[HN Gopher] Kannel: Open-Source WAP and SMS Gateway
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Kannel: Open-Source WAP and SMS Gateway
Author : thunderbong
Score : 73 points
Date : 2024-12-21 10:15 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.kannel.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.kannel.org)
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| This is an SMS spamming tool, right?
| argulane wrote:
| We use it to send OTP messages through few telco providers who
| don't have HTTP API.
| adriaanmol wrote:
| Easier to use https://www.bird.com/developer/sms-api ;-)
| argulane wrote:
| It's cool to see that they are still going. To any one looking to
| using this for SMPP connections should skip the releases and
| build it straight from SVN trunk to get the latest bugfixes.
| userbinator wrote:
| _but a reasonably fast PC workstation (400 MHz Pentium II, 128 MB
| RAM) should serve several concurrent users without problems._
|
| Back when software was actually efficient... and of course when
| WAP meant something entirely different!
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "HTTP is also too inefficient for wireless use. By using a
| semantically equivalent, but binary and compressed format it is
| possible to reduce the protocol overhead to a few bytes per
| request, instead of up to hundreds of bytes."_
|
| Around the turn of the millennium, there were numerous
| international committees and hundreds of millions of dollars
| spent by companies on this idea that we simply can't use the
| existing internet on mobile phones, so there needs to be
| something else.
|
| Of course for the companies it was mostly a plot to capture the
| web, which was uncomfortably open and uncontrolled. The mobile
| operators were used to charging 20 cents for sending a
| 140-character message and 1 euro for delivering a monophonic
| ringtone. They wanted to be the gatekeepers and content curators
| of the mobile web, taking a cut on every bit of content that
| flows to devices. (I remember vision PowerPoints where operators
| imagined that one day when video can be watched on mobile phones,
| they'd be making more money from each watch than the studios.)
|
| "We must save 200 bytes on HTTP headers or the network will
| melt!" was just a convenient excuse to build a stack they could
| own end-to-end.
| diggan wrote:
| I don't know if you tried to use the web via 3G or even GPRS,
| but I remember I did, and it was terribly slow. Opera
| Mini/Mobile ran some sort of proxy service that made things
| faster (not sure how or what that was, I was too young to
| understand anything) and helped a little bit, but the best
| thing you could come across was dedicated WAP websites that
| basically were "website lite" versions some websites ran
| concurrently with their real websites.
|
| And even so, loading a 0.1MB WAP website still took time. The
| pipes were really slow back then, and the devices not being
| like the pocket computers we have today.
|
| > The mobile operators were used to charging 20 cents for
| sending a 140-character message.
|
| In Sweden when I was young, it was pretty common for us to have
| monthly plans with unlimited text messages included (but not
| surfing, no one did that on the phone anyways). Even with that,
| WAP seemed to have served some sort of purpose, at least for me
| personally.
| usr1106 wrote:
| > Opera Mini/Mobile ran some sort of proxy service that made
| things faster (not sure how or what that was, I was too young
| to understand anything)
|
| That is still running. The SymbianOS version of the Opera
| Mini browser still works.
|
| From my Web server log: 88.88.88.88
| [20/Dec/2024:18:55:10 "GET /redacted HTTP/1.1" 200 75 r:-
| "Opera/9.80 (Series 60; Opera Mini/7.1.32444/191.361; U; de)
| Presto/2.12.423 Version/12.16"
| diggan wrote:
| I don't think their proxy server would use Opera Mini as
| the user-agent. What I seem to remember, was that they run
| this proxy which did the fetching for you, did some
| ridiculous compression or similar, and then sent you the
| compressed reply.
|
| If I remember this correctly, I'd expect the user-agent to
| be something like "Opera Proxy" or "Opera Compressor", not
| the user agent of the browser itself. But again, I might
| remember this all incorrectly, was a long time ago and I
| was just a kid.
| usr1106 wrote:
| I know the user causing those log entries personally.
| They use Opera Mini on an ancient SymbianOS phone.
