This is dated 2017, so must have been through a few phone-to-phone days transfers to be on my current one.
But in my main store of files that’s synced across machines, I have this from 1999
Memes were still finding their feet back then.
I’m a big… proponent… of handheld rechargeable air blowers after getting one from Wolfbox.
I always felt like I was risking frostbite with the cans.
I’ve used bookshop.org which sells ebooks and has a reader, but you can nominate a local bookstore to get part of the profit.
My point was really how there was little to no verification on SMTP servers back then and that you could send mail with a simple terminal program, or, more practically, a script.
Not hacking, but using knowledge of the insecurity of SMTP servers of the time, to allow spoofing easy spoofing.
Not so easy to find SMTP servers to do that with now.
Not really hacking, but in the 90s you could usually just connect to a mail server and it would believe what you told it.
If you were careful you could just type an email directly: MAIL FROM, RCPT TO, etc.
I would write scripts at work to send spoof emails sometimes, you could put anything as the FROM address, like “info @ catfacts” or whatever.
Another “not really hacking” example is that when some companies first got an Internet connection, they would just allocate public IP addresses to everyone, no gateway or firewall. So you could browse any non-passworded smb shares just knowing the IP.
I heard of it from this video
It’s just one of several tells. Although you can’t really rely on anything. Just like “badly-drawn hands” is less likely to show up now.
Once I heard this, I had to learn how to type them, btw!
I’ve run small models (a few Gb in size) on my steam deck. It gives reasonably fast responses (faster than a person would type).
I know that they’re far from state-of-the art, but they do work and I know that the Steam Deck is not going to be using much power.
I think I get more of what you mean, now. I’m sure that there are technical issues to solve, like you said from the start, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be solved.
Realistically that single sent packet is going to get copied multiple times in order to re-route it just to the subscribers. We’re not all one one big LAN.
What mechanism causes a single sent packet to get to all the subscribers (and only them)?
Assuming that we all have a static IP for simplicity, a sent packet needs to be routed to the subscriber IPs (via their ISPs). Where is that table stored? Is it sent with each packet so that it can be routed on the way? That would be a huge bloat of the packet size.
BTW, I do remember life before VCRs. Pre internet, I downloaded QWK packets from BBSs.
I get the appeal of removing communication from the hands of FB etc, but I don’t see how switching to a broadcast system that increases unreliably would help. And I don’t see how the broadcast would work on the Internet that we have.
So when a video is created it is immediately sent to subscribers?
In that case, for things to be sent once, it relies on the receivers always being online. That doesn’t work if my laptop is closed at the time.
That’s why I’m thinking that it needs online caching to work. Or everyone has a cloud server that handles sending and receiving while they’re not online.
In fact, that starts to sound like everyone running their own personal lemmy-like instance, to which their friends subscribe.
And in that case it wouldn’t matter if messages were sent more than once, each person’s server would handle it.
I see I misunderstood how you mean this to work, that routing would handle sending data only to subscribers. I was imagining that it mean a simple LAN broadcast using a packet with the subnet bits all set (e.g. 192.168.255.255). I think that it’s more analogous to a mailing list distribution, but for general data/streams?
But your earlier example of downloading the cat video still fails unless many people request the video at the same time (otherwise you’re multicasting to one). What happens if I watch the video on my phone while out, then watch it again on my laptop at home? It will still need sending twice.
Wouldn’t a more efficient approach just be to have something like ipfs with lots of local caching?
I don’t see how that would work. So all my friends video streams, for instance, would be streaming data to all my devices as they are broadcast.
But my laptop is currently asleep. It wouldn’t receive anything.
How do you solve that without storing the video on a server that I can pull from on demand?
Even for my devices that are on, they’d have to store everything as it was broadcast.
And the streams (including every other broadcast) would constantly be eating up my bandwidth.
How would I not receive streams that I’m not interested in? What would decide which broadcast packets do or don’t get sent to my router?
It was that channel!
And it was the wolfbox. I didn’t mention it because I didn’t want to appear to be shilling a particular product.
I got a battery-powered air blower after seeing a YouTube video comparing and reviewing them.
I’ve always joked about how stupid leaf blower are, but I’ve found this pocket-sized version really useful.
Cleaning out dust from computers, tower fans, etc, it is amazing.
I also have a small dust buster and this blower gets its filter really clean like nothing else can.
Unlike cans of compressed gas, there’s no concern about inhaling anything if I use it indoors, or getting frostbite when the can cools.
I’ve seen people discussing a cellphone offer that’s like “$800 but you get $800 of bill credits over 24 months” and they would say it’s a free phone. But you’d pay $800 plus tax up front and you’d not get that tax back.
Still a good deal, but it showed how many people were blind to the tax.
And there’s are those gadgets that have a USB-C socket but don’t have the correct circuitry, so that they only work with a USB-A to C cable.
Oh, many years ago I had a baby monitor that included a pressure mat. If it detected no movement for a while (it was sensitive enough to detect breathing) it set off an alarm.
Although if such a thing exists today, it probably requires an app and a subscription. Enshitification.
Looks like the pixel watch 3 can do something like this, but it only calls emergency services (and plant l only in some regions!)
Oh, I should add that the plug in the 2nd pic is what keyboard connectors were back then (PS/2 connector).