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Tunneling Internet traffic over FB chat

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Re: Tunneling Internet traffic over FB chat

#31

Post by ForHackernews »

logicallee wrote: post #28

I think this is kind of abusive of FB's infrastructure TBH. It must be hard to keep real-time messaging up for ... okay, I was going to say for 1 billion users, looked it up and it's 1.3 billion monthly actives - 890 million daily actives (Jan 2014 figure). So tell you what, on second thought I think they can handle your data. however there's a good chance you'll cause some infrastructure problems since I'm sure ther…

Maybe if it becomes popular, it'll make facebook rethink wanting to store everyone's messages until the end of time.

Re: Tunneling Internet traffic over FB chat

#33

Post by zanny »

nl wrote: post #29
modeless wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes this interesting is the fact that Facebook chat traffic is subsidized by Facebook and free of charge in some countries as part of their anti-net-neutrality "Internet.org" initiative. This project allows you to hijack the Facebook subsidy for purposes they didn't intend. Of course, if it becomes popular then Facebook will have to block it, emphasizing the self-serving commercial nature of the subsidy.

Internet.org might not be net neutral, but that doesn't make it bad. Much of the world isn't the US, and differently structured markets need to be considered differently.

So if you are in an impoverished area your packets are different from first world packets, magically making it harder to send them to 207.241.224.2 (archive.org) than 173.252.120.6 (facebook.com)?

No, that is not the case. Instead, Facebook will pay for you to get Internet if that is Internet that only lets you access Facebook. And that is not an Internet at all. The infrastructure, the physical reality, means that if you have any connection, you can have all connections, and in these circumstances only profit hungry greedy monsters would consider effectively blacklisting every site but their own to guarantee them revenues to show to shareholders for providing network connectivity to you - or I guess it should be more appropriately called Facebook connectivity.

Re: Tunneling Internet traffic over FB chat

#34

Post by milankragujevic »

Couldn't you just use Facebook's "Fetch as FacebookBot" feature and just fetch the pages yourself? Example: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/echo?q=https%... I was thinking about doing this since on my network Facebook access is free but Internet isn't. (2nd world country, but barely)

Re: Tunneling Internet traffic over FB chat

#35

Post by Dylan16807 »

zanny wrote: post #33
nl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet.org might not be net neutral, but that doesn't make it bad. Much of the world isn't the US, and differently structured markets need to be considered differently.

So if you are in an impoverished area your packets are different from first world packets, magically making it harder to send them to 207.241.224.2 (archive.org) than 173.252.120.6 (facebook.com)? No, that is not the case. Instead, Facebook will pay for you to get Internet if that is Internet that only lets you access Facebook . And that is not an Internet at all. The infrastructure, the physical reality, means that…

They're not blacklisting anything.

The only bad thing they do is call it "internet". It's not internet access. Free access to things like wikipedia is a good thing, as long as it's not taking money away from actual free internet initiatives.

Price gouging actual internet access would also be bad, but that would be someone else doing it, and I don't think it's happening here.

Re: Tunneling Internet traffic over FB chat

#36

Post by im3w1l »

ForHackernews wrote: post #31
logicallee wrote: post #28

I think this is kind of abusive of FB's infrastructure TBH. It must be hard to keep real-time messaging up for ... okay, I was going to say for 1 billion users, looked it up and it's 1.3 billion monthly actives - 890 million daily actives (Jan 2014 figure). So tell you what, on second thought I think they can handle your data. however there's a good chance you'll cause some infrastructure problems since I'm sure ther…

Maybe if it becomes popular, it'll make facebook rethink wanting to store everyone's messages until the end of time.

Or limit how much data you can send over chat. Say max 10 bytes per second sustained (higher burst) allowed. Should be enough for normal chat, while limiting infrastructure problems.

Re: Tunneling Internet traffic over FB chat

#37

Post by nly »

Uses Gumbo... from the README

> Gumbo was initially designed for a product that worked with trusted input files only. We're working to harden this and make sure that it behaves as expected even on malicious input, but for now, Gumbo should only be run on trusted input or within a sandbox.

Re: Tunneling Internet traffic over FB chat

#39

Post by sukilot »

DickingAround wrote: post #17
andrepd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the specifics about how the surveilance is implemented, but embedding encrypted payload in benign files is a neat idea to bypass internet censorship, at least in principle.

Inconvenient Message Detection: https://github.com/DickingAround/InconvenientMessageDetectio...

FYI github renders readme.txt as preformatted code, but your readme.txt is not preformatted, so it is very hard to read (one line per paragraph).

Re: Tunneling Internet traffic over FB chat

#40

Post by sukilot »

zanny wrote: post #33
nl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet.org might not be net neutral, but that doesn't make it bad. Much of the world isn't the US, and differently structured markets need to be considered differently.

So if you are in an impoverished area your packets are different from first world packets, magically making it harder to send them to 207.241.224.2 (archive.org) than 173.252.120.6 (facebook.com)? No, that is not the case. Instead, Facebook will pay for you to get Internet if that is Internet that only lets you access Facebook . And that is not an Internet at all. The infrastructure, the physical reality, means that…

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