That’s a great question!

Wait, does “this comment” refer to your comment, or the one that you’re replying to?

I used those to call back to the UK when I moved to the US, back around 2005.

When you entered the number you wanted to call, it would do a VOIP connection from the line you were on to that company to a line in the destination county. So it was an Internet call for the international part (which is how they did it cheaply).

I realized that because the cards I bought were from a company with “VOIP” in the name!

I had one of those Radio Shack tone dialler boxes so that I could pre-program the free US number and the card id number.

Just having driveway alarms can be useful. Battery motion sensors trigger a chime on the base unit. Enough to give you an alert that something needs to be checked.

Last year they announced a price increase to the 365 subscription along with adding copilot features.

It turned out that they had actually kept the non-copilot version at the original price as a hidden “legacy” subscription.

So they were just tricking people into paying for the copilot upgrade.

https://youtu.be/eYVPThx7yss

Ghost In The Shell (2017) with the Ki Theory soundtrack.

https://youtu.be/G4VmJcZR0Yg

I love slow remixes of 80s music.

Why don’t they let the people who make the trailers make the movies!

Oh, I should add that the plug in the 2nd pic is what keyboard connectors were back then (PS/2 connector).

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

https://youtu.be/9Ch4a6ffPZY

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.