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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

That's a really awesome story with a great opening, middle, and especially the end, if one ignores the adolescent fraud. I think it really highlights the simple joy that technology that literally just works can bring. I'm around the same age as the author, a little younger in fact, but there's just something about today's Internet and a lot of the overwhelming amount of technology that just isn't fun or memorable. From game consoles to land lines to various other things, there were pieces of technology that just worked and worked well. Of course, there was technology that didn't work well, but I think part of the tragedy is that a lot of technology that worked well has been replaced by "better" technology that doesn't work well.

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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 will have a hard time writing it, because I will be distracted by the sea of clickbait, and worst of all, I'll have a hard time finding things to write about.

And of course, the very fact it all does work so incredibly well, with a Sci-fi level of polish, means... it's no longer new. Most of it is being a cruise ship tourist, not an Arctic explorer.

Because the internet is dead without the offline stuff that gives it meaning.

It's like, binoculars and a field notes book with nobody to spy on, the perfect party where nobody shows up, or a spreadsheet showing all the customers someone doesn't have.

I think it's just like the idea of set and setting.

The internet/tech/coding/etc is the drug, and we lost all the cultural context, so now it's less "A beer at the bonfire with friends" and more "I had a bottle of wine alone because I don't know what else to do with myself".

Well not sure.

My GFs blog is like in its 6th year now and every year its more visitors. Its not that much in internet terms (we are at ~700 visitors a day) but its serious content (dogs and science around dogs). No clickbaits, no cookies, no nothing.

Can younshare the Url? My wife would love her blog sounds like...

https://fluffology.de/

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?

damn... this hit harder than it should. Sometimes I need to hear the obvious.

I like the metaphor too but also so much of society hasn't figured out the sugar thing either.

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.

For those of us who still embrace RSS and try to avoid the clickbait and social media, please create a basic website. The more of those basic sites we have, the more people will avoid social media to some extent.

> 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.

I am not sure credit card fraud is innocent pranks or misbehavior... I can tell you with certainty that most teenagers have never committed that sort of crimes tbh.

Here’s your merit badge for pedantry

You'd be surprised..

Not for lack of trying.

Always-online teenagers are a different demographic than your "average" teenager.

the highs of an exploit working or a bypass make drugs look like candy.

If we’re talking about the AOHell era of the mid 90s then I have anecdotal evidence that the majority of kids I knew were committing some kind of wire fraud in exchange for internet access!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOHell

Said the one who clearly missed out....

Credit card fraud was really common in the 80 among "hacker" types.

I knew of several in Lake Tahoe that were high-school kids at the time in the late 80s - someohow managed to get credit cards and would order deliveries to "vacation homes" in lake tahoe where they knew the owners lived in the bay area and wouldnt be at the house - and would have things dropped off to the vacant houses to go get them.

Also, in 1980 - we had a payphone inside our home in Tahoe. I didnt know this was an odd thing to have until much later.

Late 1980 was when criminality was going up and right before its peak. It is quite lower now ... and people who were teenagers in late 1980 are almost 60 now.

Check your math on that one. More like 50 +/- a few years.

Im 47. Started Highschool in 1989

Also, I have been using computers since 1984...

Online since 1993.

All credit card fraud is not created equal. He didn't steal any physical goods, nor did he steal anyone's credit card. He stole some hours of internet connection, which probably didn't cost the ISP that much. Not saying it is totally fine, but it really isn't that bad.

While in general I'm tempted to agree with you, if anyone deserves it, it's probably telcos anyway.

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 lot of lying because he didn't have something he wanted.

I think if he would describe it as a youthful indiscretion or something similar it would go a long way.

In the hacker ethos, gaining access to systems is in no way unethical or deserving of remorse. The hack in this case was (1) exploiting the ISP’s delayed batch processing of credit card orders, and (2) circumventing their deny list of callback phone numbers.

For the same reason you’ll rarely see urbex photographers expressing remorse for trespassing. Getting onto skyscraper roofs and into steam tunnels is just what you do.

Related - I went to college in the late 90s, at the end of this era, where there was a constant game of cat and mouse between the University unix and network admins and the hacker kids. Yes it was technically felonies all night long, but there was legitimate mutual respect for technical skills on both sides and following the unwritten rules of not causing data loss or disrupting services. This is how I learned the skills to start my career, and probably how they learned themselves back when they were students. For them to rat out a student was kind of unsportsmanlike. It would be admitting they weren’t good at their jobs.

I’m told this hacker culture no longer exists at my Uni. If you get caught escalating privileges on a computer you’d be facing expulsion and referral to the police.

