On my flight home yesterday a free, but limited, wifi option was available that allowed only for messaging (WhatsApp, Messenger, and I think the Google and Apple ones were specifically mentioned), but not web browsing. I checked and, sure enough, I couldn’t get web browsing to work, but WhatsApp and Messenger worked fine. I decided to try my XMPP client and I was pleasantly surprised to that that worked fine as well.
I know it’s a limited use case, where XMPP is one of the few unblocked protocols, but are there things I can do with it besides chatting? Could I use it to receive status updates from my server? Is there a way to use it for SSH somehow? I guess some sort of bot running on my server would be required. Seems like there are lots of possibilities, like bots that fetch websites or interact with ActivityPub. Has anyone found or tried anything like that?
cross-posted from: https://pixelfed.crimedad.work/p/crimedad/598286716239948208
Dog on a plane
My wonderful neighbor, Juicy, on our flight home.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System IP Internet Protocol SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
[Thread #69 for this sub, first seen 19th Aug 2023, 17:16] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Good bot, keep it up
Bad bot
In theory, you could make a XMPP bot that can do all these things. Status information and executing simple commands shouldn’t be that hard but interactive commands might need a custom wrapper.
RMS uses email to fetch websites instead of using a browser, you could easily do the same with XMPP.
What…the… Why?
He’s just a special guy.
The man is eccentric to say the least.
https://github.com/msantos/xmppipe
Would be one example, but there are actually many such projects.
Especially if you are on a really bad or congested connection it actually works better than regular SSH.
Obviously security trade-offs regarding this need to be carefully considered.
https://github.com/Shura0/mastaj
For ActivityPub access.
Man, I love the internet!
Ah very cool. I just need to figure out how to install it.
deleted by creator
IIRC, Nintendo switches use xmpp extensively as well. Whatsapp is a modified version of xmpp. Many apps in the wild use xmpp for notifications, signaling and pubsub.
Like the other guy said, they’re probably not doing DPI to actually check for XMPP, so if something like portquiz.net:5222 loads, then you could host a VPN on the same ports as XMPP and have unrestricted internet.
If I were to do this would I have to change my actual XMPP port? Or, is it just a matter of adjusting my DNS records somehow? Or something else?
would I have to change my actual XMPP port? Yes.
You could port scan portquiz.net to find other unblocked ports if you want to use the same IP, or get a VPS or something to do the VPNing (Oracle cloud have free ones, or a cheap one will do).
The project is dead now, but have a look at Archipel, it’s a whole orchestrator (like Proxmox) based around XMPP
It is possible. As long as the protocol allows sending bytes of data controlled by the user which XMPP allows.
You would basically wrap http with XMPP. You need a server that would understand XMPP, read the payload, create the http request, do the request for you, wrap the response with XMPP and send it back to you.
You can do that with DNS as well which would bypass probably everything. However, your bandwidth wouldn’t be great.
There used to be web, ftp, and gopher relays that would work through email, so I’m sure it’s possible.
