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

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

#92

Post by johnwalkr »

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…

> Hacker News is extraordinarily resilient to lousy connections

It really is. Where I live when you run into the limit of your data package, your network is usually throttled to 100kbps. I changed my plan to just 3GB per month because I was staying at home most of the time due to the pandemic. Now I'm pretty much back to my old routines, but I didn't change my plan yet. I have a 45 minute train commute and 3GB can be used up in a few days just browsing reddit and loading news sites.

Anyway, google search, hacker news and facetime audio work as normal at 100kbps. Google maps works with a bit of patience. Virtually nothing else will load. 5 years ago most text-based things worked at this speed albeit slowly. Now everything is so bloated and so much content will not load show until fonts and things are loaded.

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

#94

Post by pbhjpbhj »

goldenkey wrote: post #62
Cerium wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An LED on what? If you were McGuyver you'd have converted that into a laser, or used some sort of welding tool to melt through the bars!

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

#95

Post by Nextgrid »

Almost a decade ago a French mobile carrier had their entire domain and subdomains zero-rated - one of the subdomains had a phpBB forum - someone created a little script to tunnel full layer 3 communication over the forum’s private messaging functionality. I’d imagine it would slaughter the DB if you tried to pass any significant traffic though it but as a demonstration it was cool and worked fine.

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

#96

Post by codeflo »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #27
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 actually thought that's what this blog was going to be about. Some kind of http encapsulation over Whatsapp. Was disappointed that it's just regular a chat bot

I once experimented with something like that a few years back, when I was regularly using a WiFi that only allowed HTTP. It’s not hard to tunnel something like SOCKS over TLS over base64 over anything that allows sending text, including HTTP. Latency might be a lot worse than the special purpose chatbot though.

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

#97

Post by Macuyiko »

mmh0000 wrote: 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 also used this a lot while travelling to access the internet through captive wifi portals. Especially in asia this worked very well, given the huge amount of telco wifi providers in cities.

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

#99

Post by Litost »

harias wrote: post #86
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...

Thanks I'd not heard of internet in a box, I love how it empowers people to determine their own requirements and solve their own issues rather than just be another excuse to form more dependencies on facebook.
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