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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

#141

Post by climb_stealth »

defrost wrote: post #137
climb_stealth wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right, I almost never need support but when I do I appreciate it. Apparently they have a flag for accounts of people who know IT stuff. Found that out when my partner ended up talking to them and she got a bit flustered over the questions they asked. I also like to think of it as doing my bit against the enshittification of everything. Cheap internet is a race to the bottom and it's not pretty. But Aussie Bro…

The motherlode of Australian ISP inside knowledge and recommendations is likely still Whirlpool forums where noobs and line engineers rub shoulders. eg: Choosing an ISP https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum/92 RIP Broadband Choice tables: https://bc.whirlpool.net.au/

Thank you, much appreciated!

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

#142

Post by pixl97 »

int_19h wrote: post #126
nocoiner wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The first video I remember watching on the internet was someone pouring liquid oxygen on a grill and the melt down from it. I'm pretty sure that was 96ish era and would have had to have been a pretty huge file for the time. Was on a 64k line and not dial up.

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

#143

Post by batshibstein »

toast0 wrote: post #107
pluijzer wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I translated this literally from Dutch. I searched for it and I think it is just incorrect. Maybe English is not that weird anyway.

You could be discharged from a job which is formalism for being fired, so I can see how a literal translation could lead you there.

More direct correlation of discharge in the sense of a weapon or firearm.

"Discharged a gun", "Fired a gun"

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

#144

Post by ry4nf »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #132
ry4nf wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AOL had some crazy password vulnerabilities. For awhile "12345678" would validate if your password was actually 1234, 12345, 123456, 1234567. So that means you could speed up your cracking by removing some of those shorter passwords from your list. Another I remember was for awhile(99-2000ish?) you could change your password and old passwords still worked. I don't know how long it took AOL to fix those but at least a…

> AOL had some crazy password vulnerabilities. For awhile "12345678" would validate if your password was actually 1234, 12345, 123456, 1234567. So that means you could speed up your cracking by removing some of those shorter passwords from your list. I wouldn't call that a vulnerability, even if lets you attack passwords 2% faster.

Yeah I don't know what it would be called but it was a nice trick for the type of cracking like was being described by harvesting names out of public chats. People normally used short password lists with variations of a lot of common things when they were trying running a list of thousands of names to crack. No clue exactly how much it improved hit rates or speed but I remember being it helpful for sure

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

#145

Post by vGPU »

DanAtC wrote: post #17
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…

Except now you're limited to 2 TB/mo with no alternatives.

Comcast? I have att fiber and I can pull down 5-10tb/mo no problem.

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

#146

Post by rconti »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #42
DanAtC wrote: post #17

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.

Just went from my unmetered symmetric gigabit for $90 to unmetered symmetric 10gig for $49! Sonic, SF Bay area. Considering I'm in the middle of silicon valley it sure took a long time to actually get fiber (2019), but now I'm not complaining.

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

#147

Post by anouar45 »

bwann wrote: post #90
shultays wrote: post #76

For me even the weirder part that the CEO knows the author's email program has an interval of 10mins. This CEO checked what kind of traffic is being used. Hopefully he wasn't interested in un-encyrypted traffic data as well!

Most people tended to use their own ISP's mail servers back then. Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL were the only third-party email services around, before the likes of Gmail took off. It would be trivial to go look at mail server logs to see if X login was connecting every X minutes. Encryption was seldom used there for POP3/IMAP/SMTP because hey you're on the same ISP network and not crossing the Internet. Further it was pre…

hgjhgktgkg

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

#148

Post by rconti »

jelly wrote: post #120
bityard wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure I remember talking to people on IRC who used eskimo.com as their ISP. I don't know if the company is still operational, but their website sure is! https://www.eskimo.com

What a delightful website, the design is frozen in time. From the News section it appears they're still running - they posted an update on a router upgrade today https://www.eskimo.com/news/

Heh, neat. They were all Solaris (SunOS?) back in the day.

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

#149

Post by roygbiv2 »

cjbprime wrote: post #140
qingcharles wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it was brutal in the UK in the mid-90s. That first £1000 phone bill almost had my parents divorce me.

Same. I remember the day the letter came from BT suggesting that my parents switch to the "Heavy User" tariff. I'd been using the nearest CompuServe POP in a different city.

Haha we had the same thing! Mum was always complaining about the phone being in use and I used to have to put the duvet over the pc to hide the modem calling, the AT commands to turn off the speaker never worked. Eventually that company released the pay once never again CD that put an add at the top of the screen. That was happy days for awhile until they they went bust.
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