lukeasch21

9 ms·

1. 31.▲
   by lukeasch21 3y ago

   My thoughts exactly - other places like Iran have also experienced deliberate government internet blackouts recently. Thanks for sharing.
2. 32.▲
   by lukeasch21 3y ago

   I know for sure that what you're saying was true around 10 years ago. Once apps like WhatsApp began to gain popularity in some countries, though, I've seen a few examples of carriers allowing for unlimited SMS and switching to foc
3. 33.▲
   by lukeasch21 3y ago

   In theory, you could adapt this approach to whatever needs you have. I have heard people suggest implementing IP over SMS, setup as a local VPN. I would say the sky is the limit, but I think with how brittle, unreliable, and slow SMS is, IP
4. 34.▲
   by lukeasch21 3y ago

   I just ran some non-scientific tests with compression quality set to 11 (max), and these were the results: frogfind.com - default: 3 messages :: new: 3 messages lite.cnn.com - default: 43 messages :: new: 44 messages text.npr.org - default:
5. 35.▲
   by lukeasch21 3y ago

   Those look like interesting options, and they're surely be more reliable than relying on the phone's own SMS capabilities, but I wasn't able to find a public API for any of those services. As far as SMS rate limiting goes, I
6. 36.▲
   by lukeasch21 3y ago

   The server is back up and running - it turns out that CDMA networks continue to be an issue, and the queue of WebViews was being depleted as any WebView that received a malformed string failed. I fixed that, but the string should never have
7. 37.▲
   by lukeasch21 3y ago

   It looks like HN successfully killed the server, I'm on my way to investigate. Thanks all (:
8. 38.▲
   by lukeasch21 3y ago

   Thanks, and that would be awesome! I'll keep an eye out.
9. 39.▲
   by lukeasch21 3y ago

   Thanks, I didn't realize that Brotli had multiple compression levels. I'll look into that!
10. 40.▲
    by lukeasch21 3y ago

    Thanks! And yep, my goal was to make it as easy as possible to host a server without any technical knowledge. I haven't looked into the subject extensively, but I believe those services exist(ed) in the form of Opera Mini and UC Browse
11. 41.▲
    by lukeasch21 3y ago

    Thanks and yeah, that's another good application of the idea. It's somewhat similar to iodine[1] in that respect. On the ground in the US, this would probably only be useful if you're hiking in a remote area or something like
12. 42.▲
    Show HN: TxtNet Browser – Browse the Web over SMS, No Wi-Fi/Mobile Data Needed(github.com)

    234 points by lukeasch21 3y ago|73 comments
13. 43.▲
    by lukeasch21 4y ago

    Wouldn't that imply that you were an employee at Google sometime between 2002-2004? :P Unless I'm not getting the full picture (I was not old enough to be fully aware of Gmail's existence in 2004)
14. 44.▲
    by lukeasch21 4y ago

    Minor nitpick, but why are you adamant that you've had your Gmail for "over 20 years"? Gmail was made public in 2004.
15. 45.▲
    by lukeasch21 4y ago

    I'm not very familiar with infosec. How is the author able to obtain this information? Are there 2 identical files, one source and another encrypted? >They must be encrypted with AES-128-CBC using key=”)1Zorxo^fAhGlh$#” and IV=&quo
16. 46.▲
    by lukeasch21 4y ago

    Don't worry, the website solved this issue: > "Probably Won't Fail: Featuring the latest build of an undocumented API." This will work as long as YouTube doesn't change anything. And since when has YouTube change
17. 47.▲
    by lukeasch21 4y ago

    Hi there, I know it's a little distasteful to hijack your comment on an unrelated topic but I didn't know any other way to contact you. About 6 months ago, you commented on my post ( https://news.ycombinator.com/ite
18. 48.▲
    by lukeasch21 4y ago

    Yet again, I really ought to pay more attention to my results! I was looking at the website https://example.com , which does only total 112 bytes. But https://google.com is actually 3.42kb! That means the actual effec
19. 49.▲
    by lukeasch21 4y ago

    Thanks! Another user asked a similar question, so I tested loading a simple(r) website like Google. The stripped HTML totaled to 3.42kb, which took 4.5 seconds to transmit. That totals out to 0.76 kilobytes/second of raw transfer speed
20. 50.▲
    by lukeasch21 4y ago

    Thanks for the reply! I have considered this idea as a potential solution, which would overcome some of the hurdles of Android's SMS limitations. However, I think the real bottleneck for sending SMS would inevitably be the carriers. Th
21. 51.▲
    by lukeasch21 4y ago

    Just realized I had a brain fart, there's no way that those kind of speeds would be possible! I meant to say 25 bytes per second. Very slow compared to any mobile network, but better than not having any internet access at all.
22. 52.▲
    by lukeasch21 4y ago

    Thanks for the praise, I know it's not a super huge scale project but it was a good challenge to develop. As far as speed goes, I'm not exactly sure. I know that Twilio's toll free numbers send about 5 SMS messages a second,
23. 53.▲
    by lukeasch21 4y ago

    Hello HN, I've been working on this project for a little under a year now as a college student. I was inspired by the user coldsauce who also created a similar project back in 2014. It turns out this was harder than I anticipated becau
24. 54.▲
    Show HN: TxtNet Browser – A Web Browser That Communicates over SMS(github.com)

    34 points by lukeasch21 4y ago|10 comments
25. 55.▲
    by lukeasch21 5y ago

    Good point. I was looking into a way to maximize efficiency on Android without low-level access (no root necessary), so I'm pretty much limited to the charset that I can receive from the Android APIs for encoding binary data into (3686
26. 56.▲
    by lukeasch21 5y ago

    Could you elaborate on why UCS-2 is so wasteful? I think that makes sense on the surface level, but if you encoded a message using all the characters available in the BMP that UCS-2 provides then each character has tens of thousands of opti
27. 57.▲
    by lukeasch21 5y ago

    I appreciate the comment - at first I wasn't sure if it was too ambitious, but once I realized that Android has libraries for parsing HTML and a documented way to send and receive texts, it was more manageable. It was also nice that Co
28. 58.▲
    by lukeasch21 5y ago

    Thanks, I'll be in touch.
29. 59.▲
    by lukeasch21 5y ago

    This is crazy that I stumbled upon this post, I just learned about HackerNews today and saw this on the front page! I've been working on making a sort of revival project of Cosmos browser for a couple months now using a custom encoding