• potemkinhr@lemmy.ml
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    18 days ago

    If you had real shitty internet back in the day (read 56k modem) and you liked to play russian roulette you would dump satellite traffic with a skystar2 DVB-S card. You never knew what you’d get realistically, found some true gems underneath mountains of coal in the day of (still) unfiltered internet.

    • enkers@sh.itjust.works
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      18 days ago

      That’s wild. Did you need a special program to parse stuff out of the data stream? I guess it would mostly come in as http reaponses, so it wouldn’t be too hard, but still an interesting problem.

      • potemkinhr@lemmy.ml
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        18 days ago

        Yep, used Skygrabber, you could filter out files depending on extensions, filenames etc and could narrow out what you wanted. Still had no real way of knowing what you’d end up with as you were effectively just passively listening on the satellite traffic. It was wild as you could fill out a 40 gig drive overnight without issues in the era where people were downloading a MP3 album for hours.