|
| Yes, it works like you describe. They use a compressed
| protocol between the client and the proxy. The DOM might
| not even be based on HTML, not sure about that.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Actually I would not have needed to redact the IP
| address. It's not the end user but Opera's proxy:
| 82.145.211.80 [20/Dec/2024:18:10:36 "GET /redacted
| HTTP/1.1" 200 75 r:- "Opera/9.80 (Series 60; Opera
| Mini/7.1.32444/191.361; U; de) Presto/2.12.423
| Version/12.16"
| lxgr wrote:
| > I don't think their proxy server would use Opera Mini
| as the user-agent.
|
| It does, I just checked:
|
| > Opera/9.80 (Android; Opera Mini/87.0.2254/191.361; U;
| en) Presto/2.12.423 Version/12.16
|
| > What I seem to remember, was that they run this proxy
| which did the fetching for you, did some ridiculous
| compression or similar, and then sent you the compressed
| reply.
|
| That's Opera Turbo, a feature of Opera Mobile (which is a
| full browser, HTML, JavaScript and all), which indeed
| compressed images and other media in a lossy way (and
| text losslessly, if it wasn't already at the HTTP level,
| I assume).
|
| Opera Mini actually renders HTML (and executes JavaScript
| for a couple of seconds) server-side and then sends a
| binary version of that pre-render to the phone. I imagine
| it to be closer to SVG or PDF than to HTML and CSS.
| pavlov wrote:
| Both are true: WAP was technically a well-intentioned (if
| poorly designed) solution to a real problem, while also being
| a cynical power grab by the operators.
|
| The problem turned out to be more short-lived than anyone
| imagined in 1999, and fortunately the power grab failed too.
| Steve Jobs hammered the definitive last nails onto that
| coffin. Mobile operators became the dumb pipes that was
| always their worst nightmare.
| diggan wrote:
| The influence of Steve Jobs in Sweden was basically nil at
| that point in time when it comes to cellphones and internet
| on cellphones. What put the nail in the coffin there, was
| the launch of a new company (called 3 or "Three", was new
| in Sweden at least) which promised connection to a new
| network/stack called 3G. With 3G, you no longer needed to
| use WAP. We were all using Sony Ericsson and Motorola Razor
| (Razer?) when 3G arrived, and the iPhone was still years
| away at that point.
| rollcat wrote:
| > Opera Mini/Mobile ran some sort of proxy service that made
| things faster [...]
|
| In 2017ish, I've overheard from a friend who used to work for
| Opera, that back in their time they were using Presto (their
| in-house engine) on the backend to pre-
| render/optimise/compress pages. Think smart VPN/proxy.
|
| Also, heck yes, Opera on "dumb" phones was an amazing
| experience - compared to the built-in contemporary browsers.
| lxgr wrote:
| This was how I browsed the web on the go for the better
| part of a decade, before browser became good enough and
| prices (and download times) per megabyte cheap/fast enough
| to actually use the full web on mobile devices.
|
| It was absolutely amazing. And it's still around! I have an
| install on my iPhone; while the app seems to be unpublished
| in most western countries' App Store, I can still use it
| just fine. I believe the Android and J2ME versions are
| still actively installable.
|
| Although I just gave it a try, and the iOS version seems to
| not be the real deal anymore; it seems to use a media
| compression proxy and regular WebKit to render on the iOS
| side. The Android version still does server-side rendering.
| fulafel wrote:
| Yep, it was obsoleted before it could catch one. Sadly not so
| with IoT devices. Today's IoT device hardware would run HTTPS,
| JSON etc just fine, but there are all kinds of constrained
| weird protocols used, and lots of companies there have
| incentives to perpetuate it.
| lxgr wrote:
| I wouldn't underestimate how verbose JSON over HTTPS is,
| compared to a binary protocol that maybe only sends a single
| symmetrically encrypted UDP packet per sensor status report.
|
| Some IoT devices run on CR2032 Lithium cells, and even a
| single order of magnitude still matters there.
|
| Network data usage can be a consideration too. Some IoT
| devices use satellites as a backhaul; you definitely don't
| want to (and in fact can't) run HTTP over something like
| Iridium SBD, for example.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| We're better off than that scenario, but not much better. Apple
| and Google ended up owning the phone operating systems so only
| the things that they deem acceptable are what the vast majority
| of users are allowed to use.
| pavlov wrote:
| Do Apple and Google stop you from opening a web browser and
| navigating to any web site?
