…what more can I say?
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I’m not actually convinced that this would work but as a game industry professional, I spend *way* too much time trying to get access to the ‘net in strange lands where the powers that be have devoted significant effort to making such things impossible or sufficiently expensive to justify taking out a second mortgage… so I’ll probably give it a go at some point.
Did you ever sit at the airport or at a cafe and there was a unencrypted wireless access point nearby, but whenever you wanted to visit a site their website would pop up asking for a fee to use the internet through their AccessPoint (aka. Captive Portal)?
Well, I did, several times. But in most cases you are able to look up arbitrary hostnames, ie. google.com.
But you can use the fact that you can resolve arbitrary hostnames to gain free connection to the internet.
The Idea is to tunnel all outgoing traffic through DNS.
I did too… but I’ve certainly never thought of overlaying TCP/IP over DNS! This guy has really taken the idea and run with it though;
ntez375sy2qk7jsg2og3eswo2jujscb3r43as6m6hl2ws xobm7h2olu4tmaq.lyazbf2e2rdynrd3fldvdy2w3tifi gy2csrx3cqczxyhnxygor72a7fx47uo.nwqy4oa3v5rx6 6b4aek5krzkdm5btgz6jbiwd57ubnohnknpcuybg7py.6 3026-0.id-32227.up.sshdns.feh.dnstunnel.deSo the responses come Base64 encoded. Such a response might look like the following one:
695-8859.id-39201.down.sshdns.feh.dnstunnel.de. 0 IN TXT "AAAAlAgfAAAAgQDKrd3sFmf8aLX6FdU8ThUy3SRWGhotR6EsAavqHgBzH2khqsQHQjEf355jS7cT G+4a8kAmFVQ4mpEEJeBE6IyDWbAQ9a0rgOKcsaWwJ7GdngGm9jpvReXX7S/2oqAIUFCn0M8=" "MHw9tR0kkDVZB7RCfCOpjfHrir7yuiCbt7FpyX8AAAABBQAAAAAAAAAA"
Now bind (the default DNS server software) is one of the most complex and arcane pieces of software I’ve ever come accross and I’m not entirely sure that anyone fully understands DNS (the DNS configuration that seems to work best for us here at hellomonster is technically illegal according to the RFC but a properly formed DNS entry fails a lot more frequently for some reason)… so layering an entire TCP stack on top of it is just brilliant. Or madness, it’s hard to tell.
Damn, Bad Gods stole the idea for my new game! Not just that, they gave away cheats to our entire battle system. We can’t change it now, we spent years obsessing over the details and getting everything just right. Oh well, I guess it’s back to the drawing board!
This is so unbelievably bent I just had to post the link, live from the 12:39pm train to Brighton for the Develop Conference. In my idler moments I have often wondered if it would be possible to mechanize and engame some of the more tedious chores of the desktop (feeding the spam plant, mowing the defragment lawn, doing a mail merge with some kind of Space Invaders motif), but blow me down, somebody has just done it. Parody it isn’t, real it is - check out your own 3D Mailbox!
This is the Web 2.0 equivalent of ChindÅgu and I think both hemispheres of my brain have started to split apart just writing about it for this long. PC only of course, sorry to all you Mac people - you can’t have all the cool stuff.