You are on my leaderboard for the best writing for this year.
Thank you for rekindling some memories.
Installing a payphone in my house
241–250 of 279 posts
Re: Installing a payphone in my house
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the technology itself is 100x better in just about every way(Except for pure novelty, smartphones largely killed true gadgets) The lack of fun, to me, is mostly because of how everything changed around it. I can make a basic website now, no problem, everything is easier than it was aside from the fact we pretty much have to have HTTPS. But, nobody will read it, because it will be lost in a sea of clickbait. I…
because I will be distracted by the sea of clickbait Welcome to the 21st century! One of the 20th century's main themes was humans having to learn how to live in a world of infinite sugar, fat and salt. Here in the 21st century, we have to learn how to live in a world of infinite information. What will you do with your attention today? Will you consume the mental equivalent of broccoli or snickers bars?
Not just infinite information but “legitimate” information that directly conflicts with other interpretations of the same thing.
You can now basically find “facts” that support any assertion you wish to make. You can even live in a comfy echo chamber where everybody else agrees with your “facts.” It doesn’t even matter if your “facts” are actually correct because there is a huge body of “evidence” on the internet to fully back you up. It starts to make you question if there is even an objective truth to things.
It’s one reason I get so nervous about labeling things as “misinformation”. Because often times “misinformation” simply means “something I disagree with” and todays “misinformation” will eventually become “information”
We are entering into a post-truth era.
Re: Installing a payphone in my house
#243> My daughter is 5 - I don’t want her dialing 911.
Well… hmm. I taught my daughter how and when to do that by that age. You never know. That could end up saving a life. She knows not to do it frivolously. This does not seem too advanced a concept for a kindergartner.
That said, intercom-like internal system Bertrand built seems to be much cooler than having the real phone.
Re: Installing a payphone in my house
#244I'm a Sonic customer and just learned about their Tradewars server! thanks!!
I am a very happy Sonic customer as well (fuck comcast...) but the tradewars server doesn't seem to still be up? I think early Sonic had a lot of neat stuff like usenet, free hosting, and some other offerings that they have done away with over the years.
Re: Installing a payphone in my house
#245> My daughter is 5 - I don’t want her dialing 911. Well… hmm. I taught my daughter how and when to do that by that age. You never know. That could end up saving a life. She knows not to do it frivolously. This does not seem too advanced a concept for a kindergartner. That said, intercom-like internal system Bertrand built seems to be much cooler than having the real phone.
> My daughter is 5 - I don’t want her dialing 911.
Yes, that was really weird to have as the very first item. As a parent I taught my child, when she was young, to know my phone number, to dial 911, and to recognize a police officer and other service people.
Re: Installing a payphone in my house
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's a really awesome story with a great opening, middle, and especially the end, if one ignores the adolescent fraud. That admission was the best part! Everyone here was not goody two shoes in their teens. Accepting this reality can release people from expectations of perfection. Perhaps ironically, kids' behavior can improve when they feel their imperfections are airable.
In the grand scheme of things, what he did is hardly the end of the world. And yet, it still doesn't sit quite right with me. I suppose its because there doesn't seem to be the slightest hint in the writing that credit card fraud is wrong, or that it's even something you shouldn't do. I looked for it. And to add to that, what he did wasn't 'a hack', it wasn't particularly clever. It was just theft of services and a l…
Sure, but imagine a kid 16, reading 2600, figuring things out. Trying to get access to the best tool for figuring things out.
I think a lot of people transgressed at that age. I, for one, benefitted from being granted a bit of leeway. My transgressions actually taught me to not WANT to break the law which I think is better than just not breaking the law because that’s what’s expected and one has never considered the alternative.
Re: Installing a payphone in my house
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Outside of movies these antics were confined to a specific (wealthy, male, usually white) demographic, though. Um no, definitely not. > Sure, culture has become more sensitive to these things overall Decades of fearmongering in media, omnipresent surveillance and the buying off of all competent hackers did a good job of that.
[flagged]
Don't do this.
Re: Installing a payphone in my house
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's a really awesome story with a great opening, middle, and especially the end, if one ignores the adolescent fraud. That admission was the best part! Everyone here was not goody two shoes in their teens. Accepting this reality can release people from expectations of perfection. Perhaps ironically, kids' behavior can improve when they feel their imperfections are airable.
