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Geeks In Asia Use Clever Hacks To Get Slashdot

Posted by kdawson on from the whatever-it-takes dept.

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."

8 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Elegance, Windows, UNIX by P(0)(!P(k)+P(k+1)) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Résumé of TFA:

    1. uses Visual Studio;
    2. emails himself arbitrary binaries;
    3. executes said binaries.

    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.

  2. Taste of Anti Net Neutrality by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:LOL. by noidentity · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm more of a UNIX newbie, so I'd have thought he could simply telnet to his American machine and run Lynx.

  4. Errr, making the solution harder then it is. by OverlordQ · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.
  5. Re:Overly Complicated? by thelima · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What about something like this? $ curl http://slashdot.org/ | gzip -c | mail somoeone@gmail.com

  6. Re:Or..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Or maybe he couldn't, because he only had mail access. See, I got that information from the short Slashdot blurb. Didn't even have to read the article. Happy New Year. Same as last year.

  7. Re:Good luck sending .exes in zipfiles via GMail by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Good luck sending .exes in zipfiles via GMail ... 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."

    This used to be true, but it has been a while. I just sent myself both a .ZIP and .RAR file and they came through successfully. I imagine Google got sick of complaints aobut it. I've been sending ZIP file backups to myself for several months now.

    --

    "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

  8. A Proxy? by KidSock · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    If he can communicate with his web host in America and that host can communicate with ./ then why not just setup a proxy on that machine? Installing and running tinyproxy on a Linux machine is mind numbingly easy.