Geeks In Asia Use Clever Hacks To Get Slashdot

Daedius writes "My comrade Hugh Perkins is living in Asia and he has been without reliable internet connectivity for many days. He uses l33t hacks to get his daily dose of Slashdot in desperate times." From the posting: "The Taiwan earthquake has brought telecommunications in the Taiwan/Hong Kong region to a standstill. I am living in Shenzhen and am unable to read Slashdot directly for several days. Gmail and Google have privileged bandwidth and local servers and both continue to work perfectly from the region. Could there be some way to use Google or Gmail to read Slashdot? A solution was to upload an executable to my web hosting in America that would receive zipped executables by email, execute them, then email me the results."

Elegance, Windows, UNIX

[P(0)(!P(k)+P(k+1)) (1012109)]

Résumé of TFA:

1. uses Visual Studio;
2. emails himself arbitrary binaries;
3. executes said binaries.

Promiscuity and Windows must go hand in hand (bad joke there, anyone?); why the hell wouldn't he set up a dæmon that received URLs by email instead of arbitrary binaries?!

Elegance may well be a UNIX thing.

Re:Elegance, Windows, UNIX

[RAMMS+EIN (578166)]

``Promiscuity and Windows must go hand in hand (bad joke there, anyone?)''

Is that why *nix users never get laid?

Re:

[evilviper (135110)]

Promiscuity and Windows must go hand in hand (bad joke there, anyone?);

Windows users have toxoplasma gondii parasite?

As if it's known symptoms weren't bad enough, this clever bug wears down it's host's defenses by compelling them to use Microsoft software...

Re:Elegance, Windows, UNIX

[jellomizer (103300)]

Well for posting a story trying to show how good your coding is hoping to get a pat on the back, Slashdot is the worse place to do so.

• Your choice of programming language will be judged. Someone will use an other language to show you the simpler solution, (although it may not work, or work for your situation).
• The OS your program runs on. If it is Windows people go why the hell are you using Windows and point you to a Unix/Unix clone. (Even though over 90% of the people are using Windows, and at the time of the disaster and the remote system you have access to only runs windows apps)
• Your coding style. If you do it in C, C++ or C# you better make sure your brackets are in the prescribed but yet debatable location.
• Your Code. If it i longer then 5 lines (properly spaced) then someone will find a better smaller solution even though the code may be unreadable.

Slashdot is filled a diverse group of people, Good Programmers who know they are good programmers, Bad Programmers Think they are the Best Programmers out there, Good Programmers who who think they are Bad programmers so (the tend to keep their mouth shut), Bad Programmers who know they are Bad Programmers, and Good programmers who think themselves as the Best programmers, and Bad Programmers who think them as actually good programers.

The most vocal are those who think they are the best programmer out there, some may point to some award that they won in college (that a Lot of students didn't compete in) or show all the great stuff they made. These are also ones the most easily get get threatened by an other programmers code and find ways of knocking it down. Making sure the designer of the code fells as crummy as possible, so the guy can still keep the place in his mind that he is #1!

The Good/Bad Programers who know/think they are Good normally may give a couple of corrections in the code just to make it work a little better of efficiently, or just admit that that isn't quite the same approach they would use, in there style they may accomplish the same task differently and make it more easier for them to read threw.

The ones who think they are bad programmers will try to learn about the code hoping it will make them better programmers or just ignore it as a programming thing.

As for my take on the solution, it does seem a bit overkill, but you need to keep in mind that .NET adds a lot of additional code that other higher level languages (such as python) doesn't show you as part of your code (for all those includes say all the code for url.py in the python lib directory, or the smtplib code)) So his solution as far as the computer is concerned may be close to doing it in an other language. As well if he added to the email a Content-type: text/html\n\n to his email header he could probably be able to view the HTML file straight from gamil. I would grade the solution a C+/B- it gets the job done, it wasn't impressive, and a bit hard to follow. As well if you are going to post your code online you should at least make some comments explaining what each section does so the reader could read the comments for each function and get a gist on how the code works.

Re:

[lxt518052 (720422)]

Indeed, the *nix way is far more elegant than the guy's solution. The guy's probably not aware of the tools available on a *nix host. Or worse, he could have chosen some IIS host, in which case, it's not likely he'd know *nix well.

