4 ms·
How do they know your tethering?
by o_sam_o 17y ago
How do they know your tethering?
- TomOfTTB 17y agoI presume the iphone reports it when transmitting but even if that wasn't the case there's plenty of stuff in the ip header (OS, browser type, etc...) to determine if it's a phone or a computer on the other end. Plus PCs in paticular produce a lot of junk that would give it away. Stuff like IGMP calls would only come from a PC.
- zacharypinter 17y agoSSH tunneling could avoid a lot of that, right?
- stcredzero 17y agoWhat about a SOCKS proxy?
- pieter 17y agoWith Apple's tools, they use a separate APN for tethering. This is like having another router (you can have another APN for MMS, for instance). All your iPhone traffic gets routed through your normal router, but the tethering traffic gets routed by your iPhone to the tethering APN. AT&T can then see from their side how much data you've put through the normal APN and how much through the tethering APN, and charge you accordingly. This is also how some of the other iPhone carriers charge you per MB, or give you a monthly xGB limit. The tethering hacks you see now just make the iPhone use the 'normal' APN for tethering traffic, which AT&T can't distinguish so easy. They might still be able to do it with deep packet analysis, but that probably costs a lot of money and might not be worth it.
- ciscoriordan 17y agoI wonder if people who paid for Netshare when it was available in the App Store will get billed for tethering if AT&T goes after unauthorized tetherers.
- chrisbolt 17y agoNetshare is a hack, a pain to set up, and when I tried it was far slower than tethering is now. I bought the app, tried it, and never used it again.