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Comment by jcr | Hacker News Reader

VerizonWireless does all sorts of ahem questionable things to the network traffic passing through it, particularly unencrypted traffic like plain HTTP. If you're concerned about image quality, one of their more insidious but unnoticed intrusions is their on-the-fly recompression and/or resizing of images.

Always using a VPN (or SSH tunnel) solves most of the problems.

  $ ssh me@example.com -4ND 127.0.0.1:1080

But you'll need to make sure ppp(8) ignores the HLDC errors they inject into long standing sessions. It will work if your settings and chat script are correct.

Lastly, check your contract; you might be one of the lucky ones who have the clause stating VPN traffic is not counted towards your bandwidth cap and/or rate limit.

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T-Mobile got called out pretty hard when it was discovered they were downscaling videos [0] under the guise of their "Binge On" program. But hidden tracking cookies are far more disturbing that (noticeably) downscaled images/videos. Ultimately, the people are the consumers of images/videos. Who knows who the consumers of that tracking data might be... Obviously advertisers, but who else? The NSA?

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-mobiles...

my tmo network service is often a crude joke. 10gb/mo of basically trash service. at least i get 4 bars!

I switched about 6 months ago and haven't had any problems at all. Anecdotes!

Are you in an area where T-Mobile offers band 12 LTE, and does your device's radio support it?

http://www.spectrumgateway.com/t-mobile-700a-spectrum

Band 12 is rolling out pretty quickly and is spectrum that allegedly helps with a lot of issues caused by buildings / dense urban environments / long range / etc. I can't confirm personally since I don't own a device that supports LTE band 12 (purchased before TMo bought this spectrum....) but reports seem to be very positive.

Anecdotally, my TMO LTE service is better than my coworkers ATT or VZ in quite a few places.

That link says they reduced the download speed, but the actual files remained unchanged.

I think they were relying on video services being able to detect available bandwidth and alter the stream to fit. Netflix does this, for example. If you have a narrow connection, you're probably going to get 240p video.

If the streaming service doesn't do this, you just get a terrible experience (buffering... buffering... buffering...).

That's why streaming on bad (narrow, high latency and/or jitter) connections is a bad idea, no? Download in the background, then view, makes much more sense.

I don't think there's one right answer for that.

Buffering is a terrible experience everywhere.

On my desktop, I'd rather wait to get the best quality video that I can get. On mobile though, I probably prefer for video to start NOW at a lower bitrate if need be. It will save bandwidth, and battery, and time and the quality is probably good enough.

I'm not a mobile user, so this is probably unworkable.

But anyway, why not download to desktop, and then transfer to mobile device? Destroys spontaneity, I know.

> Destroys spontaneity

It's exactly that. I'm sitting in a waiting room or the departure gate at the airport flipping through Twitter or Instagram and a click on a video. I don't need that 6 second video to play in 4K. That it runs instantly is the most important quality, IMHO.

That's a very different situation: they didn't downscale anything — the service used traffic shaping which caused most services to fall down to lower bitrates but they weren't altering content, which is why it still applied to HTTPS – and that wasn't a “discovery” as much as “reading the announcement”. The emails and SMS sent to all of their customers first and those messages included the opt-out link.

In contrast, the super-cookies were only discovered by people noticing unexpected headers in the requests their servers were receiving. There was no pre-announcement and it took publicity to get opt-out instructions.

That's pretty bad if you're trying to use your phone for image editing or something.

I wonder what would happen if you repeatedly downloaded and uploaded an image to imgur or something. Maybe something like this? http://gizmodo.com/5555359/the-weirdness-of-a-youtube-video-...

I'm confused. How did you go from an SSH SOCKS proxy to ppp?

I left out plenty of details, so sorry if the transition wasn't clear and seamless.

VerizonWireless, whether via a "smart" phone or a dongle (i.e. 3G EVDO or 4G LTE via USB usually, or PCMCIA historically) operates as a plain old modem connected to a serial port. To connect with a UNIX system, you need ppp, either in kernel or in userland. You also need a "chat script" which is the AT Commands needed to set up the connection.

Once the connection is up, create a SOCKS proxy bound to localhost with ssh(1) by using the '-D host:port' flag. You could use another type of secured connection like OpenVPN or IPSec tunnels, but ssh(1) is by far the easiest.

The one thing I've never figured out is the exact AT Commands necessary to update the PRL (Preferred Roaming List), but that only needs to be done every few years if you don't move around the globe too much. The cell tower leases are usually 20 to 30 years, so they stick around for a long time. Unfortunately, if your PRL gets too far out of date, VerizonWireless can prevent connections, so occasionally you need the verizon software to update it.

To update the PRL you just need to dial 22898, that's all the VZW software does (228 is interactive and requires you actually answer a voice prompt, while *22898 forcibly pushes a new PRL to your device).

If you edit to replace your asterisks with [STAR], your post will make more sense. To the best of my knowledge the only reliably way to get an asterisk to display in an HN post is to use only one. (Maybe sometimes stick it in the middle of the word.) Backslash does nothing useful.

It's not pretty, but just put a space after the stars:

* * *.

Too late to edit it now, didn't realize HN even did any formatting (don't think I've ever used it at least). But yes, [STAR]2289.

Thanks a ton for the PRL tip. I'll try it out. As for formatting on HN, the link blow covers the details.

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

You can write a single asterisk in "code" format with two leading spaces on a line.

  *22898

That should work.

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