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How I used to steal Internet connectivity

Ajouté le mar. 17 sept. 2024 Science et technologie Rectangular HD

Sorry for the autofocus hunting, I had been recording "on the go" previously and forgot it was enabled.

This is the long range antenna I used to take with me while travelling with work. It was rare to find accommodation with included Internet access at that time, and a mobile connection was absolutely not viable in that era. So I used to scan the neighbourhood for Internet cafes and sneak onto their network at night. I did also go to the same cafes during the day - partly to get the password, but also to give them business with coffee and cake to make me feel better about using their connection at night. It was just used for collecting email, minimal browsing and collecting the latest posts from newsgroups and mailing lists with Demon's Turnpike software. (That's how long ago it was.)

Huge shout out to Demon Internet for making Internet access viable in the early days.

Demon were the victim of a professional troll and the greedy legal system trying to find a way to make cash from this new fangled Internet thing. The troll routinely provoked reactions on mailing lists and then demanded that Demon take down all the messages he didn't like. He then sued them when they refused, and won a significant settlement. These days that would be recognised as a serious misuse of the legal system and a very poor decision by the naive judge and jury on that case, who clearly had no understanding of the Internet.
It was probably a major factor in Demon's downfall. Another example of how the profit-motivated legal system has become a massive burden on society and technological progress.

In my opinion Demon Internet were one of the most important things that happened in UK Internet history.

Thankfully, these days work accommodation and the work sites themselves have high speed connections as standard, and mobile connectivity is also very viable.

The antenna itself? That's RF voodoo. At the frequencies involved (2.4GHz) all usual electrical rules go out the window. The design of antennas like this is a specialist area of the electronic industry.
I'll make a wild guess that it's a form of dipole antenna optimised to one wavelength or a division thereof.

I'm expecting the RF experts to weigh in on the comment section and talk RF rocket science.


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