Live data from Hacker News

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

alexanderell.is

61–70 of 137 posts

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

#61

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…

What nefarious needs other than probably playing shrek2 on the inflight entertainment systems?

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

#62
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I blinked an LED in my cell but I'm still behind bars. Guess these dumb adages don't really hold a candle to reality.

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

#63
“WhatsApp messages are limited to 1600 characters” If that is UTF32 we have 51200 bytes or 50kB per message.

“the basic free accounts I was using rate-limit to ~1QPS” That is 400kbit/s. Can we have multiple accounts? 40 accounts would give us a theoretical maximum speed of 16Mbit/. Would probably closer to 10Mbit/s in real life, enough to watch movies.

Example library for sending/receiving WhatsApp text: https://github.com/open-wa/wa-automate-python

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

#64
post #30
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.

What do you do when wifi has a captive portal though requiring a user name and password?

I use my Samsung S10 for exactly this as it has multiple radios that allows connecting to wifi and hotspotting to share that connection with other devices. Great for Chromecasting.

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

#65
post #10

Many years ago (2012) Delta inflight wifi would allow DNS queries out without paying. Being a very frequent flyer I used to run an ip-over-dns tunnel using Iodine[1]. It was slow but worked. I wonder if they’ve blocked that hole yet. [1] https://code.kryo.se/iodine/

I did the same on trains in the 00s, but built application specific tunnels which were much faster, funnily enough among them was one that would fetch Wikipedia pages. The client would piece together the replies and render the markup to html again.

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

#66
Cool pet project, admirable engineering etc.

My comment is about something else: net neutrality, as someone already mentioned.

I was teaching English in Laos for school kids. I was amazed that some of their families struggle with providing (nutritious enough) food for their children, yet, everyone had smartphones with always-on 4G,even in the countryside - however, no WiFi almost anywhere.

The brains of these kids are like sponge. They WANT to learn, they're shy, but they want to speak, to read, to practice English. They also like to (constantly) sing (something that is badly missing from western schools), so at one point I referred them to "simple English Wikipedia", where they can research their favorite singers with easy-to-process articles.

Empty stares.

"so instead of Wikipedia.org, you go to simple.wikipedia.org."

Still nothing.

I had to realize later that even if they knew that this free, always available encyclopedia exists, it's NOT included in their 4G subscription.

Yes, you guessed correctly: those subscriptions are sponsored by big US / Chinese corps, so all these kids had were Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and TikTok, everything else costs ~10$ which is days worth of meals for whole families there.

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

#67
post #66

Cool pet project, admirable engineering etc. My comment is about something else: net neutrality, as someone already mentioned. I was teaching English in Laos for school kids. I was amazed that some of their families struggle with providing (nutritious enough) food for their children, yet, everyone had smartphones with always-on 4G,even in the countryside - however, no WiFi almost anywhere. The brains of these kids ar…

in this instance a simple vpn or proxy should suffice. they could get by on free subscriptions for textual content

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

#68
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you do when wifi has a captive portal though requiring a user name and password? I use my Samsung S10 for exactly this as it has multiple radios that allows connecting to wifi and hotspotting to share that connection with other devices. Great for Chromecasting.

The first device to connect has to go through the captive portal, then the rest doesn’t.

Also works well if your 2nd device doesn’t support captive portals (Chromecast, Tesla car).

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

#69
post #66

Cool pet project, admirable engineering etc. My comment is about something else: net neutrality, as someone already mentioned. I was teaching English in Laos for school kids. I was amazed that some of their families struggle with providing (nutritious enough) food for their children, yet, everyone had smartphones with always-on 4G,even in the countryside - however, no WiFi almost anywhere. The brains of these kids ar…

in this instance a simple vpn or proxy should suffice. they could get by on free subscriptions for textual content

> vpn

> proxy

These are solutions for ME and YOU when we are there as tourists (if we really want to chop off that $10 from our travel budget). Probably not a solution for people who have never heard of websites like Wikipedia.

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

#70
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you do when wifi has a captive portal though requiring a user name and password? I use my Samsung S10 for exactly this as it has multiple radios that allows connecting to wifi and hotspotting to share that connection with other devices. Great for Chromecasting.

you would need a router which supports WISP Repeater mode. some GL.inet products support this
Post reply on HN