I don't know if you guys notice, but there is a new feature on the 3.0 that put an end to the outcry that has been going on for years from the iphone community.

They say the copy/paste, MMS, landscape keyboard is the "main attractions", but....in addition which i think its way under-rate is the grouping on the calling history.

FINALLY!!!!!!, I can tell which one is incoming calls and which one is outgoing calls. It is one of those feature that should of been on the phone from the get go. Now, I'm just happy.

 

I'm also glad they now tell you on the main call screen if someone is calling you from their home phone or their mobile phone. I like this new feature.

 

OOPS!!! Got you mixed up with someone that posts here and also on that site. Sorry!

 

Hey if you work at ATT, maybe I could ask you for a favor to enable MMS on my account(s)?

 

So what's the deal with tethering now, does it just kind of slip through the system as far as being charged for it goes? I got the carrier settings that unlock tethering and got it working the other day. Tethering over bluetooth =

 

AFAIK, there is nothing to distinguish iphone traffic from tethering traffic. Tethering works, just not officially by Att.

 

This is an untrue statement.

Distinguishing HTTP traffic maybe not, but when the iphone is communicating on non-standard ports (SSH, Telnet, Bittorent, so on and so forth) this information is easily sorted. The good news is they won't do anything to your service unless you abuse tethering. I speak not from experience of having such done to my account rather 13 years IT experience.


YES non standard ports will be traceable and you will be accountable for the data if you abuse tethering.

 

I would also recommend that you do not carry out the MMS hack either.

Using the PDANet free tether is probably the only safe hack for now in those regards. Tethering and using the connection like I stated above for anything other than HTTP traffic is an invitation for fail letter from AT&T.

 

yes, I would agree that non-standard port traffic can definitely be tagged, though http would be much harder to distinguish, unless there is massive amount of traffic going through from a single user.

Remember that the iPhone is a versatile platform. There are Apple authorized, thus AT&T authorized VNC, SSH, Voip, etc clients available to be installed from the app store. These apps all run on ports other than 80. AIM runs on port 5900, SSH is 22, etc. Apple even has its own built-in L2TP, PPTP, IPSec VPN client on the phone. VPN traffic is also non-80 traffic. The list of non port-80 using apps will continue to grow, especially with 3.0. Afaik, only voip apps aren't allowed to use the 3g network.

So is tethering traffic indistinguishable from regular iPhone app traffic?
Yes, ATT would not be able to tell if a user is tethering just because the hack is applied and a laptop is connected.

Are there precautions to look after if I do hack my iPhone? What traffic would be safe to use on my laptop?
DNS, HTTP, HTTPS, SSH, VPN, CHAT (AIM) would all be safe. I would stay away from bittorrent and any other filesharing programs while tethering.

In what ways could ATT figure out that I am tethering?
It would be possible to take traffic patterns such as usage per port and run a statistical analysis. However, it only points to such the possibility of tethering.

They could log/sniff your traffic and see what internet traffic you are using. For example downloading flash swf's from a website would be a giveaway as the iPhone doesn't support flash and download download them. However, this is also a resource intensive process and to do that across the millions of user accounts is possible, but not necessarily practical with finite budgets and time.

Ultimately they are going to stick to their user agreement and stick users that are transferring "too much" traffic and bill them per MB/GB. We will probably soon see a star next to unlimited* data stating that unlimited data is really only so many Megs or Gigs. More than likely, they will put an artificially low limit on the $30 data plan to persuade users to upgrade to the higher plan.

So will I be found out if I tether, don't abuse (just browsing & chatting)?

No, not really.

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Also Apple/ATT can try to vilify and spread FUD about jailbreaking & hacking their phones, but it's a PR campaign that they can't win. There have been over 4 million downloads of various jailbreaking apps. That's probably close to 4 million customers they do not necessarily want to piss off w/out good reason (no reasons really exist for pissing 4 million customers off), especially with the rumors about an VZ iPhone around the corner. I would gladly pay my $120 - (5*months of contract used) cancellation fee if att pulled any stunts.

 

wtf.....wow...my head hurts