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Comment by nneonneo | Hacker News Reader

I was on T-Mobile until recently (moved to Canada, where we _finally_ have unlimited plans too), and I worked around the throttling by running a SOCKS5 proxy on my phone and tunneling through that while connected to the tether. The packets appear to originate from my phone (iPhone) rather than the tethered device, and I got uncapped speeds.

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Very nice! What iOS app are you using? I didn't realize this kind of functionality would be allowed.

I originally made my own app: compiled an OSS SOCKS proxy with a simple iOS wrapper, deployed with a free developer account. Later, I switched to using Pythonista (paid app available on the App Store) to run a SOCKS proxy written in Python. I should add - Pythonista is a pretty amazing app, given that it’s a proper App Store app that lets you write your own Python programs with full access to iOS APIs (including the ability to dlopen private frameworks via ctypes...).

The iOS app I “wrote” is up on GitHub: https://github.com/nneonneo/socks5-ios. It’s really barebones; I knocked it together in less than an hour since I rather desperately wanted a good internet connection at the time :)

Where’s the python code you’re running?

I didn't upload it anywhere because it's _shamefully_ hacked up - it's a quick bodge-job on top of some existing Python SOCKS proxy, where I added PAC support so my iPad can also use the hotspot (since you need PAC to convince iOS to use a SOCKS proxy).

But, hey, if you want to see some random person's SOCKS code bodged up with some extra hacky bits from me, here you go: https://gist.github.com/nneonneo/fc770965944a4640e2aef34e0f8...

If you want to use PAC, set the "automatic proxy URL" to http://172.20.10.1/wpad.dat when using this as a tethering proxy (yes, iOS lets you bind port 80 without root - your app just needs to be running).

No need to feel ashamed. If you share your code, people know what they run and can learn and improve from there. One of the awesome benefits of FOSS

Awesome solution, great hacking, well done!

Best guerilla marketing for Pythonista ever.

FWIW, I have zero affiliation with the app, I just happen to really like it :)

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