The mother of all ingenious hacks 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 basically just a wrapper around the standard Android browser, but instead of using a data (2.5, 3, 4G) 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. Both SMS and MMS are completely free with T-Mobile’s unlimited messaging plan. How can IP traffic be tunneled through SMS and MMS you ask? Well, web requests via SMS are easy enough — 160 characters is more than enough for most URLs, and multiple SMSes can be used if the contents of any cookies need to be sent. For returning complete web pages, though, things are a little trickier: we’re talking about kilobytes of data, after all. This is where Smozzy’s real hackery takes place: the entire remote resource is downloaded (HTML, images, CSS, JavaScript) and zipped up. The ZIP is then encoded as a PNG image file, with each RGB pixel representing three bytes of the ZIP. The resulting ZIP-cum-PNG is split into multiple parts and delivered via MMS — and the Smozzy Android app simply reverses the process. Read more: ExtremTech
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