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 are like sponge. They WANT to learn, they're shy, but they want to speak, to read, to practice English. They also like to (constantly) sing (something that is badly missing from western schools), so at one point I referred them to "simple English Wikipedia", where they can research their favorite singers with easy-to-process articles.
Empty stares.
"so instead of Wikipedia.org, you go to simple.wikipedia.org."
Still nothing.
I had to realize later that even if they knew that this free, always available encyclopedia exists, it's NOT included in their 4G subscription.
Yes, you guessed correctly: those subscriptions are sponsored by big US / Chinese corps, so all these kids had were Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and TikTok, everything else costs ~10$ which is days worth of meals for whole families there.
That's interesting, inspired me to go down a bit of a wikipedia rabbit hole reading about internet.org, facebook zero, wikipedia zero, and zero-rating generally.
It seems mobile wikipedia is zero-rated in many countries, but by no means all, as indicated by the table on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-rating
Though many countries don't have any info in the above table (including Laos), and I think the "Zero Wikipedia" column may be obsolete as that project was apparently shut down in 2018.
If you know anyone still involved over there you should let them know about the Kiwix project!
>Kiwix is an offline reader for online content like Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, or TED Talks. It makes knowledge available to people with no or limited internet access. The software as well as the content is free to use for anyone.
Kiwix is nice.
Also from your comment, I feel that I definitely fail to communicate what the actual problem is.
The problem is NOT that the kids (and their teachers) cannot access certain sites. Although they might not be able to afford it, if they want.
The problem is that they DON'T KNOW that internet sites exist. For a kid who was born into the era where a magical handheld thing can show his friends' life and funny videos, a "website" means nothing. I even didn't want to write handheld television screen, because most of them haven't even seen a television before.
They don't know that wikipedia exists at all.
Another anecdote (maybe I should summarize it in a post somewhere) is that the teachers were using Oxford Press's Headway [1] books. Excellent series, many of us in Europe learned English from these books. It improves your vocabulary a lot, teaches you words like "coin", "train conductor", "mp3 player" and so on.
Now let's see what does NOT exist in Laos, at all: - mp3 players - TRAINS!!! - and, well, coins (Lao Kips start at 1.000 bills (10¢) IIRC and last time coins were issued was 40years ago. In the 2mo I stayed there, never saw a coin, nor the kids I was teaching).
It's really a different world, it took me some time to even start my head wrap around it
[1] https://elt.oup.com/student/headway/?cc=nl&selLanguage=en
https://internet-in-a-box.org/ might come in handy.
Facebook tried the same in India but was quickly shutdown: https://www.wired.com/2016/02/facebooks-free-basics-app-is-n...
This stuff is such a gray area for me. Iâm staunchly pro-net neutrality, but depriving people of the internet altogether means losing a huge asset for learning, a platform for financial success that otherwise is unattainable, and more.
But then you read about the success of Facebook in emerging markets in Africa and it becomes even murkier. Basics has caused Facebook to become utterly dominant in many African countries[0], and thatâs precisely what net neutrality tries to prevent. Thatâs so much power. I donât know what the right answer is.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/20/facebook-...
Is Facebook a "huge asset for learning [and] a platform for financial success"? The utter dominance of Facebook surely prevents competitors that are better suited to these things. I am not at all sure that Facebook-only is superior to no internet at all.
Thanks I'd not heard of internet in a box, I love how it empowers people to determine their own requirements and solve their own issues rather than just be another excuse to form more dependencies on facebook.
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 bureaucracy" defence.
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.
Wikipedia contains non-disney-fied facts, like sex education and the Armenian genocide. Not sure if operators would be keen to include it.
âAT&T is subjecting our kids to blasphemyâ is a real PR problem in many countries
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 browser and Wikipedia probably would have worked. It's strongly website dependent. Hacker News is extraordinarily resilient to lousy connections and generally the index would always load without any trouble. It works even on a 3 second ping over satellite internet. Very few websites are that tolerant.
The flight crew (BA) knew what's up. They specifically warned us to check which package we were getting, because evidently they get a lot of complaints when people buy the message-only bundle and are surprised that nothing works.
Singapore gave out free passes for single devices last time I flew with them. It was possible to rotate MAC addresses by forgetting the connection and then re-joining. The connection was quite good, you could watch YouTube in potato resolution. It's quite fun to chat to people and send them photos out of the window.
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.
The first device to connect has to go through the captive portal, then the rest doesnât.
Also works well if your 2nd device doesnât support captive portals (Chromecast, Tesla car).
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.
you would need a router which supports WISP Repeater mode. some GL.inet products support this
I've been thinking about doing somethign similar and am really interested in what hardware you're using for this and what your setup looks like. Do you run a VPN service directly on your router, for example?
I use the TP-Link TL-WR902AC for this, it's cheap and has a MAC cloning feature that makes it pretty easy. Unfortunately the firmware isn't updated anymore and it's missing a VPN client, but apart from that it gets the job done.
Which one do you use?
Not GP, but I've been using the GL.iNet Beryl (GL-MT1300) and I'm really happy with it.
> Hacker News is extraordinarily resilient to lousy connections
It really is. Where I live when you run into the limit of your data package, your network is usually throttled to 100kbps. I changed my plan to just 3GB per month because I was staying at home most of the time due to the pandemic. Now I'm pretty much back to my old routines, but I didn't change my plan yet. I have a 45 minute train commute and 3GB can be used up in a few days just browsing reddit and loading news sites.
