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by darklajid 5214 days ago
I run iodine[1] on my server. Maybe it's illegal, maybe it's a grey area - I don't care.

Here in Israel free wifi access is the norm, but in DE? They charge an arm and a leg. Switzerland (if we're talking about Swisscom anyway)? They are _insane_. The hotels already rip you off with prices like there's no tomorrow and charge for internet on top.

I fire up iodine on my client. If it works: Great. The network was obviously created by morons (it could easily be prevented). Morons won't be able to track me down the short while I'm on their network, on a trip, with a mac address like 'deadbeef' or somesuch nonsense.

If it doesn't work? I don't go online and leave to have a couple beers..

1: http://code.kryo.se/iodine/
3 comments
icebraining 5214 days ago
If you think allowing unrestricted DNS is moronic, you haven't seen anything ;) One of our major ISPs has paid wifi networks in many cities here in Portugal, but they allow connections to any server on port 443 (HTTPS). You don't even need a server, there are free VPNs that use that port to ensure compatibility with more restricted networks.
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tripzilch 5214 days ago
> but in DE? They charge an arm and a leg.

Strongly depends on where you are, apparently. When I was in Berlin, there was free Internet all over the place. In our hostel, the hotel across the street, just about any coffee bar, pub, sandwich stand, pizzeria ... Sometimes you had to ask for a password, other times you could just connect, and other times you had to catch some air network from the place next door.

Or maybe that was just Berlin Mitte?

Though I went to some places near Cologne and I didn't have to donate a kidney to get online either.

Connectivity in the more rural areas can be pretty bad though.

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darklajid 5214 days ago
I've to admit my experience in DE is limited to certain ~weird~ places. I _lived_ in CGN and rarely needed wifi outside of my own home. Got no experience w/ Berlin, but I might move there in a year.

My problem in DE was usually related to trips to customers, to the ~end of the world~. In CH it was more prevalent: I stayed in roughly 20 different hotels in Bern so far and most of them, ignoring the decoration from 50 years ago, were charging for internet access. On top of a very high room rate.

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13rules 5214 days ago
That is really cool — never even thought about the possibility of tunneling over DNS ... now I must try it!
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darklajid 5214 days ago
It seems there are projects to improve on iodine. Heyoka [1] seemed interesting for a while, but the authors seem to have abandoned it now. If DNS is not an option: You can tunnel stuff via icmp as well. Still looking for a decent solution (needs to work cross-platform at least for the client) as a fallback if DNS is restricted.

And - enjoy, have fun. Don't spoil the fun for all of us by writing an article in a big newspaper about it. :)

1: http://heyoka.sourceforge.net/

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