Slashdot Mirror
App Enables Surfing Over SMS/MMS Through T-Mobile
MrSeb writes "An ingenious browsing hack has emerged: if you have an Android smartphone and a T-Mobile (US) unlimited messaging plan, you can now use an app called Smozzy to surf the web... for free. Smozzy is just a wrapper around the standard Android browser, but instead of requiring a data connection, everything is funneled through SMS and MMS. Whenever you click a link, instead of firing off a packet to a remote web server, a web request is instead sent to Smozzy's intermediate server via SMS. Smozzy forwards the request, downloads the web page you're trying to visit, and then sends it along to your phone as MMS messages — and both SMS and MMS are completely free with T-Mobile's unlimited messaging plan."
This is really cool. I hope they do a version of BitTorrent as well...
No sig today...
Well the app is free and unlimited messaging is like $10 I think (Maybe $20).
Not too bad when you compare to the possible overage charges of going over your data plan.
Which part? The app is free, and I think you get unlimited text included in a $60 plan, or something along those lines.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
How does this service handle SSL? Can Smozzy spy on you? This sounds very uncool.
Which part of "unlimited messaging plan" did you fail to comprehend?
No sig today...
it's probably ok on bandwidth, but dog-slow on latency
I remember the first WAP browsers that could use (special) SMS as a transport.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
A textbook case of perverse incentives...
From the perspective of efficiency or architectural sanity, that is about as far from optimal as you could wish to be(short of running the fastest analog modem connection that will survive GSM voice compression to take advantage of your unlimited voice minutes); but the magic of telco nonsense pricing makes it entirely reasonable.
Hopefully getting their control channel hammered with SMS noise will induce them to offer some sort of reasonably priced modest-speed data mechanism that isn't a horrible pile of hack...
Incidentally, of course, does this lovely mechanism make whoever runs "Smozzy" a MiTM even within SSL-wrapped browsing sessions, or does the TCP/IP->SMS insanity just wrap the packets whole and serve as a peculiar sort of link layer?
But I thought sending or receiving a SMS message was more expensive per MB than getting data from the Hubble Space Telescope. I suppose it is a workable solution if you really need data access but can't get it otherwise but I wonder about this since I also see stories about how excessive SMS messages going out over the control channels could overwhelm the cell network.
Time to offend someone
Playing devils advocate, it depends on how you define expensive. As far as money goes yes it's free, as far as time goes, it has to be dog slow.
Also if this becomes popular and people start using... abusing it you can bet T-mobile will change their TOS.
In short this is why we can't have nice things.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
Is there anything like this for BB? My parents love theirs (big screen, nice keyboard) and only occasionally want to surf the web, so an app for RIM like this would be great.
Which part of "unlimited messaging plan" did you fail to comprehend?
The same part of unlimited internet having a cap.
For £35 (~$60) I'd expect a few gig of data included.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
I went straight to the Market to download the browser for my Android. Fired it up... now I'm stuck at "Request sent. Waiting for response..."
I suspect that every other T-Mobile Android user on Slashdot is doing the same, and the poor guy's SMS gateway is now a smoldering heap of slag.
Interestingly, the Market reported that the download count was "10+". Obviously, there's some latency there...
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
The part where the carriers will turn it off as soon as people start using it too much, just like everything else.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Now to get around data caps we need to have someone hack up a system that will use IP over voice so you can surf unlimited for free on nights & weekends. Now if we only had a way to carry electronic communication over phone lines.....
Although I'm sure someone has already patented using a modem over cellphones by putting 'on the internet' in it, so this won't work.
This signature is a waste of 42 characters
I would expect it to have high latency, but relatively fast download speeds. I would guess (not having looked in to it very much since I don't have T-mobile and therefore don't care enough to) that it encodes the entire website into one txt message. It doesn't take long to send and receive a txt message, so actual download speed is dependent on the server, which I would imagine is not exactly hooked up to a 2400bps modem.
As to your second point, I wouldn't be surprised if they do that by the end of the week ;)
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
Because a data plan is like $30 or $40 these days and the SMS plan is just included with the voice? That's a $360/year savings!
I read the internet for the articles.
They won't have to turn it off. They just have to block Smozzy. They can do this now without changing their TOS and without the regular users of SMS/MMS noticing. In fact other than Snozzy airing their complaints on twitter or slashdot, I don't think many will care.
