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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."

25 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.

    1. Re:Elegance, Windows, UNIX by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 5, Funny

      ``Promiscuity and Windows must go hand in hand (bad joke there, anyone?)''

      Is that why *nix users never get laid?

      --
      Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
    2. Re:Elegance, Windows, UNIX by jellomizer · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Well for posting a story trying to show how good your coding is hoping to get a pat on the back, Slashdot is the worse place to do so.
      • Your choice of programming language will be judged. Someone will use an other language to show you the simpler solution, (although it may not work, or work for your situation).
      • The OS your program runs on. If it is Windows people go why the hell are you using Windows and point you to a Unix/Unix clone. (Even though over 90% of the people are using Windows, and at the time of the disaster and the remote system you have access to only runs windows apps)
      • Your coding style. If you do it in C, C++ or C# you better make sure your brackets are in the prescribed but yet debatable location.
      • Your Code. If it i longer then 5 lines (properly spaced) then someone will find a better smaller solution even though the code may be unreadable.

      Slashdot is filled a diverse group of people, Good Programmers who know they are good programmers, Bad Programmers Think they are the Best Programmers out there, Good Programmers who who think they are Bad programmers so (the tend to keep their mouth shut), Bad Programmers who know they are Bad Programmers, and Good programmers who think themselves as the Best programmers, and Bad Programmers who think them as actually good programers.

      The most vocal are those who think they are the best programmer out there, some may point to some award that they won in college (that a Lot of students didn't compete in) or show all the great stuff they made. These are also ones the most easily get get threatened by an other programmers code and find ways of knocking it down. Making sure the designer of the code fells as crummy as possible, so the guy can still keep the place in his mind that he is #1!

      The Good/Bad Programers who know/think they are Good normally may give a couple of corrections in the code just to make it work a little better of efficiently, or just admit that that isn't quite the same approach they would use, in there style they may accomplish the same task differently and make it more easier for them to read threw.

      The ones who think they are bad programmers will try to learn about the code hoping it will make them better programmers or just ignore it as a programming thing.

      As for my take on the solution, it does seem a bit overkill, but you need to keep in mind that .NET adds a lot of additional code that other higher level languages (such as python) doesn't show you as part of your code (for all those includes say all the code for url.py in the python lib directory, or the smtplib code)) So his solution as far as the computer is concerned may be close to doing it in an other language. As well if he added to the email a Content-type: text/html\n\n to his email header he could probably be able to view the HTML file straight from gamil. I would grade the solution a C+/B- it gets the job done, it wasn't impressive, and a bit hard to follow. As well if you are going to post your code online you should at least make some comments explaining what each section does so the reader could read the comments for each function and get a gist on how the code works.
      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  2. Privileged bandwidth by ishmaelflood · · Score: 5, Funny

    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 /.

  3. Could always rename Slashdot.... by edwardpickman · · Score: 2, Funny

    "The Glorius Workers Communist Website of Slashdot", That should get it past the censors.

    1. Re:Could always rename Slashdot.... by The+Slaughter · · Score: 2, Informative

      If you'd bothered to read the article, you'd see that the reason he was unable to read slashdot was due to the EARTHQUAKE limiting connectivity over there. Not any chinese censorship.

    2. Re:Could always rename Slashdot.... by jarl1976 · · Score: 2, Informative

      The article specificly says the man lives in Shenzhen(like myself). Shenzhen is most certainly not in Taiwan...

  4. Google Translate? by dtfinch · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Select a bogus source language and it makes a good proxy for reading blocked sites, unless they block that too.

  5. Too bad... by spammerboy · · Score: 2, Informative

    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!! ;-)

  6. Those that ignore history... by ColaMan · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:Those that ignore history... by seifried · · Score: 3, Funny

      From: Badguy
      Subject: http://www.cnn.com/ ; rm -rf *

  7. 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.

  8. 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.
  9. Standstill? by ladislavb · · Score: 2, Informative

    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?

    1. Re:Standstill? by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 2, Informative

      ``Am I just lucky or has Taiwan escaped the "standstill" reported in other places in the region?''

      You're just lucky. See this message on interesting-people.

      There's a video of the outage.

      --
      Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
  10. Or..... by bobintetley · · Score: 2, Interesting

    He could have just run web proxy on his remote server instead of being a complete moron and doing this "clever" hack. Sheesh.

    1. 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.

  11. Clearly an over-complication by predakanga · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  12. Overly Complicated? by Smerity · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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...

    #!/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()
    msg = header+slashdot

    p = os.popen("%s -t" % MAIL, 'w')
    p.write(msg)
    p.close()
    Sendmail code referenced from Sending email in Python

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

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

  13. Go online in Hong Kong, via proxy server by didiken · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 :)

  14. web to mail portals by dargaud · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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 ?
  15. 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)

  16. 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.

  17. I live in Hong Kong by Cycnus · · Score: 2
    right after the quake access was fine. It's only the next day that things started to go awry. From what I could verify, packets were dropped after only 2 hops in Hong Kong.
    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.