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2600.network Dialup Service

2600.network

111–119 of 119 posts

Re: 2600.network Dialup Service

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I was in Team Virus and later Team Phreak, and we had plenty of people coming to tell their stories of being either Draper or the first to discover red/blue boxing after we put out NPA-NXX. A lot of absolute nonesense, but tons of fun while it lasted.

Oh, to live again in 1995! The year of peak payphone and working red boxes. It was glorious, but sadly lives on only in our memories: https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/pay-phones-coming-back... "The stark shift happened fast; in 1995, the number of pay phones in the U.S. peaked at 2.6 million, Slate reported in 2022. In less than three decades, that's dwindled to fewer than 100,000."

[deleted]

Re: 2600.network Dialup Service

#112
post #106

So a decade and a half ago there used to be the Google Search Appliance (no idea if it still exists). It was essentially a black (actually yellow) box with some Google magic inside that let you have Google search on premises and for local documents you didn’t want leaving your data center back when people still had their own data centers. One problem with this premise was that when the appliance was not working how i…

Sometime around 1999/2000ish, I built a sort of distributed database application. Early web app days, Perl and PostgreSQL on FreeBSD, and almost no JavaScript. It was for fairly sensitive data that the users were a bit squirrely about sharing, so the idea was that you stored all of the bits you owned on your local node, and you could send a remote query to the whole network and each node would execute it, notify the…

This feels like a perfect application for UUCP / NNCP.

Re: 2600.network Dialup Service

#114
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want 722 really, one of the choices for "HD voice", it mangles it much less than even 711

No, unlike G.711, G.722 is lossily compressed using psychoacoustic concepts, and modems wouldn’t know what to do with the extra acoustic frequencies anyway. G.722 might sound better to humans, but G.711 is definitely better for modems since it’s effectively just uncompressed PCM (disregarding a bit of dynamic range compression which modems are generally fine with).

Have we forgotten about T.38[1]? It is designed just to let analog fax machines/modems send documents over IP.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.38

Re: 2600.network Dialup Service

#115
post #114
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, unlike G.711, G.722 is lossily compressed using psychoacoustic concepts, and modems wouldn’t know what to do with the extra acoustic frequencies anyway. G.722 might sound better to humans, but G.711 is definitely better for modems since it’s effectively just uncompressed PCM (disregarding a bit of dynamic range compression which modems are generally fine with).

Have we forgotten about T.38[1]? It is designed just to let analog fax machines/modems send documents over IP. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.38

But only fax, and it's basically a software version of what I suggested above. It isn't actually a modem of any kind, it's basically the equivalent of sending a fax via sip messages. The closest we have is iaxmodem which does actually work for low baud faxes, but it's no DSP emulation for higher speeds, even if the line was good enough.

Re: 2600.network Dialup Service

#116
post #10
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early digital lines were purely circuit switched and didn’t add any jitter (unlike modern VoIP based “lines”), so there shouldn’t have been any problems running analog or digital fax over these. V.34 was mostly a speed improvement, as far as I remember, no?

I think WarOnPrivacy was thinking of the T.38 standard. Once T.38 gained enough adoption in the various providers fax over IP became far more reliable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.38 edit: That is I assume that they meant VoIP when they say digital phone lines. Fax over digital ISDN lines has been reliable since its inception as far as I am aware.

> I think WarOnPrivacy was thinking of the T.38 standard

You are right btw. I was working off long disused recollections and then had to leave.

Re: 2600.network Dialup Service

#117
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most internet-based VoIP services (read: full telephone providers, not just chat providers) use the same exact G.711 codecs used in the digital portions of traditional telephone lines for normal calls. In theory you can run anything over this that could run over a long distance PSTN link. In practice most modem technologies do not handle jitter and packet loss well at all, and quirks which a human would not even noti…

You want 722 really, one of the choices for "HD voice", it mangles it much less than even 711

G.711 is what's used on the actual PSTN, so there's not even a hypothetical benefit from G.722 unless you're going direct over IP to another host supporting 722, and if you're doing that then you're probably better off with T.38 or just dropping the modem entirely for serial-over-IP.

Re: 2600.network Dialup Service

#118
post #54
post #9

FYI - 2600 Hz is a common handshake tone used in telco. Hence why “2600” is referenced. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600_hertz

It was also the inspirational name behind a multitude of “hacker” (really more like tinker) communities back around the millennium. I’m not sure where these went, maybe they were killed by social media, but there used to be a lot of 2600 named tinker group for technology “nerds” here in Scandinavia. I guess what happened was the same thing which happened for me, people got older and stopped “hanging-out”, but I wonde…

The publication is still around, at least online. Weirdly, I also noticed there’s a 2600 Meetup group nearby where I live.

Re: 2600.network Dialup Service

#119
post #67
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate datacenters are still quite common.

Indeed. People thinking otherwise live in quite the news bubble.

They live in a tech bubble is what they live in. Anyone working at a non-tech company would learn this in the first week.
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