Well, I would say bittorrent with a good vpn or, usenet with a good indexer and depending on how much you download, block account vs monthly.

Personally I top up all my block accounts whenever I see a sale. With priority set from cheapest per gig to most expensive (so the pricey ones are only used as fillers).

But that does involve paying some money, but then doesn’t really require a vpn. In the long term I don’t think I’m paying that much though.

On public WiFi I just vpn into my home network. The issue with public WiFi is that it can be sniffed by anyone in range since there is generally no encryption.

Although pretty much everything we do is over tls these days, and DoH helps protect against even dns sniffing. There’s still at least some risk to working in the clear over a public WiFi network. At least in information gathering, what bank you use, etc.

But, there’s no real benefit in using a paid vpn over one you own unless you’re downloading illegal content, want to watch another Netflix region, or are in a country with heavy Internet monitoring/filtering.

AOL did, and the others that were easy (compuserve etc) provided their own limited interface to a curated Internet.

Most providers (at least here in the UK) that provided actual tcpip did so using slip and a login screen. Which generally needed a script to login and then chain on slip to connect it to the local stack.

It wasn’t until 1998 or 1999 there was widespread use of ppp and the windows 98 dial up networking could get you straight in. Then in the UK we had services like freeserve which provided simple ways to connect.

My first ever international business trip (in the late 90s) was to Skovde, and that was for software development reasons. So the town has a long history for it.

It’s a nice place too with very nice people.

Well. I think it might be worth checking again what I wrote. I was quite clear in that I said there’s a not lot to like, not that there’s nothing to like. If I didn’t get anything from the modern internet, I’d not be here posting these comments.

I’d like to pull you up on the point about free e-books. Project Gutenburg was in its second decade by the time most home users got online. So that’s hardly a contemporary internet exclusive, it’s almost as old as the internet itself. Also, communication about weird hobbies is certainly not unique to the contemporary internet. We just did it on open services not controlled by corporate entities. Corporates that only run the service in order to sell your data.

As for a few of the things I don’t like? Well. Ads everywhere (including those containing malware), constant hacking attempts for anyone running a server (ssh/sip/www very commonly hit with some protocols getting 100+ hits per second), AI crawlers scooping up the whole internet without any care about how they impact transit fees or user experience, licensed purchases (streaming services, games, etc that can be taken away at a moments notice with zero recourse for the user), terrible user agreements for EVERYTHING especially regarding privacy with no way to reject since ALL companies offering similar services have the same damned agreements, subscriptions on everything everywhere and increasingly so, having to click to reject cookies everywhere and knowing they’re still building a profile about me whether I like it or not just in order to throw more adverts my way.

I loved the old BBS community. I used to run an Amiga based BBS (also on Fidonet, I would say my node number, but it can still be looked up today, and we used real names so…). One day I had a drive failure and lost pretty much everything. No problem, said another Amiga BBS operator in my city. Bring your new HDD over and we’ll copy over my downloads folder.

I feel the same about the early (home) internet (years 1994-1999). Adverts if they even existed on a page were just a few lame gifs on a page. IRC and usenet were the “social media” of the time, except no-one called it that. Almost everyone online was as much of a geek as you (except AOL users), because the hoops to get online were significant enough to keep most normal people away. Businesses were convinced it was a fad, so didn’t get too involved.

It was basically universities, students and a handful of modem owners that could get a TCP/IP stack to work and write a login script (ppp was quite rare in the beginning).

Rose-tinted glasses? Maybe, but there’s a lot not to like about the modern internet.

Hmm. That would mean it’s likely one of the following (well perhaps more options, but these spring to mind)

• A windows machine that has the network set as a public network, or netbios specifically blocked on LAN.
• A windows machine that has all the netbios services disabled.
• Not a windows machine, or a container as others suggested that’s running some kind of IIS install
• Not a windows machine at all but for some weird reason IIS files and a web server setup.

I think you suggested in another comment, that it’s not in your DHCP client list but has an IP in your normal range. Which suggests it is setup with a static IP. That is odd.

Some other people suggested it could be a container that is using a real IP rather than the NAT that docker etc usually use. I do know that you can use real IPs in containers, I’ve done it on my NAS to get a “proper” linux install on top of the NAS lite linux that is provided. But I would have expected that you’d know about that, since it would require someone to actually choose the IP address to use.

If you have managed switches you could find which port on which switch the MAC address (as found by lookuping up the arp record for the IP using arp -a) is on (provided the switch allows access to the forwarding tables). Of course, if they’re on Wi-Fi it’s only going to lead to the access point they’re connecting to.

I don’t even think my current wifi kit has WPA (1) as an option. It’s WPA2 or 3 only I’m pretty sure.

So, as others have saId this is just an unconfigured IIS server, which implies it’s either a windows machine, or a windows based VM, well or someone put the default IIS files on another server, but that’s unlikely.

When you say “weird” IP I’d wonder what you mean by that.

I think since it’s probably a windows machine, from another windows machine typing nbtstat -A <ip> should give you the computer name and workgroup or domain they belong to. See if it matches anything you expect on your network.

If not, maybe it’s time to change your WPA wifi key.

Don’t need the router. If you’re on windows or linux, you just ping the ip then enter ‘arp -a <ip>’ it will show the MAC address for the IP from your machine’s arp cache.

No, you just stop telling everyone else about it.

Technically, no. The last few have been significantly below either measure of inflation. So in real terms, I’ve had a wage cut!

Raises where you work are still based on merit? Damn!

Packets are lost all the time. Especially when uploading or downloading.

Anyone running a webserver and looking at their logs will know AI is being trained on EVERYTHING. There are so many crawlers for AI that are literally ripping the internet wholesale. Reddit just got in on charging the AI companies for access to freely contributed content. For everyone else, they’re just outright stealing it.

It’s specifically implied? :P

Hah, we used to have some of those AUI to 10Base2 transducers back in the day in the office. Definitely had one on the IBM RS6000/220 box.

“it goes up to eleven”

Yep, less overheads! This is the way.