It was in the early 2000, and smartphones weren't a thing. It also was a time where companies were paranoid into letting employees access the internet, but at the same time had abysmal security. By that I mean viruses ran free on shared folders, undetected because their antivirus software was years outdated. Very different times...
With a technique which you described, you could probably abuse a phone with this SIM as a "free" hot spot with infinite data.
So it costs at least 83 cents per month. Still might be worth it compared to the insane mobile data charges here if you can get a usable bandwidth. I suspect in practice they will just ban you if you abuse it like that.
In the early 2000s I was working at an insurance company. They used some kind of blocker in their outgoing firewall that prevented access to certain sites. At one point the blocklist included sourceforge, which threw my team's work a wrench because at the time a lot of the packages we depended on were hosted there. It took a few days to get that removed from the blocklist.
This same insurance company shut down for multiple days when a virus, I think it was ILOVEYOU, infested their email system so bad that nobody could work, and everyone (except the poor IT folks) got a long weekend. And then a while later, it happened again, but with a different virus, possibly Nimda. The company was very bad about updating its systems, and even in 2003 most users were stuck on Win95.
I recall we had a crappy firewall that would collapse under the load of NAT for the 100ish employees and so executives got static IPs mapped to their machines. The late 90s and 00s were crazy.
In my Uni days, all our department's machines had public IPs; no NAT, no firewall(!)
So much simpler to able to telnet, FTP and/or remote desktop straight from home to the office :)
At least it taught me how to detect attempted hacks early because every machine had to be monitored for attacks.
I just looked and they still have a /16 (65k public addresses). This is for a school that has maybe 15k students, not all of them living on the campus. And I’m sure most of the computing takes place in the cloud now anyway.
I know there are a lot of places who were on the Net early besides the military that have excess address capacity.
More importantly, was he charged and convicted with anything?
I am getting really tired of this public opinion tribunal, where mere accusation is enough to get a person out of their position. This is not how this is supposed to work at all.
The only questionable thing he did was try to rationalise pedophilia, which he has since changed his mind about. Given that he's clearly _not all there in the head_ (i.e neurodiverse) and assuming he hasn't tried to access child pornography or similar I couldn't care less. All of the other accusations against him are nonsense[0] and all center around unsubstantiated rumors of him being a "creep." People being anti-Stallman is insane to me considering how much he has contributed and advocates for not only free software but also gender equality.
[0] https://stallmansupport.org/debunking-false-accusations-agai...
Neurodiverse people are "not all there in the head"?
gtfo.
It's exactly this eggshell stepping that people are expected to adhere to that has people treating him the way they are.
The disingenuous nature of this all is why he's back in his foundations again.
wget --user-agent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)" ...
Nobody will suspect a thing!