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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

#111

Post by redox99 »

7402 wrote: post #40

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 on…

Most people wouldn't mind some kind of throttling, as long as it is net neutral. The problem here is the lack of net neutrality.

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

#112

Post by [deleted] »

codeflo wrote: post #96
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#113

Post by kmarc »

KermitTheFrog wrote: post #106
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…

You may try to write an email/better official mail or even visit personally to local cellulars marketing teams to include wikipedia to the subscriptions. You may propose them as PR action: future-care, education-care name it. Trust me it may definetelly works.(I did it many times("tune up" some events) but I worked inside the cellular companies) The main problem may be is to the break the "first line" of "corporative…

It feels like this is a lost case... Since then I spent a couple months in Ecuador (and other SouthAmerican countries), and what I see, was similar:

Less fortunate people, whose (only?) entertainment is TikTok/YouTube/Facebook constantly on their phones. Well, Claro (cell provider with one of the best 3G/4G coverage on Galapagos) greets you with a Facebook(!!!) page explaining that Facebook&sister apps are brought to you for free.

There is zero incentive from any sides to fix this situation. The provider is not interested in ditching Meta, Meta is not interested in promoting anything else, and unfortunately most probably one of them (or both) already paid some gobernadores to shut up and keep the status quo of pointing people to ads, ads, and more ads.

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

#114

Post by kmarc »

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…

I think you are trying to find a technical solution to a social problem. Eventually technical solutions will be needed, yes.

Right now it's unreal to even think about VPNs and proxies and customized phones etc. It's not a technical obstacle for that Lao kid, it's a different universe, they never even heard of, nor their peers, parents, teachers, or anyone in their surroundings.

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

#115

Post by joshvm »

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.

Yes, it is. One of the biggest providers is called GoGo who in turn use satellites from SES. My comment about satellite was that I've also worked in very remote places using much poorer links and HN still works, amazingly.

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

#116

Post by anthk »

ale42 wrote: post #108
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 tried Iodine around 3 years ago on a Swiss flight, it worked to read my mails over SSH using Alpine, but was so slow that basically it was unusable. Not sure what was going on, I had the impression that DNS queries were getting throttled after some threshold...

Check Mosh, Mosh works on ISDN level speeds.

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

#118

Post by richiezc »

nullify88 wrote: post #64
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.

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.

I used just clone the MAC address across my iPhone and laptop and switch between them, so I guess you could use your phone to get through the captive portal and then connect with a travel router that clones the phones MAC address.

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

#119

Post by nyuszika7h »

Drblessing wrote: post #60
xeromal wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Maybe it has to do something with WhatsApp also using the Signal protocol, though you'd think generally they'd whitelist IPs or hostnames rather than doing DPI.

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

#120

Post by Matthias247 »

InvaderFizz wrote: post #102
Matthias247 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Makes me wonder if one could bypass the zero-rating scheme with a custom TLS tunnel that sends SNI headers for Facebook.com to your own server.

You probably can. But it would require a custom app that doesn't use the same cname for DNS resolution, SNI and then inside follow-up requests in the Host header. A web-browser would e.g. just use the same values for all of those, and then you either get charged or would end up at facebook.com.
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