Tether Under the Rader

Tethering without a plan is risky, especially if you stand to lose a precious grandfathered plan in addition to getting a surprise surcharge, and by means of deep packet inspection and other tricks your carrier can figure out if you’re surfing the web on your phone or on your computer tethered through your phone, red flags lighting up even if you’re using it lightly. It’s a very handy way to get people off grandfathered unlimited plans.

Not to worry, Berserker from XDA cooked up SSH Tethering (no root required) which works in conjunction with SSHDroid to let you browse with Firefox or whatever browser you want using your own merry little SOCKS proxy. It’s genius.

While it won’t cloak how much data you use and keep you off your quota, the packets sent and received between your tethered computer and the websites to which you connect will look normal to your carrier, just like your phone, and not a computer. It’s not an HTTP proxy but it somehow strips off the clues from your bits that your carrier watches out for, you dig? I think that’s what it does, the man sounds legit…

It’s not the least complicated thing to get running but if you’re determined to tether in violation of your contract or have some sort of philosophical objection to tethering being treated differently by your carrier and you just want to rebel yet you don’t want to get nabbed for it, here’s the XDA thread to get the files and instructions. Perhaps one of you would be a sweetheart and preconfigure Firefox or Chromium somehow to use 127.0.0.1 on 5080 for SOCKS and mirror everything for him.

Doug Simmons