> I’m told this hacker culture no longer exists at my Uni. If you get caught escalating privileges on a computer you’d be facing expulsion and referral to the police.

it has a reason. We did not have our life story at our fingertips in those days. Even if the university computers may not have sensitive information but they could be hijacked to be part of bot net or just mint bitcoins. They stakes are much higher. I am not at a uni so don't know the reality but I can understand if they are doing it.

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.

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]

> 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.

It's there,

> I also don’t want her calling up an ISP and convincing them to make an account for her - I’m not quite ready to reap what I sow.

That point did make it come across as "youthful indescretion" to me.

> what he did wasn't 'a hack', it wasn't particularly clever. It was just theft of services and a lot of lying because he didn't have something he wanted.

Who says a hack needs to be clever? And what is clever? Bug fixes are often something very simple that can take a long time to discover. I'd put hacks into the same category.

Again, I think demonizing confessions like this can cause more trouble. Just because we don't talk about mischievousness doesn't mean it isn't out there.

Going through the grueling immigration process, Homeland Security eventually sits across the table from you, looks you in the eye, and asks "have you ever committed a crime for which you have not been convicted?"

I doubt there's a single person alive who could answer "no" to that question with certainty and still be telling the truth. What is the purpose of a question like that?

It's malevalent question - most people don't even know the names of all crimes that exist - let alone defences avaliable and how they all work togetehr.

Breaking into someone's house is obviously a crime, but if you were running away from a axe-wielding murder then it isn't.

Taking someone's car is theft, but it isn't if 'they would have agreed for you to use it if they had known the situatiojn at hand'.

Exactly. It bothers me every day. It defines much of my self-image in being present in the US. I was confronted with that question in my citizenship interview, and more recently in my global entry interview. I know of many others who have been asked the same thing. I'm thinking "heck I drove 9% over the speed limit driving to this interview. They probably know that. When I parked the car, I jay-walked across the empty street into the building. They have that on video!". If I say no, if I say yes, either way I have committed perjury. All just because I wanted my slice of the American dream. I had a friend (deceased) who was a federal agent. He explained to me years ago that the US code is intentionally drafted so that EVERYONE is a criminal (sorry @ClumsyPilot, a "suspect"). If you are in compliance with one section of code you are automatically in violation of another. If the 3-letter agency wants to get you, they can ALWAYS get you. I'm not sure that I believe that. I'm not sure I want to believe that. But he certainly believed that.

Do they actually ask that? That's madness.

It's really not a valid question -> only a court can determine if you've commited a crime, that's why we call people suspects, not criminals, before they are convicted.

For example recently in UK, a group of 4 people have toppled a statue and threw it in the river. This sounds like a crime to any normal person, and they were charged with criminal damage.

The accused raised defences of lawful excuse, owner's consent, etc. They were found not guilty - with many people foaming at the mouth because they disagreed with the decision, media calling them criminals, you know the drill.

But the opinions of random people are just that - opinions. In fact even if you think you commited the crime, the court is not required to accept your guilty plea and could still find your innocent.

Only judge and jury can evaluate defences presented and decide if this is a crime. So what should these four people answer to such a question? Or suppose those 4 people where never charged- what should they have answered?

case in question: https://thesecretbarrister.com/2022/01/06/do-the-verdicts-in...

> But the opinions of random people are just that - opinions.

Yet the opinion of the US (UK?) Government is so final, and often without appeal.

>Everyone here was not goody two shoes in their teens.

That's called projection.

> but there's just something about today's Internet and a lot of the overwhelming amount of technology that just isn't fun or memorable.

That's right -- modern age stuff isn't as _hackable_. Especially not at the hardware level. You get an Alexa or a mobile phone or a camera, it's all just a chip on a PCB in a plastic case, not intended to be fiddled with by anybody (not the owner, not some repair show, literally _nobody_) just to be thrown away after a year or two and replaced by a new one.

It's all very sad. There is still some software component to things that's hackable, but even that's harder to do. In the past you turned on your C64 and could start write away code, average Joe Teenager needs to install some IDE and pull in hundreds of NPM dependencies from shady places just to show a hello world. Unless daddy/mommy gave them a Linux box, then the story is different.

> In the past you turned on your C64 and could start write away code, average Joe Teenager needs to install some IDE and pull in hundreds of NPM dependencies from shady places just to show a hello world.

Or he could open a console in his web browser.

Or average Joe Teenager installs a Linux distribution, which then provides bash, perl, awk, Python, C, C++, often Tcl/Tk, etc. and usually includes one or more editors for creating source files. All without "pull[ing] in hundreds of NPM dependencies from shady places"

That's a lot of work just to show a "hello world".

