Comments on: T-Mobile traffic through http://1.2.3.12

By: Richard Hays

Richard Hays — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 09:31:02 +0000

If you go to http://1.2.3.50 T-Mobile give you options to disable this ‘feature’ for your connection.

By: Gregory

Gregory — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:46:55 +0000

Same here,

I was working on some web development (my broadband connection left me too :( ) and noticed those weird things.

Bad :

- A simple google search on those url parts shows that it can really mess up users posting stuff on facebook/twitter/ect …
- Image compression if you don’t want it and rather wait :)
- I’m working a lot with different extranets, and even if security by obscurity is not my thing, I kinda don’t like seeing all those urls in the wild. (Let’s be honest, proxy logs are far more detailled than TCP/IP logs (if any)).

Good :

- With a phone and without privacy concerns, it should be excellent :)

By: Pigeon

Pigeon — Sun, 22 May 2011 01:00:45 +0000

I too have just noticed this… like you, suddenly finding myself without wired broadband access (in my case, due to BT breaking my phone line and not being bothered to repair it) and the cheapest way to get back online being to get a T-Mobile USB G3 adaptor.

I am most definitely NOT in favour of it. Quite apart from the fact that I do not want some third party sticking their nose into my HTTP requests, it spoils the image quality. JPEG images are re-compressed to a greater degree of compression – lossily, of course – and the increased level of artefacts is very noticeable. The image quality is ruined.

Since a lot of my work involves images retrieved from the internet, this is a big problem.

It is necessary to route all HTTP traffic via an encrypting proxy service so T-Mobile can’t mess about with the requests in order to be able to access images in their original quality. This is a nuisance and slows the whole thing right down. It is even more annoying since there appears to be no way to deactivate this T-Mobile “feature”.