The only catch here is that you need to have T-Mobile as your cell phone provider, and the only people who have it are masochists and cheap fucks. My family is full of cheap fucks, so OF COURSE we have fucking T-Mobile, aka the Aquaman of cell service whereas Verizon is Batman (ideal) and AT&T is Superman (not as good as Batman, but you’re not complaining when he pulls you out of a burning building).
Jacob Ajit doesn’t care that his phone is the most useless member of the Justice League and spends its free time talking to fish, because Mr. Ajit figured out how to get free data with his T-Mobile phone. Free data > literally all the other perks you get with not having T-Mobile. Sounds like a fair trade to me:
Jacob Ajit made the discovery while playing around on a T-Mobile pre-paid SIM on a spare phone with no active service.
Without an active service, the phone was still able to connect to the network, taking Mr Ajit through to a portal asking him to renew the pre-paid phone plan.
He noticed that the Speedtest app – which tests connections – still worked.
Along with the Speedtest app, Mr Ajit worked out that he was able to access media sent from any folder labelled ‘/speedtest’ – possibly because T-Mobile deems these files trustworthy.
To test his theory, he set up his own ‘/speedtest’ folder and filled it with media, which he was able to access.
He then created a proxy server as a gateway to allow users to access any site – although he has since removed the proxy.(via)
That is a fairly brief summary of how the hack was done, however if you’re looking for more detail, head over to Medium and read the post that Jacob made. Fair warning though: Jacob says he’s reached out to T-Mobile about the hack and is still waiting for a response back, however in the meantime the hack still works…for now.
[H/T Daily Mail & Medium]