Slashdot Mirror
Geeks In Asia Use Clever Hacks To Get Slashdot
Daedius writes "My comrade Hugh Perkins is living in Asia and he has been without reliable internet connectivity for many days. He uses l33t hacks to get his daily dose of Slashdot in desperate times." From the posting: "The Taiwan earthquake has brought telecommunications in the Taiwan/Hong Kong region to a standstill. I am living in Shenzhen and am unable to read Slashdot directly for several days. Gmail and Google have privileged bandwidth and local servers and both continue to work perfectly from the region. Could there be some way to use Google or Gmail to read Slashdot? A solution was to upload an executable to my web hosting in America that would receive zipped executables by email, execute them, then email me the results."
Résumé of TFA:
Promiscuity and Windows must go hand in hand (bad joke there, anyone?); why the hell wouldn't he set up a dæmon that received URLs by email instead of arbitrary binaries?!
Elegance may well be a UNIX thing.
... unless you rename them to something other than .exe. GMail is a monstrous pain in the ass in this respect. It will not let .exes through even in a .zip or .rar file.
I'm sure all the people and companies that pay for that privileged bandwidth are very happy that it is being used for something as important as /.
No wonder there's only been one comment on this entry.
In all seriousness, though...why not just see if you could reach a service like Anonymouse to proxy it, or if you can get to your "American Web Hosting" you could set up your own php-based web proxy. Way easier and more elegant than all that other mumbo jumbo, plus you could reach any other site.
"The Glorius Workers Communist Website of Slashdot", That should get it past the censors.
Select a bogus source language and it makes a good proxy for reading blocked sites, unless they block that too.
If he just wants to read the summaries
Sent from my desktop computer
If this was the old internet, he could have used one of those 'Web to Email' services that *used to operate* till a few years back (remember Agora servers and stuff ??)... Too bad for the new Internet!! ;-)
Are doomed to repeat it.
http://www.expita.com/howto1.html
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
If you can get to your webhost to upload files, then simply proxy through it.
ssh -D 9999 for example, then set your browser to use the socks 4 host listening on 127.0.0.1 port 9999.
For those of you who exclaim "but he is running windows on his server", then do it some windows way, or install sshd from cygwin.
oh but wait, this is cool because he had to write code! oops!
This kind of limited bandwidth is probably what the net would feel like when the its content-neutrality is ditched for the pay-per-view system that some morons are advocating.
A solution was to upload an executable to my web hosting in America that would receive zipped executables by email, execute them, then email me the results
I'll admit, the workaround was indeed clever, but did anyone else get a horrible, queasy feeling when they read this?
Instead of writing an executeable that reads another executable which fetches the page, why not just write the one executable that responds to plain mail with URLs in the body in the first place?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
If you ever want a slashdot post to be inaccessible in China, all you have to do is post "falun gong", and get modded up.
Stuff about communism won't do it these days. The hot topics are religion and independence of various sovereign nations that just happen to be adjacent to China.
Dali lama might do the trick too.
I live in Taiwan, but I haven't noticed even the slightest disruption in Internet service (Hinet) whatsoever - either in terms of speed or connectivity to the outside world. Am I just lucky or has Taiwan escaped the "standstill" reported in other places in the region?
He could have just run web proxy on his remote server instead of being a complete moron and doing this "clever" hack. Sheesh.
If you can access google and gmail, doesn't the google cache work, too? If so just type "site:slashdot.org" first result is, gasp, slashdot home, click cached link, get site home updated last 30 december. Some other sites are newer, some not, but you have enough material to satisfy your geekitude.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
...in the received document. But it should not be too difficult to get that to work, too.
It was really bad to have traceroute slashdot.org going nowhere. But here in Hong Kong, I just googled "open proxy", took a look at the Google cached results and configured the proxy (I picked one from UAE)... and there it was, my daily dose of Slashdot! It was very slow and I could not post a comment to the Taiwan quake story, but it worked. I did not have a chance to see if this works in Shenzhen though.
Now, proxy is longer needed, the traffic is routed through London and Slashdot is still very slow for me. I can only hope the cables will be fixed soon, 400+ ms ping is not fun.
... Internet by Email?
- via-email/
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/internet-services/access
http://www.expita.com/howto1.html
I did this in 98, when I was overseas, and my internet access was a 15 minute on one of 4 PCs for about a hundred people, with a local SMTP/POP solution that dialed in twice daily for sending / receiving mail. Worked quite nicely, actually.
Then again, I don't know if any of the servers listed are still up, but it ought to be easier to have someone install something like this...
