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."

Google Translate?

[dtfinch]

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

Or.....

[bobintetley]

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

Clearly an over-complication

[predakanga]

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]

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 from Sending email in Python [thinkspot.net]

web to mail portals

[dargaud]

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.

Re:Too bad...

[Anonymous Coward]

Some web-to-email sites still exist http://www.webreplicate.com/ [webreplicate.com]

Re:Elegance, Windows, UNIX

[jellomizer]

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.