The point was that it's hard to do it with the thing you already have. Of course it's easier if you just get a new thing -- which installing a new OS corresponds to in the software world.

What about the kids in school districts that issue locked-down Chromebooks? They probably can't even do that!

I, for one, learned how to bcdedit my way into booting from a .vhd on my school-issued laptop. And how to SSH tunnel on port 443 to get past the proxy. How LSPs worked on Windows. Messing around is how kids get their start in computers, and I couldn't agree with the parent comment more.

> Messing around is how kids get their start in computers

And, sadly, they tend to get punished for it, once it's found out.

In the past you couldn't upgrade the memory in your C64, now you can open the case on any desktop and put in different RAM. Laptops are sometimes upgradable as well. The raspberry pi even comes as a bare board for hacking on.

The kinds of hacking you can do today are different, but things are just as hackable if you want. If you don't want to hack, just get things done, then today things are much better, computers mostly just work for people who need to get things done.

I believe the reason technology could spark so much joy for a young mind back a few dozen years back is more that it was much simpler rather than "it just worked".

It was simple and therefore easier to tamper and play with. Also, because it was so simple, more knowledge and understanding of the underlying mechanisms was required to use the technology. In the early years of the internet, simply operating a computer and exploring the web was an adventure in itself!

Now, things have gotten plenty complicated and that complexity brings bugs and makes the technology impenetrable to the common folk even with an educated mind - you need to be an expert now. If it's too complex, you can't play with it, and if you can't play with it, you don't learn and you don't have fun.

I feel that your conclusion, 'it just worked', is more a consequence of the increase in complexity rather than a root cause in itself.

Very true. The old-fashioned telephone handset was a masterpiece of human engineering. I bet with state-of-the-art mic and speakers, it would still be way better than a smartphone for actual phone calls.

Of course, I have to admit that my Bluetooth headset is pretty good, and a first-class gaming headset would be even better.

With the 1950s mic and speakers, it was substantially better than a smartphone.

The Western Electric model 1500 [1], from 1963, is generally considered the best analog phone [1]. This was rented, not sold, so it is extremely reliable and rugged.

Best audio quality was with ISDN phones. Digital end to end, synchronized at the bit level, no noise, no dropouts.

[1] http://www.telephonearchive.com/phones/we/we1500.html

I'm not sure why you picked a 1500 as the best sounding, the 500, 1500 and 2500 all used the same network, receiver, and transmitter elements - I've used all three, they perform identically, the 1500 set is actually incredibly rare - touch tone was just not common until the 2500 was out.

The best speakerphone ever made (even better than modern ones) is a 4A Speakerphone.

Also in my opinion, an AE 80 with a non cohered up carbon mic will outperform a 500/1500/2500 on a short loop (sub 15kf), and can be tuned to outperform on a long. The self compensating network in the WE set is better however.

That all said, a modern Northern Telecom or Aastra analog phone will consistently outperform a 500 set, because of the electret mic in them. Carbon mics have benefits as an amplifier, but transistors rendered them obsolete in most cases.

You know your phones.

The mic and speaker in the 90s Iskra payphones are far superior in sound quality to anything you'd find in a cheap phone these days. I hooked one up to Discord last month for an art instalation and could not believe my ears when it sounded way better than the 3 other people in the call using flagship smartphones.

One thing has not improved one iota in the 30 years I've had a cell phone - the voice quality.

I'm not sure this is true universally. I just spoke to a friend for the first time since I got a phone that does "HD" calling, and although I've been speaking to them for 25 years on the phone, I didn't recognize their voice. I feel like POTS and edge->3g calling made me miss out on a lot of detail and intonation. I'm just glad I get to experience this call quality with non-technically inclined friends before I go completely deaf.

I use a lot of voip services and there's something to be said for the phone companies actually making a competitive product, here.

I suppose one could argue that "HD calling" is technically just VoIP as well.

VoIP systems negotiate codec choice on call initiation, generally using a "best common denominator" rule. Even when only companded PCM is available (PCM-a, PCM-µ), 64kbps will be used since it's the universal norm on the TDM (conventional) telephone newtwork. Unfortunately, as a capacity measure GSM specifies very low bitrates for voice connections, as low as 5kbps in the worst case and 10-20kbps typical. This requires the use of high-efficiency vocoders like CELP variants that are sufficient for intelligible speech but, well, only for that purpose.

"HD voice" is exactly VoIP and with few exceptions is only transported over SIP or a SIP-like protocol using the existing RTP negotiation mechanism, which usually ends up selecting 64kbps companded PCM (same as a landline phone). Increasing use of VoLTE, which is essentially an optimized form of SIP designed to "combine" session control features with LTE for lower overhead, has made this pretty common as HD voice support is standard from VoLTE vendors. There was such a thing as HD Voice over 3G using a similar mechanism that leveraged HSPDA but it was never very common, at least in the US.

