Reliving the Dial-Up Experience in 2020
goughlui.com
goughlui.com
What's that font on the pr.oxy/fileserver listing?
...and now that it is, companies are taking advantage of that to make nearly every new application phone home without your knowledge. The amount of network traffic produced on a clean install of an OS like Win10 is disturbing to see.
Aside from this, direct connections from the browsers to secure HTTPS websites was impossible due to the difference in cipher suite and SSL/TLS protocol support, so I decided to use an Asus Tinkerboard running Nginx web server to serve a miniproxy page that allows us to visit HTTPS sites and serve them back as HTTP.
You can use something like Proxomitron which uses OpenSSL in MITM mode to get TLS 1.2 and all of its newer crypto.
Another thing I miss about that era is the relative efficiency; computer hardware wasn't as powerful, but on average, software seemed to be far closer to its limits than it is today, Now, despite the increase in computing power, software feels less efficient, and it leads to some very visible comparisons. My "daily driver" machine is rather old now, but will happily do things like play 1080p video or render a complex PCB layout in 3D with resources to spare; yet struggles, straining the CPU and RAM, when loading a JS SPA whose functionality should seem to be far less demanding than the former tasks.
Finding a friend who still had a PSTN line themselves was surprisingly difficult (in Australia, we’re moving away from PSTN in favour of VoIP), but I found one.
I only managed to get a remote shell going, but if I had more time to play around with it I probably could have got PPP up and running. Having someone else on the other end for a multiplayer DOOM session over dialup would have been really cool.