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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except now you're limited to 2 TB/mo with no alternatives.
Depends on your area. I'm in a suburb outside Portland, OR and have Ziply Fiber which sells me symmetrical gigabit with no data cap for like $80/month.
The ISP president called me at home when it was a teen to tell me "don't do that[0] again". I looked him up recently. He's a big player in SV now. [0] little demonstration that their Windows domain shouldn't be on the same subnet as their users.
Back Orifice 2000 was a widespread script kiddie Trojan that gave clients a menu of mischievous features like changing people's desktop wallpaper or ejecting their CD tray, and malevolent ones like deleting files or dumping their stored passwords.
I thought I was invincible because I got away with wardialing all through the 90's and tried to keep my hat grey by not pulling any of the malevolent tricks, but boy did I ever hit that "eject CD tray" button every single time I found a BO2k server.
Fortunately for me I answered the phone when they called instead of my parents, and they were content with reminding me it was a TOS violation and letting me off with a warning.
In hindsight it was probably unusually civic-minded of them to run a honeypot and use it to catch kids and just tell them to knock it off if they wanted to keep their dial-up access.
"Good" ISPs had a 10:1 user:modem ratio. Crappy ISPs had a 13:1 ratio. Get much over 10:1 and you start risking busy signals. We didn't really track user sessions but we'd occasionally hop onto one of the Lucent Portmasters and if someone had an egregiously long session, you might reset their port.
I was logged in all the time from my family home because we had a 2nd phone line leftover from the 1 year my dad had a home business. I ran the line down through some ductwork into my bedroom, and had switch boxes so I could switch which line went into the modem if I had to. From 1995 I had a Slackware Linux box online 24x7 and also (later, I guess) setup ipmasq and an ethernet interface so I could provide internet service to a 2nd computer we got in the late 90s (since, after all, the family computer had been co-opted by me, put in my bedroom, and Linux installed on it.
It was always via modem, we could never get ISDN or DSL until much later (like 2002 later).
A funny anecdote about leaving your modem online in those days. We had 2 phone lines coming into our demarc box, and the ringers of the phones had a strong current draw that required a capacitor (?) in the demarc box be topped up. We started having issues with quiet/silent phone rings on the "voice" line, and the modem dropping at the same time. Turned out having the modem on all the time didn't allow the capacitor to charge up, so when the phones in the house tried to draw a ton of current to ring the ringer bell, you'd basically get no current to anything, and the modem would fall over. Funny how primitive that sounds to describe it. Then again, the phone system wasn't exactly cutting edge in the 90s.
I was a little bastard in the late 90s, a script kiddie who executed anything I could find. Ran very obnoxious port scans against everything online. Eventually I got a letter from my ISP and it was a thick binder with "netiquette". How to behave online. And a letter saying basically "we see everything you're doing, cut it out". They probably had complaints on the abuse address of my home IP, since I was a total moron…
I got kicked off Autobahn, an SF ISP, for doing _something_ (I don’t remember what) in their provided shell access. Simpler times of experimentation…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not necessarily unethical - it's a problem of resource allocation under constraints. You can either let the person who stays connected for weeks stick around, or free up space for less frequent users who are also paying customers.
The overcommit ratio for its phone lines and modems is a knob the business selects, and it's directly linked to their profits. There's clearly an incentive to skimp here and resort to underhanded tactics. If you've promised unlimited use to the customer, it's definitely unethical.
As an small ISP owner in the 90s, there was no way to win. Incoming phone lines were a considerable hunk of your expenses so you wanted to have enough available at peak time in the evenings to not have busy signals. Smaller POPs may have only had a couple dozen phone lines. For the very vast majority of subscriber, they'd dial up for 2-6 hours, browse the web and whatnot, and disconnect. I hated the "unlimited" thing…
Wouldn't another solution to have been to appeal to the courts or the legislature to sanction competitors who used unfair and misleading wording in their plan terms?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The overcommit ratio for its phone lines and modems is a knob the business selects, and it's directly linked to their profits. There's clearly an incentive to skimp here and resort to underhanded tactics. If you've promised unlimited use to the customer, it's definitely unethical.
Eh, many times, especially in the 95-97 era overcommit was not optional... that is the telco could not physically provide enough lines. The other issue we ran into was 'short-distance' calls over telco borders. In our case GTE didn't have enough connectivity to SWB to handle the number of long running connections our users. Customers in those cities would get a different mix of busy signals when we had available capa…
It's not an all-or-nothing switch. Obviously the less ethical/more greedy players overcommitted more than others.
Ha, this reminds me of getting my first ISP account cancelled when I exceeded their web hosting bandwidth limit. The limit was 150 MB (I think per month? This was 1995, but even for back then, that seems awfully low…), and my pages racked up something like 450 MB of transfers. The network administrator was quite displeased with me. I don’t know what’s wrong with Gene Forney, I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want t…
150MB in 95 was a huge amount.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail#Internal_deve...
In 2004, 9 years later the idea of 1GB of email was though of as insane
>Advanced search capabilities eventually led to considerations for providing a generous amount of storage space, which in turn opened up the possibility of allowing users to keep their emails forever, rather than having to delete them to stay under a storage limit. After considering alternatives such as 100 MB, the company finally settled upon 1 GB of space, compared to the 2 to 4 MB that was the standard at the time.
So yea, no surprise your host kicked you.
*I realize this is space versus bandwidth, but they do correlate. Your ISP at that time may have only had T1 connectivity
The ISP consisted of two PCs running Slackware, a Livingston Portmaster, two dozen Hayes 56K modems and a single T1.
I would have been the person reviewing access logs each morning and would have noticed someone connected for 20 hours that hadn't been sending any traffic.
Yet, I don't recall every having to send such an email. We _may_ have auto-disconnected sessions after a period of time to let other callers connect, but I don't recall.
Not the same, but in the early 2000s (Germany, so ISDN dial up), my dad got a call at work from my ISP, because they got a call from blizzard, because my dad's son was hosting WC3 closed beta cracks and servers on the ISP webspace…
> because my dad's son Is this referring to you, or to your brother? That wording is highly confusing in English. If it were you, it would be "my dad got a call at work because his son was...", and if it was your brother it would be "my dad got a call at work because his other son was..." . You would never say "my dad's son" to refer to yourself.