That being said, it's still a nice hacking attempt. He'd probably be converted to the *nix way sooner or later if reading slashdot is of such importance to him. Once the door is open, there're endless opportunities.

Privileged bandwidth

[ishmaelflood (643277)]

I'm sure all the people and companies that pay for that privileged bandwidth are very happy that it is being used for something as important as /.

Re:

[msobkow (48369)]

I'm sure they are happy about it, as they're the ones paying for it. :)

No one mentioned it being corporate bandwidth or people surfing at work, did they?

Here in Saskatchewan GMail access was horrendously slow this morning, and access to other web sites has been very inconsistent and unreliable. Having to refresh pages a few times was not uncommon throughout the day, and has often been a problem throughout the holiday season.

Too many script kiddies on the 'net during the holidays around the world tha

Re:

[1u3hr (530656)]

I'm sure all the people and companies that pay for that privileged bandwidth are very happy that it is being used for something as important as /.

Screw them. Thay can get their porn a bit slower. I (in Hong Kong) pay for my home connection which was completely dead for two days and is now at about 50% (guesstimate) of its normal performance.

What struck me as suspicious was that for the first 12 hours after the quake (about 8pm local time) I didn't notice any problems in access. Only the next morning did

Could always rename Slashdot....

[edwardpickman (965122)]

"The Glorius Workers Communist Website of Slashdot", That should get it past the censors.

Re:

[The Slaughter (887603)]

If you'd bothered to read the article, you'd see that the reason he was unable to read slashdot was due to the EARTHQUAKE limiting connectivity over there. Not any chinese censorship.

Re:

[lxt518052 (720422)]

Hey, this is slashdot. Some people NEVER read TFA and always assume they knew it! Besides, everything in China has to be evil, doesn't it?

Re:

[jarl1976 (1000672)]

The article specificly says the man lives in Shenzhen(like myself). Shenzhen is most certainly not in Taiwan...

Re:

[lxt518052 (720422)]

Please ignore the parent post, my friend. He probably is not that ignorant to think Shenzhen is in Taiwan. He just wanted to provoke people and make some fun. There're a million mischievous surfers out there, you simply can't educate them all, especially when they don't really care about facts. Let's just make our points and move on.

Re:

[1u3hr (530656)]

This is in Taiwan, not China.

No.

The story is about Shenzhen, China. The quake off Taiwan was where the cables were damaged.

Google Translate?

[dtfinch (661405)]

Select a bogus source language and it makes a good proxy for reading blocked sites, unless they block that too.

Re:

[TubeSteak (669689)]

That's pretty much what I came here to say.

french to english translation of slashdot
(since there's no french, it just passes the page as-is)
http://google.com/translate_c?hl=en&langpair=fr%7C en&u=http://slashdot.org/ [google.com]

You can use pretty much any online translator to do this.
(Turning off images is wise, since the images will not be 'proxied')

Too bad...

[spammerboy (834445)]

If this was the old internet, he could have used one of those 'Web to Email' services that *used to operate* till a few years back (remember Agora servers and stuff ??)... Too bad for the new Internet!! ;-)

still usefull, restricted work places

[cheekyboy (598084)]

How useful for restricted corporate environments that either ban complete internet , or whitelist the net, or perhaps blacklist 90% of it.

Those that ignore history...

[ColaMan (37550)]

Are doomed to repeat it.

http://www.expita.com/howto1.html [expita.com]

Re:

[zCyl (14362)]

Yeah, and what if they couldn't access that page either. :-P

Re:Those that ignore history...

[seifried (12921)]

From: Badguy
Subject: http://www.cnn.com/ [cnn.com] ; rm -rf *

Okay....

[geminidomino (614729)]

A solution was to upload an executable to my web hosting in America that would receive zipped executables by email, execute them, then email me the results

I'll admit, the workaround was indeed clever, but did anyone else get a horrible, queasy feeling when they read this?

Errr, making the solution harder then it is.

[OverlordQ (264228)]

Instead of writing an executeable that reads another executable which fetches the page, why not just write the one executable that responds to plain mail with URLs in the body in the first place?

Standstill?

[ladislavb (551945)]

I live in Taiwan, but I haven't noticed even the slightest disruption in Internet service (Hinet) whatsoever - either in terms of speed or connectivity to the outside world. Am I just lucky or has Taiwan escaped the "standstill" reported in other places in the region?