In the grand scheme of things, what he did is hardly the end of the world. And yet, it still doesn't sit quite right with me. I suppose its because there doesn't seem to be the slightest hint in the writing that credit card fraud is wrong, or that it's even something you shouldn't do. I looked for it. And to add to that, what he did wasn't 'a hack', it wasn't particularly clever. It was just theft of services and a l…
I wrote my first ever (and last) virus for the Archimedes...
Some history: Waaay back in the mists of time (1988) I was a 1st-year undergrad in Physics. Together with a couple of friends, I wrote a virus, just to see if we could (having read through the Advanced User Guide and the Econet System User Guide), then let it loose on just one of the networked archimedes machines in the year-1 lab.
I guess I should say that the virus was completely harmless, it just prepended 'Copyright (c) 1988 The Virus' to the start of directory listings. It was written for Acorn Archimedes (the lab hadn't got onto PC's by this time, and the Acorn range had loads of ports, which physics labs like :-) It spread like wildfire. People would come in, log into the network, and become infected because the last person to use their current computer was infected. It would then infect their account, so wherever they logged on in future would also infect the computer they were using then. A couple of hours later, and most of the lab was infected.
You have to remember that viruses in those days weren't really networked. They came on floppy disks for Atari ST's and Amiga's. I witnessed people logging onto the same computer "to see if they were infected too". Of course, the act of logging in would infect them... Of course "authority" was not amused. Actually they were seriously unamused, not that they caught us. They shut down the year-1,2,3 network and disinfected all the accounts on the network server by hand. Ouch.
There were basically 3 ways the virus could be activated: - Typing any 'star' command (eg: "* .", which gave you a directory listing. Sneaky, I thought, since the virus announced itself when you did a '* .' When you thought you'd beaten it, you'd do a '* .' to see if it was still there :-) - The events (keypress, network, disk etc.) all activated the virus if inactive, and also re-enabled the interrupts, if they had been disabled - The interrupts (NMI,VBI,..) all activated the virus if inactive, and also re-enabled the events, if they had been deactivated.
On activation, the virus would replicate itself to the current mass-storage media. This was to cause problems because we hadn't really counted on just how effective this would be. Within a few days of the virus being cleansed (and everyone settling back to normal), it suddenly made a re-appearance again, racing through the network once more within an hour or two. Someone had put the virus onto their floppy disk (by typing *. on the floppy when saving their work, rather than the network) and had then brought the disk back into college and re-infected the network.
If we thought authority was unamused last time, this time they held a meeting for the entire department, and calmly said the culprit when found would be expelled. Excrement and fans came to mind. Of course, they thought we'd just re-released it, but in fact it was just too successful for comfort...
Since we had "shot our bolt", owning up didn't seem like a good idea. The only solution we came up with was to write another (silent, this time :-) virus which would disable any copy of the old one, whilst hiding itself from the users. We built in a time-to-die of a couple of months, let it go, and prayed...
We had actually built in a kill-switch to the original virus, which would disable and remove it - we didn't want to be infected ourselves (at the start). Of course, it became a matter of self-preservation to be infected later on in the saga - 3 accounts unaccountably (pun intended :-) uninfected... It wasn't too hard to destroy the original by having the new virus "press" the key combination that deleted the old one.
So, everyone was happy. Infected with the counter-virus for a while, but happy. "Authority" thought they'd laid down the law, and been taken seriously (oh if they knew...) and we'd not been expelled. Everyone else lost their infections within a few months ... Anyway. I've never written anything remotely like a virus since [grin]
Re: Installing a payphone in my house
#249> This basically creates a closed network between two phones. You can configure it so that if you pick up one phone, the other phone rings, and when that phone picks up, you can talk, and vice-versa. So I bought one, drilled a hole to my daughter’s room, and ran another RJ-11 cable to her phone.
Okay, well, now I have something to do with the rotary phone I inherited from a previous job. Time to set up a phone line to my kid's room!
I wonder if something exists to connect any arbitrary number of phones together. Maybe even with distinct phone numbers?
edit: duh, of course it does, PBX. maybe that'll be my summer project.
Re: Installing a payphone in my house
#250Back when I was a kid I had alot of fun using methods to get free phone calls on these things. Like, beyond just red-boxing or whatever (Past that time). In Japan, they would just accept DTMF tones from anything that would generate them. There was all these people using hacked cards that they installed countermeasures against which were hilarious because people using these hacked yakuza cards would keep one foot in t…
> phonelosers
Wow, there's a name I haven't heard or thought about in years... I wonder if RBCP's writings are still floating around somewhere. Even the fictional ones (especially the fictional ones, I guess) are amazing.