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

81–90 of 137 posts

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

#81

Post by 867-5309 »

yorwba wrote: post #77
867-5309 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they could get by on free subscriptions

> all these kids had were Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and TikTok, everything else costs ~10$ I don't think any of those four products includes free VPN. You'd need to tunnel Wikipedia through WhatsApp instead, or something.

I don't think that's a representation of the full picture. a cheap android phone would undoubtedly also come with google preinstalled, thus cache/AMP access to Wikipedia

I don't think a telecoms company or phone manufacturer could reliably restrict the ever changing landscape of internet access without affecting usability and social media consumption

I don't think they are using customised iPhones where perhaps such limits may be imposed

I don't think any determined Laotian kid would consider a free vpn an obstacle

I don't think it's unreasonable to say where there's a will there's a way

I don't think it's an impossible feat

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

#82

Post by FrenchDevRemote »

867-5309 wrote: post #78
andrewxdiamond wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would a VPN work if there is an allowlist of domains? The VPN traffic would get blocked, no?

they operate at a lower OSI level and use various obfuscation techniques

I don't see how that change anything

They obviously charge for anything that is no whitelisted

And the IP of the VPN all the traffic would pass through is definetly not whitelisted...

If they allow Google you could MAYBE host a VPN on google cloud but besides that there is absolutely no way this changes anything

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

#83

Post by jonathantf2 »

The last time I was on an flight that had WiFi (AA about 5 years ago) I tried 2 ways to get around the captive portal, both successful:

1. Setting my useragent to iOS Safari and trying to download the Gogo Player app to watch one of the free films. If you have Android this just serves the APK but on iOS it just has to dump you to the App Store. This seemed to give me a good half hour of connectivity.

2. I went on the live chat and asked for a free connection. The agent gave it to me.

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

#84

Post by redeyedtreefrog »

kmarc wrote: 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…

That's interesting, inspired me to go down a bit of a wikipedia rabbit hole reading about internet.org, facebook zero, wikipedia zero, and zero-rating generally.

It seems mobile wikipedia is zero-rated in many countries, but by no means all, as indicated by the table on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-rating

Though many countries don't have any info in the above table (including Laos), and I think the "Zero Wikipedia" column may be obsolete as that project was apparently shut down in 2018.

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

#85

Post by mmmmmbop »

3np wrote: post #57
jjeaff wrote: 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.

Which one do you use?

Not GP, but I've been using the GL.iNet Beryl (GL-MT1300) and I'm really happy with it.

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

#86

Post by harias »

kmarc wrote: 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…

https://internet-in-a-box.org/ might come in handy.

Facebook tried the same in India but was quickly shutdown: https://www.wired.com/2016/02/facebooks-free-basics-app-is-n...

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

#87

Post by sva_ »

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 was recently on a United flight and the free 1h "text only" option gave me access to the whole internet, and I could reactivate it after an hour. I think maybe they unlocked it because the flight had a delay - or it was a bug. The flight crew didn't inform us about it though. I also didn't notice any other people using it.

The connection was pretty damn good, considering I was somewhere over the Atlantic. It was shocking to me how much more enjoyable the flight was, makes me wonder how hooked I am to being connected. (I also had extra legroom and an empty seat next to me though.)

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

#89

Post by yorwba »

867-5309 wrote: post #81
yorwba wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all these kids had were Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and TikTok, everything else costs ~10$ I don't think any of those four products includes free VPN. You'd need to tunnel Wikipedia through WhatsApp instead, or something.

I don't think that's a representation of the full picture. a cheap android phone would undoubtedly also come with google preinstalled, thus cache/AMP access to Wikipedia I don't think a telecoms company or phone manufacturer could reliably restrict the ever changing landscape of internet access without affecting usability and social media consumption I don't think they are using customised iPhones where perhaps such…

> a cheap android phone would undoubtedly also come with google preinstalled

Plenty of Android phones don't come with Google preinstalled.

> thus cache/AMP access to Wikipedia

Even if you have Google on your phone, that doesn't mean you won't need a paid data plan to actually use it.

> I don't think a telecoms company or phone manufacturer could reliably restrict the ever changing landscape of internet access without affecting usability and social media consumption

But that's the point? If you want better usability, you're expected to pay for full internet access.

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

#90

Post by dapids »

Matthias247 wrote: post #59
peeters wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's also a preferred hardware inspection as its dead easy to rip the header than to seek mid-message to do message entropy/fingerprinting.
Post reply on HN