Anyway, google search, hacker news and facetime audio work as normal at 100kbps. Google maps works with a bit of patience. Virtually nothing else will load. 5 years ago most text-based things worked at this speed albeit slowly. Now everything is so bloated and so much content will not load show until fonts and things are loaded.
I was recently on a United flight and the free 1h "text only" option gave me access to the whole internet, and I could reactivate it after an hour. I think maybe they unlocked it because the flight had a delay - or it was a bug. The flight crew didn't inform us about it though. I also didn't notice any other people using it.
The connection was pretty damn good, considering I was somewhere over the Atlantic. It was shocking to me how much more enjoyable the flight was, makes me wonder how hooked I am to being connected. (I also had extra legroom and an empty seat next to me though.)
It sounds like what you're getting on a plane is actually satellite internet.
Satellite is always what you get on planes if you fly over an ocean. If you're flying over land, sometimes it's satellite and sometimes it comes from ground-based cells. Depends on the airline and the plane's equipment.
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.
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 theyâve blocked that hole yet.
When selecting my personal use domain I ended spent some time finding a short domain partly because it's convenient but partly because it meant more goodput via Iodine. I ended up on "ds.gy" as ds are my initials and it was the only TLD that domain wasn't sat on by squatters wanting to charge thousands.The ratio of people wanting to sell you short domains vs actually using them in any capacity was surprising.
I did the same on trains in the 00s, but built application specific tunnels which were much faster, funnily enough among them was one that would fetch Wikipedia pages. The client would piece together the replies and render the markup to html again.
I can confirm that this still works on several US airlines especially if they have a free messaging option.
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.
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. ;-)
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. Itâs 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.
> 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.
I think OP meant "law" as in "law of gravity" not as in legality.
You can simply split packets into multiple messages and tag them with a unique code and use base64 (or something more efficient), that's how you can do things like do IP over IRC which has even more restricted character counts.
The problem is always going to be bandwidth as doing any kind of communication across systems optimized for human text will throttle you: you'll trigger spam warnings, rate limits, etc - and the modern web is extremely demanding
Electrical/embedded guy here. My similar law is "if you can blink an led, you can do anything".
My take has always been: If you can't blink an LED, you can't do anything.
My first priority is to get an LED blinking, and keep it blinking. Every other feature is less important.
I blinked an LED in my cell but I'm still behind bars. Guess these dumb adages don't really hold a candle to reality.
The real, important value of implementing IP over WhatsApp (in a proper, transparent way as other commenters are stating, and not from a chatbot as in the article) is not to avoid paying $5 for WiFi on a plane, but to protest the lack of net neutrality in an effective way.
I've tried this before, it's a fucking nightmare lol it's not full-duplex at all so this severely limits your ability to do things at a reasonable speed for most shit. For me it was because at the time Zuckerbutt was giving out 'free' internet in the third world, but only for whatsapp, instagram, and facebook, so me and my friends wanted to see if this was exploitable, but it was just way too slow. It really gave me an impression of how fast TCP runs at normally which I took for granted before, and ideally bidirectionally fast.
For airport wifi I use a DNS tunnel or simple MAC rotation, for in-flight... well if they could make it quality someday maybe but every time I've shelled out like 50 bucks for an hour or whatever the ripoff deal is it doesn't work well enough to do anything. I hear the DNS tunnel method does work on some of them though, I should try that someday.
As a side note those in-flight screens in the backs of seats are interesting in this 'why the hell would they do this' kind of way. I managed to crash one when I noticed it had a USB port (bad idea on their part)... It was super easy, I tried to read the USB key but then just removed it when it was accessing the thing and the whole thing just went down. Apparently it was running x-windows on some type of *nix because I could see that default background with an X for the cursor. They should really get rid of those because I'm sure that they could be misused for nefarious ends.
Vpn over websocket.. in Indonesia even worked when they "turn" off the internet for nyepi with a simple host file hack as you could browse the isp website was based on name not IP so yes the vpn was unencrypted but you couldn't see it was a vpn
What nefarious needs other than probably playing shrek2 on the inflight entertainment systems?
I think someone I read about on a link from here actually demonstrated a badusb attack
Of all the possible websites to choose as an example, Wikipedia is a strange choice since, unlike most websites, one can download its database and query it offline. For example,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
https://download.kiwix.org/zim/
Some other ways to search and read Wikipedia offline:
XOWA: (S: XOWA)
WikiTaxi: S: WikiTaxi (for Windows)
aarddict: S: Aard Dictionary
BzReader: S: BzReader and MzReader (for Windows)
Selected Wikipedia articles as a printed document: Help:Printing
Wiki as E-Book: S: E-book
WikiFilter: S: WikiFilter
Wikipedia on rockbox: S: Wikiviewer for RockboxSaw that page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download and where which will be suitable for ebook reader for free.
âWhatsApp messages are limited to 1600 charactersâ If that is UTF32 we have 51200 bytes or 50kB per message.
âthe basic free accounts I was using rate-limit to ~1QPSâ That is 400kbit/s. Can we have multiple accounts? 40 accounts would give us a theoretical maximum speed of 16Mbit/. Would probably closer to 10Mbit/s in real life, enough to watch movies.
Example library for sending/receiving WhatsApp text: https://github.com/open-wa/wa-automate-python
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