T-Mobile/USA Hijacks Open Ports
{ July 5th, 2008 }
If you’re a developer who likes to go to coffeeshops work with people around, stay away from some places that offer Wifi on T-Mobile. This is pretty silly because T-Mobile is one of those wifi providers that you still have to pay for. Yet, I’ve got less functionality than most free alternatives. I didn’t realize this until today when I was trying to connect to my django host using Terminal.
Normally the opening Terminal results in a default window that looks like this:
username_macbook:~ username$
Now let’s get a list of all our open communications ports by typing ls /dev/tty.* This command normally returns something that looks like:
dev/tty.BTRS232 /dev/tty.Tigoe6630-AppleAgent-1
/dev/tty.Bluetooth-Modem /dev/tty.Tigoe6630-Dial-UpNetwor-2
/dev/tty.KeySerial1 /dev/tty.modem
When I was at borders today I opened this and noticed something odd…
250:~ username$
I’m not sure exactly what that 250 means but I assume it’s got something to do with taking over my open ports and filtering them through whatever T-Mobile device is used in-store. To confirm this I typed /dev/tty.* again which returned:
/dev/tty.Bluetooth-Modem /dev/tty.Bluetooth-PDA-Sync
This essentially means I have no open ports except these two Bluetooth ports.
Now, we know T-Mobile does this because they don’t want to be held liable for hackers attacking users of their networks. Unfortunately that means from now on when I need to do real work I’ll just stay home instead of spending money with them.
