AT&T Cracking Down on Free Tethering via Jailbroken iPhones
modmyi.com
modmyi.com
Seems like such a false boundary to segment the market on.
I actually just got back from a month in the US, mostly in LA, staying around west hollywood. The phone coverage was just bullshit and I'm not exaggerating. I was constantly amazed how I'd be standing outside, on Sunset Blvd, with 1 bar of coverage or nothing at all - I'd have to be deep in a basement or in an obscure train tunnel to get that in Sydney. I'm amazed that anyone can use this tethering at all, I was lucky to be able to check my e-mail.
Just one of those crazy things ..
All so that they can sell zillions of different plans for slightly different services, overcomplicating the market.
I really hope that some time in the future, an internet giant such as Google will step into the mobile internet space and simply regard all bandwidth as bandwidth. Without caring whether it's used for voice, short messages, long messages, video etc. It would make life so much simpler.
Old link, but that's the best I could find for now: http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=393471
It seems AT&T want to charge more for packets that have more value. Or putting it in another way, they're performing a kind of price discrimination. All things we like to do, we just don't want them done to us :-)
Sounds exactly like what you suggest :-)
Now, it is time to validate your home landline phone. Are you really doing no business over it? ;-)
Everything else is just the way they create price discrimination and exploit the customers' perception of value, much the same way that Microsoft have sixty-three jillion versions of Windows.
Note: I don't know about telephony (they do charge more, but I don't know about their SLAs), but it is true for ISPs (I work for one as a programmer).
Hopefully Verizon won't pull a similar move: they seem to be largely ignoring the unofficial tethering solutions for Android phones.
Good luck suing them. They offer tethering for a price, you're not paying it. I think the chance you'll get away with invasion of privacy on something that they technically should only see from flagged account is about 0.
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/g62wv/i_woke_up_...
If this is the case, user agent spoofing will not work, and it would be quite a bit of hackery to trick iOS' IP stack into spoofing TTL's for packets from tethered devices.
these can/may be manipulated via ip-tables, but then you still have a huge data-volume to account for...
At least you'll be sure telco guys are not inspecting your packets by any means, be it "teethering detection", blocking some kind of traffic, or something more malicious, like profiling your Google searches. (Timing analysis may still apply.)
With GNU/Linux iptables it's just one rule in the "mangle" table with TTL target.
On *BSD with pf "packet normalization" can be done with pf's "scrub" directive with min-ttl option.
Unfortunately, I've never used iOS and/or OS X/Darwin, so I don't know what are possibilities are there. But I believe there should be some.
(Edit: on reflection, if you know enough to know about the forwarding chains, I'm sure you know that TTL is 8 bits. Sorry.)
I was talking about modifying TTL of the forwarded packets on the phone, to make the packets look like they were originated from the phone itself.
As a bandwidth user (=carrier customer), I don't think it should matter.
As a bandwidth provider (=carrier), I would probably think that different use cases provide different levels of value to the customer, and thus can motivate different prices.
You might argue that bandwidth to a computer is "more worth" than bandwidth to a smart phone, since the computer has more power do to things with that bandwidth. That also means that, to a first approximation, customers can just plain use more bandwidth from a computer, which of course also makes it interesting to charge more for the ability to do that. And so on.
"I helped my boss through this one... I had him call AT&T and explain that he received a message about something called "tethering" and to act dumb and explain that he is a heavy pandora and Netflix user and doesn't understand why he's going to be billed more for it. _Bottom line they couldn't prove it so they apologized and removed issue from his account with no changes._
Good luck to everyone. (my boss was on 4.2.1 and he is using about 25gb per month)
AT&T is hoping people will either ignore the message or call to apologize (Don't act guilty and you'll be fine)"
Basically, being able to get out of your contract without paying an ETF is only possible if they change the price of services to which you subscribe. Since tethering would not be a part of the data plans of the affected iPhone users, this would not apply.
User Agent spoofing should be added to MyWi/PDANet to avoid this!