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
Couldn't he have changed his user preferences and gotten Slashdot to email the "Daily Newsletter" to his Gmail account?
Why not just telnet/ssh in and do a wget -r2 * and then tar.bz2 it then email it to gmail from there.
But on the other hand, it would be nice if slashdot offered a 'one file' download of todays stuff with 1 level view of the comments.
Its all text/html, should compress really nicely, under 100k. Add another 25kb for adds. Pdf maybe. An offline deliver would be nice.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
``Gmail and Google have privileged bandwidth''
So you're saying that while folks in the US are arguing over network neutrality, it's already out of the window (in Asia, anyway)?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I'm in an area affected by the connection issues as well (Malaysia), but I took a more polished, simple solution. In a word, TOR. Not only have I set up my own network to use a squid-privoxy-tor system to provide relatively fast internet to sites I couldn't access at all before (slashdot for one), but I've been recommending and teaching others how to use Torpark so that they can still get their slashdot, youtube, etc, fixes.
when i started to participate in freifunk, a wireless mesh-net, i did not know how exactly to contact one subnet from another. my computer was in 192.168.0.X, the others were in 104.61.249.X .
one night i desperately needed some information form a website. i quickly figured out that my router advertised itself as 192.168.0.1 AND 104.61.249.1, so i connected to the router per ssh, connected to the next node per ssh, connected to the next node per ssh, connected to a server i had an acount on per ssh and started links2. funny, but it worked.
How useful for restricted corporate environments that either ban complete internet , or whitelist the net, or perhaps blacklist 90% of it.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Isn't that an overly complicated solution? I haven't checked if this will work fully as I don't have access to working sendmail, but basically this Python script cronjobbed would do the same...
msg = header+slashdot
#!/usr/bin/env python
import os, urllib
MAIL = "/usr/bin/sendmail"
header = """To: user@china.com
From: server@usa.com
Subject: Slashdot
"""
slashdot = urllib.urlopen("http://www.slashdot.org").read()
p = os.popen("%s -t" % MAIL, 'w')
p.write(msg)
p.close()
Sendmail code referenced from Sending email in Python
I live in Hong Kong, and indeed it was a huge disaster. I run an online flower shop myself, so we see our daily traffic went flat for the last couple of days. And I can't even ssh into our colo in USA.
:)
Recape of the situation: 6 underground fiber lines were cut. "Foreign" sites like Slashdot, Google, EBay and Yahoo! were dead. Hong Kong based sites, Australia sites and a few European sites like BBC does work, so that give us hope. So...
On day 1 ( 12/28 ): we found out Google Hong Kong still works, and Australia sites work... so we search "australia proxy server" and funny that a few ISPs have open proxies open at 3128 (Looks like Squid Cache to me!). Since we must be an early batch, we feel wonderful to be "the only one" in town to go online, beat the odds and get all the pussies...
One day 2 (12/29): news of the proxies must have gotten out. Yahoo! Answers are full of such foreign proxies lists, and some entrepreneur hackers must have wonderful day, building their own proxies and lured people into using it. Of course your average surfers wouldn't know normal http is unencrypted... Meanwhile our "free proxy" running by that friendly Australia ISP finally adds ACL to block us out... We try installing Google Web Accelerator, and it did no good, and accessing local sites are even slower...
On day 3 (12/30): we start looking for Australia colocation / dedicated server plans to run our own proxy server. Their prices are at least 2 times more expensive than US hosting companies, so we start pinging popular hosting in USA.... ev1servers.net? down. Rackspace? up (but too pricey). Godaddy? up, and lo and behold, they have a cheap $29.99 USD virtual linux plan.
So, we setup our own Squid cache and it finally keeps us reading Slashdot until this day
7Zip to just uncompress zip files from C#? Handmade s/mime parser? base64? Mono? Execs? On Unix? OMG! This is most weired solution I could imagine!
Thanks god this guy haven't installed MS SQL MSDE database and Exchange plus some web services on IIS server to store intrmediate results and push them back to Asia...
I could probably write this within no more than two lines of curl/perl/whatever...
God Be Gone
People who forget history are bound to repeat it goes the saying. At the very begining of the WWW, not everyone had access to web browsers so various systems were developped, including web to mail portals. You would sent an email to a specific address with a GET request, and you'd get the page in return. Some of those servers are still in use to get around censorship or very limited conectivity, which was my case last year in Antarctica. I read slashdot thanks to a daily email connection, text only, and the agora web-to-mail portal.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I have been using Tor to access websites and, despite of the inherent slowness, it has been working fine for me. The best part of Tor in this scenario is that Tor figures out the possible working routes and I got quite a few :)
People who dislike China tend to mention Tiananmen Square a lot, but they always forget the Tank Man is also a Chinese.
