How I gained access to TMobile’s national network for free (opens in new tab)

This strikes me as burying the lede -- if TMobile is traffic shaping based on what looks like the speedtest folder, are they also QoS-prioritizing that traffic to get better speedtest results?

Wasn't this posted a few days ago?

Back in the 2000's (age of J2ME featurephones and when 3G networks were only starting to flourish) there was this Spanish carrier that had a separate APN for sending MMS (with a proxy that only allowed access to the actual MMS server, that billed by sent message) and another one for ordinary data (which was, of course, expensive at the time).

After some fiddling, I found out that the filtering proxy was banning access to anything other than http://mms.provider.es*. Note how there was not a trailing slash. You could access any domain like http://mms.provider.eswhatever.freedns.org and it would happily proxy you to the outside internet. As the billing was done on the MMS server and not in the proxy, you could pretty much open any HTTP connection to any proxy that had a domain like that pointed to it.

Some deep browsing (too much free time) led to Filipino forums sharing hacked versions of Opera Mini and other popular apps that let you change the Opera proxy endpoint to other custom domain that then was pointed to Opera's own servers - probably because of similar separate tricks.

Oh, old times...

Props for disclosing this. I would have probably went for a life-time of free, unlimited and prioritized mobile internet access.

I remember being able to SSH to any host using a PAYG sim on three that had run out of credit a few years ago.

These sorts of slips seem quite common

Do you want to get into a a great university?

Because making things like his post is how you great university.

This isn't a large technological feat, but the curiosity and writing ability on display would certainly have me ticking the [yes] box were I in admissions. (Though I am not.)