How a high school student hacked his way to free, unlimited 4G

Unlimited, free data is basically the dream, right? Jacob Ajit, a 17-year high school student from Virginia, hacked his way to just that.

It all started with boredom, as Ajit explained in a post on Medium:

I had a T-Mobile prepaid SIM on a spare phone with no active service, so I came up with a fun challenge: could I somehow get access to the internet without a data plan?

That is considerably more ambition than I had at 17, but the crazy thing is, he found a way to actually get this working. Ajit noticed that the T-Mobile website worked without a data plan, and tried to figure out what else did. Most apps failed, but the Speedtest.net app worked perfectly, even while using third-party servers. Intrigued, he tried to learn how Speedtest works:

I decided to do some fieldwork with my phone connected to mitmproxy running on my Mac. I was getting a better understanding of Speedtest works, looking at it download large 30×30 images, etc. These files were hosted on various URLs, the only similarity between them being the /speedtest folder with its appropriate contents.

This got Ajit thinking: will the same trick work with any folder named “/speedtest”? As it turns out, yes. Ajit put some Taylor Swift songs and videos into a folder named “/speedtest” on his own server, then tried to load them. It worked:

Wow, this was great! I can now host all my Taylor Swift songs in the cloud and access them on my phone without paying for data!

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This would be enough for most people, but Ajit wanted access to the entire web, so he built a proxy service and hosted it in a folder named “/speedtest.” Just like that, Ajit had access to the entire web on a T-Mobile phone without a data plan.

Brilliant, right? Don’t dig up your old phone too quickly, though, because the problem has already been patched, though no one at T-Mobile has reached out to Ajit at this point.

via Slashdot