|
| Because that was the trillion-dollar vision for mobile
| operator owned WAP portals around 1999. They would completely
| control access to online services on mobile devices. That was
| how they planned to get a cut on everything you view on a
| phone.
| lxgr wrote:
| > Do Apple and Google stop you from opening a web browser
| and navigating to any web site?
|
| Apple kind of does, yes. They do let me use exactly one web
| browser.
|
| On my old Symbian phone, I had the choice of the built-in
| WebKit browser, Opera Mini, Opera Mobile, all with
| different rendering engines and their various advantages
| and downsides.
|
| Now it's all WebKit frontends.
|
| > That was how they planned to get a cut on everything you
| view on a phone.
|
| Apple does get a cut of every web search I do, and I can't
| even use the search engine of my choice.
|
| Not that I think the mobile phone operators and
| manufacturers of the early 2000s would be better custodians
| of user freedom on their devices, but I don't think it's
| correct to paint this as an unequivocal change for the
| better.
|
| There was more design by committee back then (and the
| committees were as bureaucratic as it gets, just open any
| 3GPP or OMA specification and you'll never complain about
| anything W3C again), but there was also more pluralism of
| device design and UX aesthetics, and more than two
| implementations of everything, both by US companies
| sometimes struggling to empathize with users living in
| other countries and speaking other languages.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| No, they are less direct but not less malicious [1]
|
| [1]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
| usr1106 wrote:
| > Of course for the companies it was mostly a plot to capture
| the web, which was uncomfortably open and uncontrolled. The
| mobile operators were used to charging 20 cents for sending a
| 140-character message and 1 euro for delivering a monophonic
| ringtone. They wanted to be the gatekeepers and content
| curators of the mobile web,
|
| So how has this changed? Nowadays Google and and Meta are the
| gatekeepers. The business model has changed from billing the
| end customer to personal data prostitution. You sell us your
| private life and we give you "free" services to get even more
| personal data. Disregarding the ethical aspects: If you look at
| Google's profits and the money they can happily spend on paying
| fines to regulators, it's obvious that we have no functioning
| market economy.
|
| In the old days one could still change between ~3 competing
| operators and one was typically competing on price. Nowadays
| you don't really have that option. Maybe every _n_ years when
| you have to biy a new phone you can choose between Android and
| Apple, but it 's a limited choice.
| sabbaticaldev wrote:
| the fact that other companies succeeded doesn't have much to
| do with the many that failed with terrible assumptions
| orev wrote:
| No, this is a completely different scenario. There's a huge
| difference between the companies who provide the pipes having
| full control over everything (the way it was back then) and
| what we have today which is that some companies have become
| defacto standard platform providers. It's the difference
| between having to pay a toll every time you leave your
| driveway vs. paying for things at whatever store you decided
| to drive to.
|
| Google and Apple happen to have devices that most people use,
| but if you want to you can buy USB adapters to use on a
| laptop, or some laptops have built-in mobile data.
|
| I think people making this type of comment like "there's no
| difference now" just were not around back then and have
| really no context on just how completely locked down the
| wireless carriers had things back then.
| lxgr wrote:
| > Google and Apple happen to have devices that most people
| use, but if you want to you can buy USB adapters to use on
| a laptop, or some laptops have built-in mobile data.
|
| But if you want a smartphone like most people these days,
| you're out of luck.
|
| Things are almost infinitely better on the network side,
| and I don't miss operators dictating when I get a firmware
| update or which app store I can use. But now Apple does
| that, and Google isn't a really great alternative either
| for other reasons.
| usr1106 wrote:
| > how completely locked down the wireless carriers had
| things back then.
|
| That was (and probably still is to some degree?) the case
| in the US. Here in this country SIM-locked phones have been
| forbidden for more than 20 years. Phone subscriptions have
| limited competition because the were only 4, later 3
| operators. And the most aggressive price challenging
| service providers get acquired by the bigger ones.
|
| But phones have fully free competition, you buy them from a
| domestic or international store, from your own operator, or
| from a competitor, just as you prefer.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Around the turn of the millennium, there were numerous
| international committees and hundreds of millions of dollars
| spent by companies on this idea that we simply can't use the
| existing internet on mobile phones, so there needs to be
| something else.
