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

alexanderell.is

1–10 of 137 posts

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

#6
Wait, is this filtering based on IP or DNS? How do they make sure their whitelist remains up to date? (I assume it's HTTPS, so those are basically the only two options...)

If it's DNS based, there should be simpler workarounds, so I guess it's just IP based?

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

#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 the various binary-to-text encodings that exist, you could probably implement Ethernet over WhatsApp. ;-)

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

#9

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 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."

In my country we have a telecom service provider law, which states, among other things:

ARTICLE 57. - Network neutrality. Prohibitions. Service Providers shall not:

a) Block, interfere, discriminate, hinder, degrade or restrict the use, sending, reception, offering or access to any content, application, service or protocol except by court order or explicit request of the user.

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

#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/

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