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Tunneling Internet traffic over FB chat

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Re: Tunneling Internet traffic over FB chat

#91

Post by microtonal »

girvo wrote: post #87
foiboitoi wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it prevent people interested in creating an ISP in any area that has "free" facebooknet? Especially if the services provided by facebooknet is most of which people would want with an ISP anyway? So not only does it prevent competitor websites, but it stops competitive ISPs, too. It's especially bad if this coporate network is censoring information. No opportunity to even discover non-filtered information out…

Are those competitive ISPs going to give the audience we're talking about access to the net for free as well? Because for a lot of people in this world, they will never be connected to the net unless they don't have to pay; they simply can't afford it.

That's why we need government or non-profit programs, giving general access to the net. Because only then it is a level playing field, and the next Facebook can be from Brasil.

This is only an intentional effort to control and shut out competition (e.g. future Facebook competitors) and has the risk of killing local ISPs as a by-product.

tl;dr It only serves Facebook. Wikipedia et al. are just thrown into the mix to make it look like a humanitarian effort.

Re: Tunneling Internet traffic over FB chat

#92

Post by microtonal »

qq66 wrote: post #73
Liquix wrote: post #70

To me, the worst part of this is that there are places where Facebook is free but you need to pay for an internet connection. If the average user can only access the mindless corporate money-making machines and not the real internet, we are moving in the wrong direction.

Free Facebook means the ability to send and receive messages with ~1 billion people at no cost. That's hugely valuable to a lot of people without the money for a general-purpose Internet connection.

And it will destroy the prospects of a healthy local internet economy where everyone can publish information or compete on a level playing field.

Re: Tunneling Internet traffic over FB chat

#94

Post by pakled_engineer »

modeless wrote: post #23
corndoge wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be more interesting if this was done over Google's chat, since Chrome trusts the Google Internet Authority cert...

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.

Here's one telecom's implementation of this proprietary Internet.org app showing free tier fb/messenger the photos are still displayed just obscured until you pay for a data plan (notice it uses free.facebook.com which is complicit in enforcing this. https://youtu.be/sUGZdFXs22o?t=2m16s

Guess no embedding creative commons university pdfs in wall posts.

Re: Tunneling Internet traffic over FB chat

#95

Post by foiboitoi »

girvo wrote: post #87
foiboitoi wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it prevent people interested in creating an ISP in any area that has "free" facebooknet? Especially if the services provided by facebooknet is most of which people would want with an ISP anyway? So not only does it prevent competitor websites, but it stops competitive ISPs, too. It's especially bad if this coporate network is censoring information. No opportunity to even discover non-filtered information out…

Are those competitive ISPs going to give the audience we're talking about access to the net for free as well? Because for a lot of people in this world, they will never be connected to the net unless they don't have to pay; they simply can't afford it.

Why would they need to be "free?" Not everyone needs personal internet to benefit from a free (as in freedom) internet being available in their area. Unfiltered information spreading in a community is almost guaranteed if it exists.

How on earth are we going to get them innovative/affordable internet solutions if no one can compete to get there?

Re: Tunneling Internet traffic over FB chat

#96

Post by spiritplumber »

hippich wrote: post #74
milankragujevic wrote: post #34

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)

It looks like it is more general purpose, than just html browser.

Potentially a problem that internet = web, at zeroth approximation.

Re: Tunneling Internet traffic over FB chat

#98

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Tunneling Internet traffic over FB chat

#99

Post by logicallee »

icelancer wrote: post #30
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…

> at the end of the day FB is just a php script Facebook Chat isn't. It's primarily Erlang/C++. https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=14218138919

"FB is just a php script" was just a joke :)

Re: Tunneling Internet traffic over FB chat

#100

Post by zx2c4 »

Back in the day when Skype was a pretty cool peer-to-peer encrypted mesh network, that successfully evaded firewalls and traffic analysis, I wrote a tool to proxy Internet traffic ontop of the Skype mesh. I was quite young when I wrote it, but I managed to dust off an old demo screencast I made (and convert the swf to an mp4), which gave me a laugh. If you're curious:

http://data.zx2c4.com/skypeproxydemo.mp4

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