|
| This was not unreasonable. GPRS started to roll out around
| 2002. And it was quite spotty initially, to say the least. The
| phone hardware was also quite underpowered, good old Nokia 3310
| had a whopping 2kB of RAM accessible to the software.
|
| I got my first mobile phone in 2000 that had WAP-over-SMS, and
| it was quite useful. I could check the weather forecast, and my
| university had a nice WAP site with important notifications
| (scheduling changes, exam reminders, etc.)
| 2-3-7-43-1807 wrote:
| this should have a (2018) in the title.
|
| anyway - is wap still an interesting or relevant technology?
| "relevant" from the perspective of someone with a hacker mindset.
| from a modern perspective it is probably just useless.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| It is not interesting or relevant in any way, I doubt any
| mobile network still supports WAP.
| lxgr wrote:
| Given that this is a WAP gateway, you don't need your mobile
| network to support WAP; a TCP connection to the gateway
| should be enough (either via IP, or via dialup, if you can
| still find a network that supports circuit-switched data and
| a low-jitter VoIP or circuit-switched landline that can
| terminate a data call).
|
| > It is not interesting or relevant in any way
|
| In a technological-historical way it definitely is. I find it
| pretty interesting to see how things used to be done, and try
| to see which design decisions were just following the hype,
| and which actually were ingenious solutions to real
| constraints of the time.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Wow, this is a blast from the past.
|
| Many years ago, before most phones had mobile internet, I was
| running a web-to-WAP reverse proxy using
| https://web.archive.org/web/20080209153558/www.hottproxy.org...
| to get mobile web access on my LG VX 5400 flip phone.
|
| You could go into the secret admin menu, reconfigure the WAP
| gateway away from the carrier's captive portal to your own proxy
| and voila! Unlimited free access to the real web! (at 3G speeds)
| lxgr wrote:
| Even though it never really took off (at least in Europe), I find
| SMS as a bearer medium for the WAP 1.0 stack fascinating.
|
| One of my first PDAs could do something similar for sharing files
| as a series of concatenated binary SMS over an Infrared
| connection via a mobile phone.
|
| The only problem was that SMS was paid per message in my country
| (double-digit cents each). Fortunately the preview dialog showed
| the estimated number of messages before sending - and it was
| something like 1000 for a small JPEG...
| srmarm wrote:
| I know the article sort of touches on it but I only recall WAP as
| being a sort of mark up language akin to a mobile HTML rather
| than a network layer protocol. My old site (probably late 90s)
| had a wap.mysite.com subdomain which I hosted them on and which
| seemed to work well on my limited testing - I don't recall
| setting anything special up with the hosting - just the same
| hosting as the regular site. It worked very well on the
| contemporary mobiles but did I miss something back then?
| lmz wrote:
| Isn't that what the middlebox (e.g. Kannel) was for? To
| transcode text to binary xml?
| lxgr wrote:
| I vaguely remember seeing a physical boxed software title in my
| local stationary/book/media store that I am pretty sure in
| retrospect must have been a WAP gateway you could install on
| Windows and dial up to your modem from a mobile phone.
|
| The idea was presumably that if you'd have a second line or maybe
| broadband connection on your computer, you could save on your
| mobile operator's WAP fees if you had cheaper local calls to your
| own landline, or possibly access local data on your PC?
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Weird to see this mentioned now since I just mentioned it a few
| comments ago. But if you just have an old device and need a WAP
| 1.0 gateway you can use this:
| https://nbpfan.bs0dd.net/index.php?lang=eng&page=wap%2Fmain
|
| Here's a pic of my first cellphone loading it earlier this year:
| https://files.catbox.moe/cmi78w.jpeg
|
| Newer mid-2000's phones are WAP 2.0 and don't need a gateway
| (they also mostly support j2me, so this is the way to have a
| mostly usable browser with opera mini, otherwise pretty much all
| TLS sites but m.google.com will fail)
|
| EDIT: I am on t-mobile and they shut down their WAP gateway ages
| ago with the exception of MMS.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| Kannel should take a page from the Weatherization Assistance
| Program and promote their work on the Wireless Application
| Protocol with contemporary music.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I remember WAP was very popular in the summer of 2020.
|
| From what I remember the "authentication protocol" wasn't very
| "secure."
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