Tech Info

Ok. So let me clear up a few things before I get into any more details so everyone can know what's going on.

If you don't know by now, I'm rockin an iPhone 4. Yes, it's the best phone in the market, hands down. This post is not a debate of that topic. The problem came about a few weeks ago, when I got an email from AT&T saying:

"Did you know tethering your Smartphone to a computer requires a tethering plan? Pls call 866-679-7118 for details or visit att.com/dataplans"

Ok, so tethering is basically giving internet to your laptop, iPod, XBox, PS3 or any other device that can use the internet wirelessly. Thing is, AT&T provides this service for a fee, per phone, and it's limited to 4gig monthly. Being a web developer, I can really benefit from tethering but I could do without the extra bill. Other catch is, being a long time iPhone customer with AT&T, I have been grandfathered into an unlimited data plan for $30 monthly. Thats $30 a month for unlimited data (not available on new plans), compared to $25 monthly for 2 gigs and $15 for 200 mb and if you go over the data limit, they charge you $10 for an extra gig of data.

To me, it seems like those plans are not very friendly and don't give you alot of options. So I will stick with my unlimited plan. And also, it's very unsettling to me how they are able to know that you are tethering your device anyways. Some people say it's cause you use too much data.... well if I have an unlimited data plan, what is too much data? So if I accept that, then I can still argue, all the data is coming from the phone. How do they know otherwise? Well, they can possibly tell the browser you're using as well. Browsers sent their info when sending packets over the network. But still, I can fake the user agent of any browser and that is not a good enough reason.

The one way that I can think of, that they can legally see what I'm doing on my machine and that it is actually tethering, is that the MAC address of the other devices are passed with the packets and with this I think they can determine that other devices were used, tethered through the phone. This is the "fix" that I am suggesting with the instructions below. Beyond the MAC addresses, I would say they have to literally invade my privacy and

Now, by making some changes to your iPhone, you can "jailbreak" it. What this does is allow you to make changes to the phone's system that are not initially allowed by either AT&T or Apple. Maybe you like people to control your belongings even after you paid money to buy it from them, but I don't. I love technology and being able to "play around" with the things in the background of the system are very beneficial. It's the same with others though. Example is Microsoft's XBox... You can't even use the bluetooth devices you may have already paid alot of money for with the system due to the restrictions. However, I think you can "mod your XBox" to get this setup.

Anyways, for the real reason you're here... you want to find a way to get around AT&T punishing you for using your own, paid for internet data. Well below, I show you how by using MyWi and PocketProxy.

Steps

1. Get PocketProxy from the App Store now before they read this post and realize what good it will be used for (they did it with the netshare app - Google it)

2. Jailbreak you phone (if not already) and purchase and install MyWi

3. Once the first two steps are complete, start up MyWi and turn on wireless tethering.

4. Minimize this app (it should run in the background)

5. Open the PocketProxy app and start it

6. On the macnine you want to access the internet on, go to the browser and enter the proxy settings. If possible, change the proxy for the entire machine

PS. If you want to have PocketProxy run in the background, get the Backgrounder app and set it to run as if in the foreground. Then you can minimize the app once it's started and still browse at the same time.

PPS. Of course this can't exactly be verified by an AT&T employee but this should send all packets that are tethered through the proxy, thus any data on the other end should be hidden and only be passed using the iPhone's MAC address.

Thats it.