Nice trick. Harkens back to the pre-2G days of the WAP.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
if this takes off would they limited the unlimited. I can just see it now "You have unlimited txting, yes sir. You have unlimited up to 5,000 txts, yep. You are really unlimited because you see people really don't text that much a month and if you go over your 5,000 unlimited txts then it's only 10$ more a month for every 1,000 more. Yes sir on this plan unlimited txting is better than ever."
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
T-mobile is currently I think the only carrier that you can use a smartphone without a data plan. If this does take off you can bet that T-mobile will change that policy.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
It's called a WinModem. The connections are in hardware, but the expensive DSP is done in software. So you just dial a modem-capable (SLIP/PPP) ISP and do the DSP in software. Any phone these days is capable of that.
Now, if only we were using a phone that we could see the source code, so we could figure how to route the software output to the phone instead of from the mic...
At least with T-mobile's unlimited internet plans, when you hit your cap, they just throttle you down to edge speeds. No extra charges incur.
greed@All_Evils:~#
Until Smozzy starts getting a bill from T-Mobile for all the SMS communications. Do you REALLY think they'll let this go?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Awesome. Now if we can just tunnel VOIP through it we can have free calling as well.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
the entire website into one txt message.
I can't imagine the website will be of much use after its been encoded into a single 160 character text message packet.
And text messages ARE actually slow to send over the air, you just don't notice it when typing on a keyboard that you can't do more than 10 bps on.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Is a data plan that expensive in the states?
I pay 10 € for my mobile contract (free calls to land line and same provider included) and additional 10 € for my data plan (250 mb, after that its slowed down till start of the next month). That is ~ 27 USD in total. Got no unlimited SMS though - costs ~ 0.12 USD per SMS ... but I don't care as xmpp is way better anyway.
Why would Smozzy get a bill for the SMS messages if it's the user who has the contract with T-Mobile?
At most I could see them doing a walled garden approach and trying to get it removed from the marketplace.
That would be the data plan for a smartphone, there is also a data plan for non-smartphones that is less. I point this out because the service you would receive from using this would be much much worse than even their most basic data plan.
It's like saying you save $250,000 by riding a bicycle to work because otherwise you would buy a Ferrari.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
My GF pays about that, and gets 200Mb of data and unlimited messages.
" Multimedia Messaging Service , or MMS, is a standard way to send messages that include multimedia content to and from mobile phones. It extends the core SMS (Short Message Service) capability that allowed exchange of text messages only up to 160 characters in length."
Because that only works in areas that they have coverage. Heh...in the area I would've needed their voice and data services, they've got bupkus and AT&T and Verizon have 3G, with Verizon having the more solid offering in the area.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Naw, its so bad to use it won't get abused. You can't get more than one or two sms packets every second realistically anyway, limited to 160 characters or whatever trivial amount it is.
It may work, but you won't be able to use it.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
"Unlimited" call time up to IIRC 5,000 minutes.
Well, then, it's not exactly unlimited, is it?
Great idea! Unless of course you live in the ~85% of the country that doesn't have 4G rolled out to it yet.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
By proxying searches/browsing/etc, they instantaneously gain profiling data for every user that uses the service. I can't imagine that data won't be mined/used for remarketting purposes. Of course, like Comcast has told me on numerous occasions, using my email/browsing data simply allows them to improve my overall Internet experience...
"Please explain exactly how you sent and received 4.5 million text messages this month! Were you even doing your homework?"
We would stop abusing, "the system," if the system would stop screwing us.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Now to get around data caps we need to have someone hack up a system that will use IP over voice
The lossy compression that both GSM and CDMA2000 use for voice signals would interfere with using any decently fast modulation.
so you can surf unlimited for free on nights & weekends.
HughesNet satellite already offers unmetered wee hours (called "Download Zone"). Why doesn't cellular?
Is a data plan that expensive in the states?
I pay 10 € for my mobile contract (free calls to land line and same provider included) and additional 10 € for my data plan (250 mb, after that its slowed down till start of the next month). That is ~ 27 USD in total. Got no unlimited SMS though - costs ~ 0.12 USD per SMS ... but I don't care as xmpp is way better anyway.
For those of us on T-Mobile without a data plan, they just rolled out a new opt-out pay-as-you-go plan: $1.99/MB.
Stop! Dremel time!
160 alpha-numeric characters including punctuation gives you a huge data storage potential if you encode it correctly. I would also imagine that flash, videos, and pictures will be stripped out of the page, leaving only text, formatting, and color info.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
And it's not too slow for being essentially 'free', as in beer.
Not 'too' slow. No, not speedy. But it works. SSL is an issue, so I suspect this is not useful to do any banking with.