Re:

[RAMMS+EIN (578166)]

``Am I just lucky or has Taiwan escaped the "standstill" reported in other places in the region?''

You're just lucky. See this message on interesting-people [elistx.com].

There's a video of the outage [internetperils.com].

Re:

[lxt518052 (720422)]

That's because most of Hinet is on the other side of the broken fibers. Your connection to the US is not affected. Try visiting some sites in Hong Kong and you will notice the difference.

This unfortunate earthquake happened to expose unfortunate planning of the Asian submarine fiber network. Almost all major conmmunication fibers took route via the seafloor between Hong Kong and Taiwan, which is subject to earthquakes.

Re:

[pikine (771084)]

A link between Taiwan and U.S. appears to be working. I'm writing this in Singapore. Since the earthquake, data packets originating from Singapore have been routed through some hops in the U.S. before finally reaching sites in Taiwan, getting 400ms+ latency for traveling half of the world and back.

I think it is not possible at this moment for Asia to communicate north to south.

Or.....

[bobintetley (643462)]

He could have just run web proxy on his remote server instead of being a complete moron and doing this "clever" hack. Sheesh.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe he couldn't, because he only had mail access. See, I got that information from the short Slashdot blurb. Didn't even have to read the article. Happy New Year. Same as last year.

Re:

[evilviper (135110)]

It's hard to believe a moderator was stupid enough to give you points for this crap.

A quick glance at TFA would instantly show you how stupid you sound.

Google cache

[marcello_dl (667940)]

If you can access google and gmail, doesn't the google cache work, too? If so just type "site:slashdot.org" first result is, gasp, slashdot home, click cached link, get site home updated last 30 december. Some other sites are newer, some not, but you have enough material to satisfy your geekitude.

What about good old fashioned...

[mikeage (119105)]

... Internet by Email?

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/internet-services/access- via-email/ [faqs.org]
http://www.expita.com/howto1.html [expita.com]

I did this in 98, when I was overseas, and my internet access was a 15 minute on one of 4 PCs for about a hundred people, with a local SMTP/POP solution that dialed in twice daily for sending / receiving mail. Worked quite nicely, actually.

Then again, I don't know if any of the servers listed are still up, but it ought to be easier to have someone install something like this...

Network Neutrality

[RAMMS+EIN (578166)]

``Gmail and Google have privileged bandwidth''

So you're saying that while folks in the US are arguing over network neutrality, it's already out of the window (in Asia, anyway)?

Clearly an over-complication

[predakanga (788419)]

I'm in an area affected by the connection issues as well (Malaysia), but I took a more polished, simple solution. In a word, TOR. Not only have I set up my own network to use a squid-privoxy-tor system to provide relatively fast internet to sites I couldn't access at all before (slashdot for one), but I've been recommending and teaching others how to use Torpark so that they can still get their slashdot, youtube, etc, fixes.

Overly Complicated?

[Smerity (714804)]

Isn't that an overly complicated solution? I haven't checked if this will work fully as I don't have access to working sendmail, but basically this Python script cronjobbed would do the same...

#!/usr/bin/env python
import os, urllib

MAIL = "/usr/bin/sendmail"

header = """To: [e-mail]
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Slashdot
"""

slashdot = urllib.urlopen("http://www.slashdot.org").read()
msg = header+slashdot

p = os.popen("%s -t" % MAIL, 'w')
p.write(msg)
p.close()

Sendmail code referenced f

Re:

[thelima (1045360)]

What about something like this? $ curl http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] | gzip -c | mail [e-mail]

Both are very good

[lxt518052 (720422)]

Yours is terse, the gp is more readable.

...but, since when do hackers care about readability? ;-p

Re:

[jellomizer (103300)]

If you used include smtplib [python.org] with a couple extra commands you could have made it platform independent, assuming that you didn't have access to a Unix box. Say a VMS Station or Windows server....

Go online in Hong Kong, via proxy server

[didiken (93521)]

I live in Hong Kong, and indeed it was a huge disaster. I run an online flower shop myself, so we see our daily traffic went flat for the last couple of days. And I can't even ssh into our colo in USA.

Recape of the situation: 6 underground fiber lines were cut. "Foreign" sites like Slashdot, Google, EBay and Yahoo! were dead. Hong Kong based sites, Australia sites and a few European sites like BBC does work, so that give us hope. So...