VoLTE will quickly become the only way to make cellular phone calls in the US which we can expect to make HD Voice pretty universal. Right now it can be spotty when calling between networks, depending on how their peering is set up.

VOIP has far better voice quality than cellular.

At some point we may need a new name for that rectangle shaped thing that we use for everything but hardly for calling people anymore.

Maybe smartbrick?

PocketPC.

A mobile, which it already is in much of the world. Or a handy if you're german.

You're calling the wrong people, or people on the wrong networks. I am on Verizon, and certainly if I call another Verizon customer (and I'm pretty sure if I call another carrier), it sounds as clear as if we were in the same room, as good as FaceTime audio or any other high fidelity voice system. You may just not realize it until you call someone else and compare, or hear someone move from their car's older Bluetooth system to cellular when they get out of the car (or headphones, etc), but voice quality has definitely improved to the point of not needing to improve further.

The bitrate can be way higher, but the latency is often much worse these days. It's high enough on most calls that I just don't like talking on the phone anymore and I think it's because of the latency.

"The mic and speaker in the 90s Iskra payphones are far superior"

Someone made an interesting observation the other day: it used to be that you rented the phone from the telephone company. Those phones never broke. Now that you buy phones, they do. And the moral is: always look for the incentives. Or, put another way: follow the money.

The low latency with a completely analog phone call is amazing. We forget it but it was really really low.

If I remember correctly, in many cases, latency was lower than in-person talk, because of the speed of sound.

Yeah, effectively you're both whispering directly into each other's ear, which, even if possible in-person is a bit uncomfortable.

I converted an old rotary phone into a mobile phone (https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-saga/), and the quality is much better than a mobile. Even just the sidetone makes it SO much better to talk on.

I have no idea why modern mobile phones have no (or very low volume?) sidetone. It makes the UX orders of magnitude better.

Yes, sidetone (hearing your own voice through the handset) makes all the difference! I'm not exactly sure why, but I find it so much easier to talk on the phone when there's a sidetone. In general, for me, talking on the phone is like talking into the void, and sidetone at least gives me the assurance that, yes, it's still working. Like the little inset video feed of yourself when you're on a Skype call.

Yeah, exactly. Plus, I've found I'm much louder when there's no sidetone, which is very tiring.

Nice work! Maybe I missed this, but have you considered simulating a dial tone?

I haven't, I think it would be a fair bit of work, given that the modem is what outputs the sound.

I haven't worked with the Arduino. Would it be difficult to incorporate an SPDT relay to switch the sound source between it and the modem?

Hmm, probably not, actually, that's a good idea. It was one of my first projects, so I didn't really know what I was doing, which limited how much I could do.

It's a great project! Thanks for sharing it.

If the relay works you could also simulate the pulse dialing signals with clicking audio on the dial return.

I have a lot of the same nostalgia, but so much of this story is that necessity is the mother of invention.

The author:

1. Had more time than he knew what to do with.

2. Didn't have money

3. Had authority figures getting in the way of what he wanted to do.

A decade later, kids were 'hacking' their parents' wifi access points by logging in as admin/password to bypass "go to bed and stop using the internet" restrictions, but the author was not, because he likely had more money, less time, and most importantly, no authority to bypass :)

  > part of the tragedy is that a lot of technology that worked well has been replaced by "better" technology that doesn't work well.

I am 100% convinced that '80's era landlines had superior sound quality to today's cellphones by any manufacturer. I went out of my way to get a Samsung Note that ostensibly supports some high-quality sound when communicating with another device that supports whatever this profile is called, but all conversations are streams of "what? say again?".

Yes I know that POTS landlines generally discard much not-in-human-vocal-range sounds that still affect how we perceive voice. But even with that limitation, I feel that the difference in sound quality as I remember it and as I now experience it cannot all be attributed to 30 years of rock concerts and rifle fire on these eardrums.

> "better" technology that doesn't work well

That's a very crude way of saying it and I 100% agree. The digital revolution promised to make analog world more precise, but we ended up having so much complexity as a result and the benefits gained by precision at low level is replaced by ever increasing chaos at high level. We seem to think having many things rendered simultaneously and faster are inherently so good not just for things like games that we built frameworks like React that run big parts of the web.

It's as if we decided increasing entropy isn't so bad after all.

Survivorship bias I think is at play here (especially with our own memories being infallible). I also remember a TON of shit being a pain in the ass and not working well at all.

Today, we take internet for granted!

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