Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tether Launches HTML5-Based iPhone Tethering Solution

macrumors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 64 posts

Re: Tether Launches HTML5-Based iPhone Tethering Solution

#3

Post by yoda_sl »

Interesting concept... Thinking about it, they are making Safari act as the proxy/gateway. I did not dig into it but are they using web socket for achieving that? I can see their desktop app, sending the request/proxying to Safari which will in turns act the gateway to the net. Neat.

Re: Tether Launches HTML5-Based iPhone Tethering Solution

#5

Post by angkec »

Ok so I went ahead and bought the service. Here's what I found out: You'll have to keep the tether client application running on your Mac or PC. So not gonna work for wifi-only iPads. Then you will need to keep the html5 webpage open in order to receive data. They instruct you to set iPhone's screen lock to "never" so it doesn't automatically shuts the web page down in 1 minute or so. So I imagine you can't take phone calls when tethering as the webpage will go offline.

Pricing wise, the first year costs $15 and will be $30 from second year on. They set my paypal up for recurring payment.

Performance wise it's pretty fast on my iPhone 4. Setting up took about 2~3 min, very easy to do. The html5 app needs to connect to both the tether website and the client computer. Took me a few tries to connect to both but once they are connected the speed is pretty comparable to tetherme in jailbroken iPhones.

Re: Tether Launches HTML5-Based iPhone Tethering Solution

#6

Post by Wilya »

guan wrote: post #4
robbiet480 wrote: post #2

How! That's what I really want to know. Streaming sockets?

Would everything have to go through their servers? I can’t imagine that HTML5 apps on iOS have permission to open enough sockets to avoid that.

In the video, the guy shows that, by tethering, he can access Hulu even though he's not in the US. So, yeah, it seems they proxy everything through their servers.

Re: Tether Launches HTML5-Based iPhone Tethering Solution

#8

Post by justinweiss »

guan wrote: post #4
robbiet480 wrote: post #2

How! That's what I really want to know. Streaming sockets?

Would everything have to go through their servers? I can’t imagine that HTML5 apps on iOS have permission to open enough sockets to avoid that.

Yeah, it looks like they use WebSockets, and the iPhone webpage just pipes data from the Mac/PC app to their servers.

Re: Tether Launches HTML5-Based iPhone Tethering Solution

#10

Post by Wilya »

The way they do it is elegant, and could be used in many other places than just the iPhone. All you need is a browser that supports websockets.

I'm not really aware of that stuff, but I'm a bit curious. Do websockets really work over mobile networks (which are, at least in my experience, transparent proxied, and where anything outside of HTTP-on-port-80/HTTPS-on-port-443 is blacklisted into oblivion) ?

Post reply on HN