms of Use.

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

#59

Post by Matthias247 »

peeters wrote: post #23
cortesoft wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is pretty simple... your filter just makes periodic DNS requests to the desired allowed host and updates it's IP restrictions to the returned address. You also need to run the DNS resolver to return that same cached IP to prevent having the upstream DNS server return a different address. You also need to make sure the DNS server will only resolve the domains you want it to, because if you allow unfiltered dns requ…

These days with the prevalance of HTTPS, another option is to inspect the TLS client hello packet. To work well with load balancers etc, clients typically indicate the server name that they're trying to connect to (SNI - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication ). That information is not encrypted. So you have both the dst IP and hostname in the initial packet.

Zero-rating at ISPs via SNI inspection is pretty common practice

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

#60

Post by Drblessing »

xeromal wrote: post #48
Drblessing wrote: post #3

Had this exact same idea on my last flight! If Telegram is an approved messenger you could also create a pretty unrestricted bot there too. Very cool.

On the planes I've flown with messaging enabled, I usually only see IMessage, whatsapp, and facebook messenger.

Shockingly Signal was working on my last flight - maybe telegram works but they don't advertise?
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