Seeing as China, Taiwan, etc. are sources for spam, is it possible that in damaging internet connectivity in places like Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, etc., this earthquake has also, temporarily, lessened the amount of spam sent on the internet?
I, for one, welcome back our old analog overlords.
Don't worry if you're a kleptomaniac, you can always take something for it.
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=slashdot.o rg&langpair=en&hl=en should work
... Why just not set up a proxy on that remote hosting server, or if that's forbidden, just set up a cron job to use wget in that server and mail results to you ...
Running arbitrary binaries on your hosting server will most likely get your account suspended.
... were invented for news-distribution and forum-like conversations in the times, real-time connectivity is expensive/slow/not available.
What's next? Using e-mail during instant-messaging downtime gets Slashdot's front-page prominence?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
So - google works. Go to google language tools. Select english->english translation. Input whatever site (i.e. slashdot) you want. Let google fetch it, "translate" it and present the output.
Just use the RSS feed with Google Reader. You will get all articles, only without the links. And if you're internet is down anyway, those links probably won't help you (but you can star the articles whose links you want to follow later).
What about just using google cache for reading slashdot ...
in this case, though there are dozens of existing sources for the same app, you must reinvent the /.RSS2email feed .
and when you're done, you can always share how you've suffered here, so that we can all understand how deprived you've been.
If this person has unrestricted access to Google, then why not use it as a gateway?
1. Use the language tools, and select "spanish to english".
2. type in slashdot.org, and hit return.
3. They download the page, do ultimately no translation, and shows you the results.
They download the page, and any links that you click, will automatically go through their server.
And you have your unrestricted access to any websites.
Does Google Reader work? I read Slashdot from it. You can add it to a your google front page as a personalized gadget
No, this is China. TFA says that the man is in Shenzhen, which Wikipedia confirms is a city in the Guangdong province of southern China, near the Hong Kong border.
Just use google personalized home page that will show you the slashdot posts' summaries atleast
People who dislike China tend to mention Tiananmen Square a lot, but they always forget the Tank Man is also a Chinese.
Using a service like rssfwd.com, you can just have feeds sent to your email. I used to use it a lot, until Google Reader came out.
A solution was to upload an executable to my web hosting in America that would receive zipped executables by email, execute them, then email me the results.
./ then why not just setup a proxy on that machine? Installing and running tinyproxy on a Linux machine is mind numbingly easy.
If he can communicate with his web host in America and that host can communicate with
http://www.web2mail.com/lite/welcome.php
Just send an email to www@web2mail.com with the web page URL in the subject, and it'll send the page back to you in an HTML email, within 5 mins.
I use it quite a bit, especially when I'm stuck on customer sites with email only access, and no web.
[Not affiliated with the above site, just a big fan of it]
The friendliest digital photography forums on the net!
It seemed that the ISP cut access to the outside on purpose for a while, I presume to lower traffic and let big institutions get better bandwidths.
Day by day the situation is getting better, but when teh ISP allowed outside access again, you could see the packet loss as you got further from Asia: some hops had more than 90% packet loss making connections very unreliable.
For access, the best thing I found was using proxies. I used findnot.com as they have nearly 30 SSH proxy servers around the world, some of them in Malaysia which were accessible.
From these servers you could have better connectivity to the rest of the world, although overall is was not very fast and connections would often time-out.
We're still suffering from spotty connections here but it's getting better day by day. What I find a bit scarry is how easy a local event like the quake could affect such a large area and bring it to its knees for days. I'm pretty sure there are good reasons for having all these sea cbales connect in souther taiwan but it strikes me of odd that an area prone to so many earthquakes be chosen as a major connection point.
If Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and most of China had been disconnected for longer over a non-holiday period I'm pretty sure the consequences for all major financial institutions and local economies would have been major, not just for Asia but the world at large.
Its for situations like these that a few years ago I wrote pagefetch [sourceforge.net], a perl script that would retrieve an html page with its associated images, tar and gzip them all up, and email them back to the original requestor.
Well since thats what you say..... The truth hurts. Really you screw your rubber doll stupid and to ensure you don't need to clean it out after you w@nk instead. so it's not really an encore after all.
If you're in a hurry, there's always the option of using carrier pigeons or trained seals.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Reminds me of a hack that I used back when my web host required me to use a silly GUI that required that I manually upload one file at a time. I uploaded a batch file and pkunzip.exe. When I wanted to update my web site, I'd upload a zip file and instruct the web server to unzip it through CGI!
No, I will not work for your startup