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90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president

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Re: 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president

#121

Post by sen »

locusofself wrote: post #40
INTPenis wrote: post #35

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 was totally the same. Got several phone calls and had my ISP service terminated when I was 13-14. Portscanned and war-dialed everything. Went to defcon when I was 16. I got my first job at a local ISP after the owner busted me for running "John the Ripper" password cracker against his system that I had a shell account on. As completely careless and reckless as I was, this kind of interest in hacking was my saving g…

Same here. I was a relentless script kiddy who flunked out of grade 10 because of undiagnosed ASD, but having “tech skills” in the early 90s meant I had no problem finding random IT jobs and working up to a career in Gov IT.

I remember hitting a point where there we no more local ISPs who would give us an account, so we’d go to the library and use BO to steal dial up accounts from random companies (always targeting local companies we hated at the time), which we’d keep in a txt file via an IRC fileserv and rotate through. Kept us online until we got better at not getting caught.

Of course all that these days would get you put in prison but back then even when we got caught it was more of a “silly teenagers, don’t do that again or we’ll tell your parents… by the way, can you help fix our printer?”

Re: 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president

#122

Post by jackvalentine »

xxpor wrote: post #31
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #7

Hah yeah I remember my dad getting an e-mail like that back in like 1996. We were paying for an unlimited connection, and then they tried to tell us that if we wanted to be connected for more than 4 hours/day, we'd have to upgrade to a business account that was like 4x the price. My dad told them to pound sand and we switched ISPs. Pretty sure between 1995 and 1997, we switched dialup ISPs like 4 times because each t…

At least switching ISPs back then meant essentially signing up for an account and changing phone numbers. Now there's all this physical infra to deal with, yuck :)

Takes literally eight minutes after clicking ‘submit order’ to churn to a new ISP on my Australian NBN connection. The connection is down for a total of 45 seconds between them!

Re: 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president

#123

Post by AussieWog93 »

climb_stealth wrote: post #103
thejosh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Australia we have been pretty blessed with pretty good ISPs. In the earlier days we had Internode (locally here in Perth it was iiNet for me for a while :)), which had a Usenet mirror (!) and were the first ISP I believe to offer ADSL2 in AU. Unfortunately in 2011 they were bought out by a major competitor and it went downhill. Nowdays we have Aussie Broadband, which has an active tech community on Whirlpool…

I haven't heard about Aussie Broadband before. I take it you would recommend them then? I hadn't known about Internode going downhill either. I'm still using them as their support is great. Price-wise looks like they both charge the same. Unfortunately no great connection here, so it ends at $100AUD for 100Mbps on a good day.

They've got the best support, for sure. But how often do you need support?

Our business is with Superloop 1000/50 ($109, and actually gets 1000Mbps solidly). Used to be with MyRepublic and would get between 300-700Mbps depending on time of day.

At home we just use a cheap provider - Spintel. It seems that for the lower speeds (we're on 50/20) you don't run into CVC issues like you used to.

Re: 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president

#124

Post by int_19h »

pixl97 wrote: post #65
pengaru wrote: post #46

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…

IMO this is all fine so long as it is clearly explained and advertised as such.

Re: 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president

#125

Post by Lammy »

jrnichols wrote: post #116

I remember being so excited when the 56k modems came out. My roommate and I were huge Mac evangelists back in the day (still are!) and I at the time I had a Hotline Server on my old 6100/66. I used to wake up to such loving messages as "your server sucks" and "slow piece of shit." Good times. It remained online as long as I could thanks to a Viacom Internet Gateway, featuring Darko the Setup Wizard. We called it Drun…

I was stuck with a hand-me-down Global Village TelePort Platinum (22.8k) in the late '90s on my 7100/66 and remember being overjoyed to discover the V.34+ firmware update for it that enabled 33.6k

Re: 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president

#126

Post by int_19h »

nocoiner wrote: post #99
pixl97 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The limit was 150 MB (I think per month? This was 1995, but even for back then, that seems awfully low…) 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 possib…

For sure, I definitely recall how space constrained things felt back then. Still, five megabytes of traffic per day doesn’t feel like much of an allowance, even back then. I guess it was really just intended for text-only personal pages. I wonder what kind of hardware their web server was hosted on… I bet you’re definitely right about my ISP being on a T1. What was bandwidth on those, 1.5 Mbps? I don’t blame them for…

How many pages that weren't mostly text were around on the web in 1995, really?

FWIW around that time I was still using a BBS, and that place had a download limit of one 3.5" floppy (1.44 Mb) per day per user.

Re: 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president

#127

Post by johnnymorgan »

bityard wrote: post #84
INTPenis wrote: post #35

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…

Hopefully the statute of limitations has run out, but but when I was young and stupid, I "hacked" a local telephone box in the area to route a payphone line to my house. I grew up in a supremely rural area. We were not at all wealthy but still one of the few households that could even afford a computer. The computer came with a modem and I wanted to use it to connect to the world. The problem was that every phone cal…

Absolute legend, it was a different time during that era.

I'd bet dollars to donuts the tech that fixed it knew what you were doing and let it slide unless you came back and broke the lock to do it again.

Or you got lucky and he though someone on their side made the mistake :)

Good times!

Re: 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president

#128

Post by TechBro8615 »

locusofself wrote: post #40
INTPenis wrote: post #35

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 was totally the same. Got several phone calls and had my ISP service terminated when I was 13-14. Portscanned and war-dialed everything. Went to defcon when I was 16. I got my first job at a local ISP after the owner busted me for running "John the Ripper" password cracker against his system that I had a shell account on. As completely careless and reckless as I was, this kind of interest in hacking was my saving g…

When were you hired to the FAANG? There used to be a culture of hiring hackers like you without a second thought, but sadly nowadays my cynical assumption is that most FAANG companies would be too corporate and buttoned-up to even consider it, at least not without needing to cut through some red tape about degree requirements and background checks.

Re: 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president

#129

Post by kthejoker2 »

INTPenis wrote: post #35

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 violated our AOL TOS multiple times running scripts (I would spam IMs with my GeoCities site, I was so cool) and had to call in and pretend to be my dad on multiple occasions. Luckily they were more interested in a paying customer than actually enforcing their rules.

Re: 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president

#130

Post by dylan604 »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #109
dylan604 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what geographic region are you (or "your friend") located with dial-up access?

https://www.interwrx.com/residential.php

I feel like I've stepped back in time with conversation of dial-up and being presented that website
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