Tethering
tbray.org
tbray.org
Which means we are all living in a fantasy land. We have a good experience, whereas life for the people we told to buy an Android phone will suck.
You can buy an unlocked phone easily; I got mine at eXpansys. Be prepared for a shock if you don't know what a phone actually costs...
If all you want is a root shell to the existing software, "Universal Android Root" seems to be the tool to use and won't void your warranty. It's still a hack and not something you get out of the box.
The only phone I know of that actually seems to come unlocked is the Nokia N900 where you can get a root shell out of the box and probably also swap the kernel for your own without voiding the warranty (not sure).
Barnacle seems to be the wifi tethering app of choice, as it's free and works on almost any hardware.
I'd really like to see Google start using their certification process to stop telcos from pulling this crap. Data is data. You're a dumb pipe. Get over it.
More flexible and less confusing, too.
http://www.appfaction.com/blog/2010/08/how-to-native-tether-...
Uhm... TTL (IPv4)/hop limit (IPv6)? Not accurate but seeing TTL of 254, 127, 63, 59 or 31 means that there's quite high probability that sender is a router, not packet's originator.
I guess the marginally harder problem would be linking together the proxy with the authentication of the connecting user, to let authorized tethering users through. Perhaps they could use a different proxy via a different APN, or similar techniques.
This would catch a lot of false positives. For example, I use Atomic Web Browser on my iPad and iPhone - it lets me change my user agent string because some websites try to redirect you to a slimmed-down mobile version, and I might want to get to the full version of the website. So it is quite often that I actually change my user agent string to show desktop Safari instead of mobile.
But you can get easily tethering on a the milestone (or many other 2.1/1.6 devices) with the adhoc mode. Root your phone (you just have to intsall one application nowadays) and install the open source wireless-ether <http://code.google.com/p/android-wifi-tether/>; package
(Telcoms are really ripping off people in some contries. I pay 14 EUR per month for unlimited, uncapped, unfiltered 3G data for three(!) devices.)
I really, really hope Europe won't become the same hell.
If you're using your phone's internet a lot, it's probably better value to get a USB dongle or mifi device. You can get a 3GB/month contract from Three for £10 or £15.
Every time I hear a story like this I feel like I read it as "run far from this madness!" and the local telecoms read it as "still some way to go, still some way to go".
In the end anywhere in the world there's never more than a few mobile providers, so I wouldn't be surprised as eventually they settled down in a nice oligopoly.
While Europe has mostly had good contracts, it is very easy for them to stop doing that. Because mobile technology is advancing so quickly the can always say they are keeping the same offer but charging you for the extra.
If Europe is saved, we'll have to thank the European Union, I think. Not sure how long it will last though.
First I should have been clear that by Europe I meant EU. And also I still think there's a lot of bad tariffs here too. I haven't checked in many countries but the 2-3 I've been to or checked had similar deals (though in Italy for example pay as you go is way more popular than contract, and in the UK is the opposite).
But I think some of the better deals may have been the result of regulatory pressure. For example every other year the EU commission sets lower prices for inter-state roaming.