Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if anyone has stated a general law along the lines of "if you can send and receive a bit, you can send and receive anything."

The only issues ended up being that 1) WhatsApp messages are limited to 1600 characters

Concidentally, that's not much bigger than the MTU of standard Ethernet. I don't know how "transparent" the data channel is with respect to non-ASCII (and probably Unicode), but if you use one of the various binary-to-text encodings that exist, you could probably implement Ethernet over WhatsApp. ;-)

View on HN

I actually thought that's what this blog was going to be about. Some kind of http encapsulation over Whatsapp. Was disappointed that it's just regular a chat bot

I once experimented with something like that a few years back, when I was regularly using a WiFi that only allowed HTTP. It’s not hard to tunnel something like SOCKS over TLS over base64 over anything that allows sending text, including HTTP. Latency might be a lot worse than the special purpose chatbot though.

> I wonder if anyone has stated a general law along the lines of "if you can send and receive a bit, you can send and receive anything."

In my country we have a telecom service provider law, which states, among other things:

ARTICLE 57. - Network neutrality. Prohibitions. Service Providers shall not:

a) Block, interfere, discriminate, hinder, degrade or restrict the use, sending, reception, offering or access to any content, application, service or protocol except by court order or explicit request of the user.

I think OP meant "law" as in "law of gravity" not as in legality.

You can simply split packets into multiple messages and tag them with a unique code and use base64 (or something more efficient), that's how you can do things like do IP over IRC which has even more restricted character counts.

The problem is always going to be bandwidth as doing any kind of communication across systems optimized for human text will throttle you: you'll trigger spam warnings, rate limits, etc - and the modern web is extremely demanding

Electrical/embedded guy here. My similar law is "if you can blink an led, you can do anything".

My take has always been: If you can't blink an LED, you can't do anything.

My first priority is to get an LED blinking, and keep it blinking. Every other feature is less important.

I blinked an LED in my cell but I'm still behind bars. Guess these dumb adages don't really hold a candle to reality.

An LED on what? If you were McGuyver you'd have converted that into a laser, or used some sort of welding tool to melt through the bars!

If you can blink an LED, you have DC current and can electrochemically dissolve those bars.

I don't think that is necessarily a law. There would be ways to actually restrict access in better ways... you would likely be right if you amended it to the ability to send a bit to an endpoint you control.

After writing code for locking down tablets used by prison inmates, I definitely agree that it's not much of a law.

I feel the urge to apply to that company and squeeze a backhanded backdoor on those tablets

> "if you can send and receive a bit, you can send and receive anything."

No, needs work.

Part 1 - No system can be 100%, then you hit the Two Generals' Problem..

Part 2 - Just because you can send a bit, that doesn't mean you can send 8 in a row. So you write a protocol, then they block that protocol, you adapt, they adapt etc etc

Maybe something like ~ any system where you have any control over information flow someone has written a protocol to send porn over it.

That's just jumping of Rule 34, you could change porn to something else

Reply on news.ycombinator.com