On day 1 ( 12/28 ): we found out Google Hong Kong still works, and Australia sites work... so we search "australia proxy server" and funny that a few ISPs have open proxies open at 3128 (Looks like Squid Cache to me!). Since we must be an early batch, we feel wonderful to be "the only one" in town to go online, beat the odds and get all the pussies...

One day 2 (12/29): news of the proxies must have gotten out. Yahoo! Answers are full of such foreign proxies lists, and some entrepreneur hackers must have wonderful day, building their own proxies and lured people into using it. Of course your average surfers wouldn't know normal http is unencrypted... Meanwhile our "free proxy" running by that friendly Australia ISP finally adds ACL to block us out... We try installing Google Web Accelerator, and it did no good, and accessing local sites are even slower...

On day 3 (12/30): we start looking for Australia colocation / dedicated server plans to run our own proxy server. Their prices are at least 2 times more expensive than US hosting companies, so we start pinging popular hosting in USA.... ev1servers.net? down. Rackspace? up (but too pricey). Godaddy? up, and lo and behold, they have a cheap $29.99 USD virtual linux plan.

So, we setup our own Squid cache [squid-cache.org] and it finally keeps us reading Slashdot until this day :)

Re:

[RAMMS+EIN (578166)]

``Since we must be an early batch, we feel wonderful to be "the only one" in town to go online, beat the odds and get all the pussies...''

LOL. You bastards. Surfing pr0n on the scarce bandwidth left after a disaster, thereby depraving others of their ability to read /.

web to mail portals

[dargaud (518470)]

People who forget history are bound to repeat it goes the saying. At the very begining of the WWW, not everyone had access to web browsers so various systems were developped, including web to mail portals. You would sent an email to a specific address with a GET request, and you'd get the page in return. Some of those servers are still in use to get around censorship or very limited conectivity, which was my case last year in Antarctica [gdargaud.net]. I read slashdot thanks to a daily email connection, text only, and the agora web-to-mail portal.

It's easier than that

[broothal (186066)]

So - google works. Go to google language tools. Select english->english translation. Input whatever site (i.e. slashdot) you want. Let google fetch it, "translate" it and present the output.

Just use the RSS feed!

[tjansen (2845)]

Just use the RSS feed with Google Reader. You will get all articles, only without the links. And if you're internet is down anyway, those links probably won't help you (but you can star the articles whose links you want to follow later).

A Proxy?

[KidSock (150684)]

A solution was to upload an executable to my web hosting in America that would receive zipped executables by email, execute them, then email me the results.

If he can communicate with his web host in America and that host can communicate with ./ then why not just setup a proxy on that machine? Installing and running tinyproxy on a Linux machine is mind numbingly easy.

Re:

[noidentity (188756)]

I'm more of a UNIX newbie, so I'd have thought he could simply telnet to his American machine and run Lynx.

Re: ah i have wget P~~~

[cheekyboy (598084)]

Why not just telnet/ssh in and do a wget -r2 * and then tar.bz2 it then email it to gmail from there.

But on the other hand, it would be nice if slashdot offered a 'one file' download of todays stuff with 1 level view of the comments.

Its all text/html, should compress really nicely, under 100k. Add another 25kb for adds. Pdf maybe. An offline deliver would be nice.

Re:

[zCyl (14362)]

You mean we'll route all of our traffic through google to get around the bandwidth limitations?

Re:

[RAMMS+EIN (578166)]

``400+ ms ping is not fun.''

You say that, but I'm on a GPRS link with round trip times in excess of one second (sometimes even over 10 seconds) and packet loss that varies from 20% to 100%.

It would be great for testing my forward error correction transport protocol (it's supposed to suffer less from high latency than retransmit protocols do), except that the telco appears to block UDP.

Re:

[MobileTatsu-NJG (946591)]

"Good luck sending .exes in zipfiles via GMail ... unless you rename them to something other than .exe. GMail is a monstrous pain in the ass in this respect. It will not let .exes through even in a .zip or .rar file."

This used to be true, but it has been a while. I just sent myself both a .ZIP and .RAR file and they came through successfully. I imagine Google got sick of complaints aobut it. I've been sending ZIP file backups to myself for several months now.

Re:

[Watson Ladd (955755)]

Sure. But that line would have a lot of semicolons!