BUT...
One important item. TMO and everyone else expects you to have a data plan with your smartphone. So this does not get you out of a data plan. It does, however, make that 200MB plan with TMO a lot more useful. By limiting your use of that to say HTTPS and anything SMOZZY doesn't handle, and using SMOZZY to fully exploit your SMS plan, you'll avoid overages (caps and throttling) and incidentally fully leverage your SMS plan.
Since SMS was always a clever use of signalling, it will be the carriers' response to re-prioritize any excess SMS traffic to ensure network signalling gets through. as far as I recall, they never even promise SMS will be delivered, so if SMOZZY gets out of hand, they could respond as if it were SMS spam. And TMO might, though they might hold off longer than, say, VZW, which I predict would boil your firstborn if you tried this on their network. AT&T would attend the buffet. Sprint would probably quietly block them and deny all knowledge.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
That's horrible, on my subscription I pay $0.18/MB and still think it's too much.
For those of us on T-Mobile without a data plan, they just rolled out a new opt-out pay-as-you-go plan: $1.99/MB.
$2/MB? That's insane. If you accidentally stream one song from Google Music over 3G instead of wifi, there goes $10.
sudo eat my shorts
We have running code, lets see the RFC.
Just remember that at 20 cents per message to send and 20 cents to receive (40 cents per message), it will cost $61,000,000 to transfer your mp3 collection over tcp/sms.
http://gthing.net/the-true-price-of-sms-messages
or else!
160 alpha-numeric characters including punctuation gives you a huge data storage potential if you encode it correctly.
It gives you the same amount of data storage potential as 160 bytes (assuming SMS uses single-byte characters; even if it were multibyte characters, you'd still have under 1 KB). Even with damn good compression algorithms, I doubt most web pages would be under 160 bytes.
http://press.nokia.com/1997/07/31/nokia-provides-narrowband-sockets-server-implementation/
"Narrowband Sockets defines an efficient implementation of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) using store and forward services over wireless messaging networks."
Failed horribly of course. I know cause I once built an agent to send push email to phones with it. Worked pretty well with my old Nokia 9110. I should have called it blackberry and built a big company around it ;)
128 bytes. They squeezed a few extra characters out by nixing out stuff like control characters.
If you dont have unlimited SMS I imagine it gets very expensive, very quickly
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
Wow, thanks! Now I can go buy ~1/2 of a house now that I've given up that Ferrari dream.
heh heh
Yeah, they want you on a data plan.
From what I read on the MMS Wikipedia page it looks like MMS uses the data channel anyway - there is an initial SMS message which refers to the attachment, and the attachment is downloaded by HTTP or WAP. I would think the carrier would charge you for that data.
I just bought a Sidekick 4g from T-Mobile. It came with the warning that some features would not work unless I called customer care and bought a data plan. I would have simply stuck to using Wi-Fi and the like to access the Android marketplace but for one thing, T-Mobile locks the GPS functionality to the data plan.
Apps like the linked are great. But they only work with HTTP. Other 'net functionality won't work.
I have to assume this was sarcasm because even the relatively svelte google home page on a PC is 50K, not including external resources like images, scripts or CSS.
Granted a mobile specific page would be smaller but 160 bytes is pretty limited, and from my own experience, I do not think SMS message order is in any way guaranteed and in some rare cases I have had messages take several *hours* to get to their destination.
MMS is just an SMS that has a link to a 'thing' (picture, video, audio etc.) on the telco operators MMS server. The phone receives the link, connects to the server and downloads the appropriate 'thing' which can be much larger than 160chars (because that limit is on the link not the thing itself).
I can't imagine the website will be of much use after its been encoded into a single 160 character text message packet.
Apparently Smozzy has a very effective compression scheme.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I thought it was 140 bytes; to get 160 chars they just pack into 7 bit. 160 x 8 / 7 = 140.
--
no sig for you. come back one year.
Of course I noticed I switched the 160 and 140 just as I hit submit...
--
no sig for you. come back one year.
The joke is that the current smartphones are much more efficient running on wifi than on 3G http://www.teksocial.com/socialblog/2010/11/14/better-battery-life-smartphone-data-3g-vs-wifi.html . So if you have wifi access at work and at home, then you only use the battery hungry 3G when you are really mobile. Leaving the wifi on permanently is the simplest way to save battery and limit the load on the data plan. If T-Mobile now just start a marketing campaign communicating this to the people, then the whole (S | M) & MS is a moot point.
!