T-Mobile USA leaked free access to sites with '/speedtest' in the URL

The un-car ...buffering... rier ...buffering... says GFY ...buffering... S.

A better use would be hosting videos. T-Mo's single "ONE" plan is $70/month with video streaming throttled to 1.5 Mbps "DVD quality" unless you opt-out for another $25/month.

Did he also get high speed access?

Just wondering.

Irony

Neat hack.... although T-Mobile already provides free LTE for streaming music.

"the educational benefits of sharing my findings with the community"

As in your street cred, you mean ?

Come on, if nobody was getting hurt you had no pressure to publish, now did you ?

Responsible disclosure means you give the company a chance to react. If there is no hurt, you can give them even more time to react.

Fido (Canada) also had a hole

I discovered in late 2004 when on a prepaid SIM on Fido in Canada, that GPRS sessions routed over a "CONNECT" session on their WAP proxy were not charged for in their entirety (they charged an eye-watering 4c/KB = $40.96/MB with a 15c minimum charge - roaming on my Virgin Mobile SIM was a "mere" £5.12/MB even roaming on the same network) so only the minimum charge was levied. So, the obvious soluition was to set my SSH server to listen on port 443 and tunnel a connection to a Squid proxy over it.

This being GPRS over 2G, it wasn't fast. but 15c/session was certainly worth going for.

Unfortunately, they had "fixed" it by summer 2005 when I was next in Canada. I haven't been back since, but not because of that!

Reminds me of the days when you couldn't send SMS to other networks but I found putting another networks SMS gateway number into my phone meant I could not only send SMS to that network I could do it for free.

So basically

Just append ?haha_tmobile=/speedtest to the url to watch endless hours of HD streaming, no data charge?

But can you get a signal? And enough bandwidth to stream video at all?

For the record, I tried this and it didn't work. I did it from a phone with a paid-up SIM but no data plan, which sounds like the same thing the teen hacker did, but of course it may not have been exactly the same plan. That was a couple days ago, but after I read another article about it of course, so perhaps it was already fixed.

Actually this has a deeper implication

Since browsers have abandoned their download speed indicators, many people resort to speedtest sites to test the speed of their connection... that's why many network providers try to cheat on those... that this is probably the cause of this "glitch".