SmarTone: Proxy & Routable Address issues

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  1. #1

    Join Date
    May 2008
    Posts
    161

    SmarTone: Proxy & Routable Address issues

    Hi,

    After many years on 3 I moved to SmarTone today as 3 wanted to more than double the fee of my unlimited 3G plan.

    Now I'm on SmarTone I notice that I'm getting an IP in a private range (10.0.0.0/8). None-HTTP (including HTTPS) data works fine but when I'm accessing HTTP I often get an empty page. This seems to be an issue with the transparent proxy.

    Did anyone else experience this issue with SmarTone? Which other mobile phone providers give out private addresses? 3 gave me a routable address AFAIK.

    Thanks,
    Chris.


  2. #2

    Join Date
    Dec 2002
    Location
    θ–„ζ‰Άζž—
    Posts
    47,965

    SmarTone has always had a transparent proxy of sorts ... one way or another. About 10 years ago, they were using it to cache and reduce image sizes from what some of my experiments showed at that time.


  3. #3

    Join Date
    May 2008
    Posts
    161

    Fairly annoying in any case, but does it at least work for you? I can at this point not access any HTTP website with Chrome nor Firefox.

    Maybe I should bring my VPN plans forward...


  4. #4

    Join Date
    May 2008
    Posts
    161

    So, I think that I might know what's happening... when I removed all browser addons one-by-one on Firefox for Android things suddenly started working when I reached Blender (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...don/blender-1/). The only thing that Blender does is changing the browser identifier to something very common (to mitigate fingerprinting). It looks like SmarTone's proxy checks the browser identifier against known mobile browser to discourage tethering on their cheapest plans (88 HKD for unlimited 3G data) and Blender probably makes it look like a desktop browser rather than a mobile browser. And surely when I tether with my laptop pages resulting from HTTP requests again show up blank... changing the browser identifier from on my laptop to something resembling a mobile device made it magically work again. Naughty SmarTone.

    Last edited by chrisvdb; 23-01-2015 at 03:34 PM.